Blade Run­ner: The Final Cut

There’s a bit­ter­sweet irony to the fact that one of the most famous mod­ern movies made about the finite nature of exis­tence and the inevitabil­i­ty of expi­ra­tion should have been revived and reformed so many times. Sir Rid­ley Scott has a yen for return­ing to films with his trusty toolk­it and tak­ing a bit of a retroac­tive tin­ker, remod­el­ling seg­ments and offer­ing sub­tle vari­a­tions on pre­vi­ous prototypes.

Whether they are bet­ter, worse, clev­er­er, sad­der, longer or short­er is large­ly down to how deep the view­er has immersed him or her­self in the text, and where one diehard super­fan might be reduced to a gib­ber­ing slur­ry of tears and snot upon see­ing a uni­corn run­ning through a for­est in slo-mo, anoth­er more casu­al admir­er might feel it’s a need­less­ly grandiose addi­tion which adds lit­tle to the over­all effect of the film.

Receiv­ing a brand new cin­e­ma roll-out rough­ly every 10 years since its cre­ation in 1982, one must pon­der whether this is a case of a per­fec­tion­ist artist unable to see his defin­ing cre­ation enter into the pub­lic domain in the state that it is, or if the rea­son behind it is pure­ly for the pur­pos­es of rev­enue col­lec­tion. The film famous­ly tanked on its ini­tial release. That could be one jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the alter­ations, but could also be seen as a pure­ly eco­nom­ic imper­a­tive in which big­ger, bet­ter and more ​“com­plete” ver­sions of films have the chance of clear­ing up all over again.

The issue with Blade Run­ner is, whichev­er way you slice it, the film is by no means a clas­sic — a bunch of smog and fluro lamps pow­ered by GCSE-lev­el exis­ten­tial the­o­ry and bad plumb­ing. It’s now deemed a crime to describe a movie as being pre­ten­tious, the infer­ence being that it’s oper­at­ing on an intel­lec­tu­al plane which the low­ly writer is unable (or, more like­ly, unwill­ing) to fath­om. So let’s say that Blade Run­ner is a movie of extra­or­di­nary self-impor­tance, every immac­u­late vista held for a length of time redo­lent of a direc­tor in rap­tur­ous love with the piece of art he’s made.

The film crit­ic Jonathan Rosen­baum com­pared Scott’s movie to the noir clas­sics of the 1940s, which seems like exces­sive praise con­sid­er­ing the plot doesn’t ever involve the audi­ence being left tan­ta­lis­ing­ly in the dark. We fol­low the par­al­lel sto­ries of Har­ri­son Ford’s boozy depres­sive Rick Deckard and Rut­ger Hauer’s Repli­cant Roy Bat­ty to the point where they meet on a rain-lashed rooftop and pon­der the futil­i­ty of man. It’s a quest movie — where one thing leads mechan­i­cal­ly to anoth­er to anoth­er to anoth­er. There are no twists. It’s noir only in atmos­phere and expres­sion­ist light­ing schemes.

And if the con­cept of ambi­gu­i­ty was too much for audi­ences to han­dle, Sir Rid­ley kind­ly came out to tell every­one that this ver­sion of the film con­firms that Deckard is indeed a Repli­cant, albeit a bet­ter mod­el than the fetish­wear philoso­phers so as to not cre­ate any fur­ther plot holes. Does his true nature have any real bear­ing on the film? Does it effect the out­come or his his­to­ry before and after the time­line of the film? Go to your DVD shelf, pick out a film at ran­dom, watch it, and when the cred­its roll, ask, ​“was [lead character’s name] a Repli­cant?” It’s the exact same thing.