1. Blade Runner (1982)
Blade Runner is completely drenched in bleakness: from the way its dark and raining all the time to the concrete pillars that cover the city, it's melancholic and inescapable, and the setting and the cinematography match the story in its bleakness. Richard Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a Blade Runner, who track down organic android replicants on Earth. The replicants are not supposed to be used on-planet and are mostly deployed for dangerous, off-world work (although they probably would be better suited to customer service). Deckard is burnt out and reluctantly takes the case to track down four more androids who've bucked this trend, which leads to haunting realizations and deadly consequences for everyone involved. The themes in Blade Runner are innately unsettling - for example, Rachael (Sean Young) is a replicant who's almost identical to humans, and when she discovers that she isn't one, it's particularly heartbreaking. She's forever damaged, and Deckard chooses that exact moment to engage in one of the most ambiguously rape-y scenes ever committed to celluloid. When it comes to the villains, it's a similar picture while they are really violent, they have an understandable goal in wanting to be on Earth and live a long, human-style life, which of course, this is denied them by Deckar. Where does one draw the line? The film's central ideas are incredibly bleak: through an exploration of what makes humanity human, the film poses questions that reverberate well after the credits roll. How would you feel if you found out everything about you was fake? Could you even move on from there? What would be the point? Think there is something bleaker out there? Share you own bleak sci-fi movies in the comments thread.