He just isn’t, right!

It doesn’t matter that you can, if you squint your brain enough, imagine that he could have been a replicant the whole time. Or that ‘Wow, wouldn’t that be a cool twist’ if he was.

He wasn’t.

Just cos big dopey Ridley toyed with the idea of tacking a nonsense twist on the end of the movie doesn’t make the idea less nonsense.

Blade Runner is based on a short story by Philip K Dick called ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ The story played around with the question ‘What does it mean to be human?’ It compared the burned-out Deckard who had no warmth or empathy but was fully human, to feeling empathic machines with emotions and a sense of their own mortality. Deckard being a machine completely removes a lot of the coolness in the story. The idea of Deckard suddenly turning out to be a replicant would have been too pedestrian, Philip K Dick dealt with big ideas, not ‘Dallas; it was all a dream and I woke up in the shower’ style plot twists.

Anyhow, if he was a replicant, how come he gets beat up all the time, eh? How come he’s so much weaker than the replicants

So to conclude, the film allows you to make your own mind up, but if you think Decker is a replicant then you’re wrong.