Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/4/07
Like
most people, I really wish George Lucas could keep his hands off the Star
Wars trilogy and would stop tinkering with special effects, making
Greedo shoot first and generally mucking up his Masterpieces. But
there are some movies that benefit from post-release tinkering, and they're
generally the ones that were mucked up originally. For instance,
there's Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's futurist classic filming of
Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
By now, most anyone who cares knows the story: in 1982, Warner Bros.
looked at a movie which in some ways was far ahead of its' time and freaked
out at its' ambiguous villains and downbeat ending and decided to make
some changes. They made tiny but pivotal alterations to scenes involving
Replicant heavy Roy Batty that made him less sympathetic and more conventionally
diabolical. They sliced out two key scenes that establish something
VERY important about Harrison Ford's lead character. And they assigned
Ford to record an awful narration track which explained some things to
death, changed/ruined the meaning of others, and worst of all tacked on
an absurdly out-of-left field happy ending. Ford intentionally tanked
his recording session, but the studio used it anyway. The result
is a movie-crippling drag on what's already not one of his best performances.
But something about Blade Runner shined through all this wreckage
and the movie attracted a cult following. In 1991, a “Director's
Cut” was released that removed the narration and restored the original
ending. But it was done without Scott's direct supervision and there
were more changes he'd hoped to make. Now, after years of legal struggles
and restoration work, he's finally been able to unleash his “Final Cut”
upon us, and it's the most impressive Blade Runner yet. The
film is not without flaws, and is starting to show its' age. But
when it clicks, it's utterly brilliant.
In
the year 2019, in a Los Angeles overrun with commercialism and immigration
but strangely underpopulated thanks to the new Off-World Colonies, a former
Blade Runner named Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is called back to duty
by his boss Bryant (M. Emmett Walsh) and his associate Gaff (Edward James
Olmos). Blade Runners track down Replicants, androids that are near-perfect
copies of humans, when they get loose on Earth, where they are banned.
Replicants do jobs no human wants to, but the more they learn, the stranger
and more dangerous they become. As such, the androids are built to
live only four years. A group of four Replicants led by Roy Batty
(Rutger Hauer) has blazed a trail of murder across space en route to Earth
and now Deckard is tasked with finding and killing them. Following
Batty are the hulking Leon (Brion James) and “women” Zhora (Joanna Cassidy)
and Pris (Daryl Hannah). Deckard begins his investigation by visiting
the Tyrell Corporation, where Replicants were developed. There, Eldon
Tyrell (Joe Turkel) shows him something new: Rachael (Sean Young)
is a Replicant who doesn't know what she is. She's been implanted
with years of human memories borrowed from Tyrell's niece. While
love blooms between the cop and the Replicant, Batty uses Pris to infiltrate
the home of Replicant developer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson).
The Replicants want only one thing: to extend their tragically short
lives. And they'll kill whoever it takes to make it happen.
First
thing's first: Deckard himself IS a Replicant. Let's review
the evidence: he dreams of unicorns and Gaff leaves an oragami
unicorn for him at the end to show that he knows what's going on in his
head the same way Deckard earlier rattled off things Rachael had never
told anyone to prove that her “memories” are not really hers. Plus,
watch closely and you'll catch a moment when the light plays off his eyes
in the background in exactly the same way it hits off all the other Replicants'.
Sure, I'd heard this theory bandied about over the years and given it its'
due after seeing the original Director's Cut (this Final Cut viewing was
the first time I ever noticed the thing with the eyes), but one question
had always bothered me. Why make him a Replicant? What does
anyone gain? Watching this time, though, I finally had an epiphany
on the subject: who says there's really any such thing as a Blade
Runner? We never meet another one, and does it strike anyone else
as odd the way he's “out” for unspecified reasons but neither Bryant
nor Gaff ever explain to him why he's needed to do this particular job
rather than an active Blade Runner. I say it's because only Replicants
are used to track Replicants: exactly the kind of dangerous job for
which they're constructed. And why would Tyrell show him the way
memories are implanted into a Replicant like Rachael if not to demonstrate
what's also been done to him? It's made clear that everyone healthy
enough to has already gotten off the planet. Why not a strapping
young movie star like Deckard? Because he's not human, that's why.
Good
to see that debate's settled, because his Replicant status is really the
only thing interesting about Deckard, a standard-issue film noir private
eye in the middle of far more intriguing events. This is really the
Replicants' show, and Hauer and Hannah have never been better. We're
told that Replicants develop “strange obsessions” and Batty and Leon definitely
have a thing about eyes that is not normal... The Final Cut plays up some
of this, but also gives Batty his due: that he's allowed a few moments
of sentiment and empathy only make his random, sadistically violent outbursts
all the more shocking. But his final moments on a rainy rooftop with
Deckard have always been showstoppingly sad (the best scene Hauer's ever
played), and now it's finally been edited for maximum pathos. Sanderson
is also excellent: the glandularly challenged Sebastian couldn't
seem like a nicer guy, but check out the weird world of creatures he's
created to share his time with! There's some really twisted God/Creation
issues going on here, and the darker and sicker Blade Runner gets,
the more interesting it becomes.
There
are also, of course, the things that made the movie's name in the first
place. The special effects are remarkable, even 25 years later.
The film's designers were so spot-on in their predications of an increasingly
multi-ethnic society and the way ads would overrun every inch of major
cities (OK, they were wrong about the blimps, but it's a cool idea...).
It was especially interesting to see the movie in Times Square, where the
sides of entire buildings ARE now video screens hawking products.
The film has never looked better than in the crisp new digital transfer,
and the miniatures used for the futuristic buildings (even the ones that
now look very presentistic) are still great. The score by Vangelis
is wonderful in its' icy inhumanity, and Jordan Cronenweth's rain-soaked
cinematography is a marvel.
There
are, as I mentioned, issues as well. The Deckard/Rachael romance
is a non-starter, and their “love” scene, which is basically a rape, demonstrates
how far the movies have come in their depiction of human relationships
(granted Deckard and Rachael are not human, but anyone looking for an excuse
there is reaching at best). I was glad to see the scene greeted with
antsy laughter by a modern audience. Rachael is barely more than
a talking mannequin, and Young's performance fails to engage emotionally
on any level. Because Deckard isn't all that interesting himself,
the investigation that makes up the middle third of the movie is fairly
dull.
But
at its' best, Blade Runner is a visionary movie that asks big questions
about the place not only of androids, but any underclass that labors for
the enrichment of their Masters. It's a cinematic stunner, and now
we can finally see this grand machine running at full capacity. For
a full breakdown of all the changes made to the various edits (all of which
will be available this December in a deluxe DVD collection), I highly recommend
the Wikipedia entry
on the movie |
