[sbmassey]

I'd say the movie was more about Roy Batty and his chums falling from Heaven to Earth, Roy meeting their creator and then killing him, and then sparing their tormentor while dying. The "Deckard learns what it is to be hunted" theme doesn't seem to work as he's mostly doing a bunch of hokey detective work, punctuated by fairly evenly matched violence whenever he actually encounters a replicant - to make the theme work you would need to depict him tormenting innocent replicants in the same way Roy would later do to him.

In addition, I don't think the replicants are meant to be without empathy, as much as having a skewed sense of empathy compared to normal humans - Rachel is detected after not distinguishing between eating oysters and boiled dog, for instance.