Although I've nto written about it, I have been to the cinema lately. Mostly recently was to see Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Here's the trailer:
Slate's Stephen Metcalf recently came down hard on the film. His gripe that there are too many versions of the film floating around is fair enough. (Wikipedia has a list.) And he is surely correct in noting that the film probably would have disappeared from our collective conscience had VCRs and cable television not come along. But I think it's interesting that it's technical aspects and distribution methods which make up the great majority of Metcalf's complaints. Just explaining the confusing array of versions of the film takes up more space than the discussion of its quality or lack thereof.
Everyone agrees that Sid Mead and the visual effects folks made Blade Runner a visual treat with its dystopian vision of the future being almost the gold standard for sci-fi films. However, I disagree totally with his assertions that "its story is underplotted and its characters almost totally opaque". I also think that to say the movie is about "what it's like to be mortal" is to give primacy to the wrong theme.
As with all films, different people will get different things from the same story. For Metcalf, Blade Runner is a meditation on mortality; for me it's primarily about the main concerns of the source material's author – what it means to be human. Although very different from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I feel that Blade Runner captures the core of Dick's interests and it does so better than any other Hollywood adaptation of his work. If, like Metcalf, you think the film is about mortality and you examine it for its treatment of this idea, then I suspect you're likely to find it underplotted and the characters opaque. It makes more sense, I suppose, to show characters having a full life and then confronting death. The contrast surely helps drive home the point. You'd want to get to know the characters so that their impending death is all the more sad. In Blade Runner, however, mortality, or perhaps cognizance of it, is just one element in defining human. Giving primacy to the inevitability of death here is to ignore the eye motif, Leon's precious pictures and the issue of memory, as well as Rachel's ignorance of her identity and her own memories. It's not that mortality and awareness of it are unimportant, but I think you have to place them in the larger dichotomy of human—replicant and how the film breaks down the barriers between the two.
None of this is to say that everyone who sees Blade Runner will enjoy it. But it's disingenuous for Metcalf to bring his piece to a close by noting that his wife laughed when Batty gave his final speech because it ignores all of the people, including those who were with me at the theatre last weekend, who didn't. That there even is a Final Cut is testimony that the film is not a laughing matter for hordes of filmgoers.
Enough about Metcalf – how was it? The Final Cut is essentially the Director's Cut of 1992 cleaned up. I caught most of the changes and would again refer the reader to the Wikipedia entry above for a list of what's new here. Nothing major has changed. For instance, the dialogue has been modified so that the number of renegade replicants is correct. Fans will notice the difference but it doesn't alter the story or the themes. Shots of dancers wearing hockey masks and Deckard talking to a cop were inserted just prior to him entering the Snake Pit and this is about it for new scenes. I entered the theatre wondering if the hospital scene was going to be inserted and it wasn't. However, the scene is included on the new DVD set and is, unsurprisingly, on Youtube:
It was the first time I'd seen the film on the big screen and I loved every minute of it. The cityscape is so much more impressive than on a TV and thusly also more expressive. I found myself wanting to mouth Batty's initial dialogue ("Man? Police...man?") but refrained. I love how Rutger Hauer extends the ee sound in "police" and adds a slight pause before he says "man". And the scene when Roy and Batty pay a visit to Chew is just iconic for me and some of my friends. While driving home after the film, The Dulcinea remarked to me that she discovered the source of many of the quotes my friends and I use in conversation. Holden's "You know what a turtle is? Same thing." is ubiquitous for us. Why? I'm not quite sure.
One can spend hours dissecting Blade Runner and many have. What I do know is that Blade Runner clicks with me. I love the visuals and I love how 1940s noir got blended with sci-fi; I think it's great that the majority of the main characters are anything but "normal"; there are some great one-liners; I enjoy Vangelis' soundtrack; and I find the Phildickian preoccupation with defining human to be very intriguing. I always get nostalgic after watching Blade Runner and find myself wanting to look at my own precious pictures, just like Leon. The D and I saw it last Sunday afternoon and that night I was in my room staring at the foot locker by my bed because that's where I keep most of my pictures. Did I really want to look at them? Did I want to traverse those memories?
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