Prophetic and beautiful, Blade Runner was released in
June of 1982, and no one cared.
Well, more or less: Released two weeks after a little film called
E.T., and on the same day as John Carpenter’s The Thing,
Blade Runner was one more sci-fi flick in a summer already full
of them. And compared to the feel-good cheer of Spielberg’s freakish
little alien orphan, or the easily marketable, gory frights of
Carpenter’s space monster flick, Blade Runner wasn’t an easy
sell. Slow-paced and with more philosophizing than gunfire, Ridley
Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel was ignored by most and
beloved by few.
Worse, Scott himself wasn’t even one of Blade Runner‘s fans:
Thanks to studio meddling, he had been forced to change his film’s
ending and add a dumbed-down voiceover track by star Harrison Ford.
While the Blade Runner that Scott tried to bring to the screen
bore little resemblance to Dick’s novel, the studio-mandated version
only occasionally resembled the film Scott intended to make.
So, more or less, people forgot about Blade Runner… except
for those who had been rightfully impressed. And years later, after an
accidental showing of an unfinished version of the film—one
without the voiceover, or the artificial ending—Blade
Runner‘s reputation began to grow. A 1991 “Director’s Cut” DVD
omitted the voiceover and cheery ending from the now-famous film. And
now, on the film’s 25th anniversary, Blade Runner: The Final Cut is the definitive version of a film that has grown from a forgotten bit
of genre cinema to one of history’s most influential films.
It is, if nothing else, gorgeous: Scott, fresh off of directing
Alien, pulled together an astounding team of artists and special
effects technicians to create a futuristic Los Angeles that is still
romantic and terrifying—where, in 2019, the sun never rises, the
cold rain never stops, and neon billboards preaching for corporations
incessantly flicker, crawling along the sides of filthy, massive
skyscrapers. Flying cars flicker through L.A.’s canyon-like streets,
but the real city is below, where—amongst steam and gibberish and
squalor—a melting pot boils, and Rick Deckard (Ford) stumbles to
find his way. Deckard is an old-school detective straight out of a
1950s film noir, but instead of tracking down flesh and blood dames,
Deckard hunts rogue “replicants”—artificial humans, originally
designed for slave labor. As Blade Runner begins, Deckard is
charged with finding a slew of particularly violent replicants—an
assignment that leads him through all social and philosophical levels
of Dick and Scott’s dystopia, eventually introducing him to all sorts
of Big Themes: patricide, deicide, sex, memory. For all its special
effects and techno-babble about “cellular decrepitude,” Blade
Runner ultimately wrestles with the deceptively simple question of
what it means to be human.
Restored in fantastic detail, this theatrical re-release is amazing
to see—never before have the film’s dense, astounding visuals
looked better, nor has Vangelis’ ethereal score sounded more haunting.
There are, supposedly, a few tightened-up effects shots, a few tweaked
scenes—but if you’ve seen the ’92 director’s cut on DVD,
nothing’s going to be too new here. The real joy is seeing the film on
the big screen, beautifully restored. (Okay, yes—for the
diehards, of which I’m one, there are other benefits to this “final
cut.” There is, for example, finally a firm answer on whether or not
Deckard himself is a replicant.) Two-and-a-half decades after its
initial botched release, Blade Runner is back, on the big
screen, as it was meant to be seen. And this time, people care.
