A new version of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is out. This is big news, because the last new version of Blade Runner provoked fifteen years of contention. In the 1982 theatrical version, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a human detective hunting replicants, artificial humans so sophisticated as to be almost indistinguishable from the real thing. In the 1992 director's cut, Deckard is a replicant himself. Even Ford is pissed about that one.
That's not all the director's cut changed; the theatrical version featured an explanatory voiceover phoned-in by Ford, added at the last minute at the demand of baffled studio execs. (Rumor has long had it that Ford deliberately botched the Chandler-esque narration in the hopes that it wouldn't be used; Ford says he hated it but "delivered it to the best of my ability given that I had no input. . . I didn't try and sandbag it.") Studio meddling was also responsible for the theatrical cut's tacked-on "happy ending," in which Deckard and his android love-interest, Rachael, escape from polluted future Los Angeles into an idyllic countryside. Some people — apparently a fair percentage, including Ford and his
Blade Runner nemesis, Rutger Hauer — actually prefer this version to the darker, more consistent director's cut, and that's strange. But it's hard to imagine anyone arguing with the new "final" cut. It won't make the Deckard-as-human crowd happy, but everyone else should be ecstatic. This is the best version ever released of the best science-fiction film ever made — the most complete, the most clean, the most moving.
Essentially a refinement of the Director's Cut, The Final Cut mercifully declines to reinstate the narration or "happy ending," instead cleaning up a number of filmmaking glitches that have irritated
BR enthusiasts for years. Harrison Ford's son Ben was brought in as a lip double for his father, in a scene where lip movements failed to match audio. A dove released at the end of the film used to fly up into an incongruously blue sky; the background of the shot has been corrected to match the rainy industrial wasteland of the rest of the film. And, to everyone's relief, a notoriously misleading dialogue error has at last been set right. When Deckard's boss, police chief Bryant, explains Deckard's mission, he used to say he had four replicants to catch, then explain that six had escaped from their work and one had been killed — leading to an obvious question. Now he says, correctly, that two were killed.
It's a very helpful change, and the result is that you might even be able to follow
Blade Runner on a first viewing, which is saying something, since the movie has always been confusing as hell. It flopped on its original release in 1982; the premise of Harrison Ford fighting robots screams thriller, but
Blade Runner's action is largely metaphysical, more focused on the replicants' search for their creator than on kinetics. Audiences knew Ford from
Star Wars and
Raiders of the Lost Ark, where he was a charming rogue, but in
Blade Runner, he's a washed-up ex-cop who shoots women.
Well, he shoots something, anyway. The exact nature of his android prey is at the heart of the debate among
Blade Runner's fans and creators. The movie's sympathy seems to lean in their direction; Deckard is a callous killer, while the replicants, cursed with a four-year lifespan, want only to survive. But to Hauer — who invests replicant leader Roy Batty with great menace and deep feeling — the synthetic humans are simply machines, and the moral of the film is, "Does a computer love you? No, a computer does not. End of story." Ford seems to imply the same by insisting on Deckard's humanity. But that seems a little cut-and-dried. If Deckard is a human, the film becomes a traditional anti-technology story, well-made but ultimately old-fashioned.
Far more subtle and devastating is Deckard-as-replicant. Early in the film, he cruelly proves to Rachael that she's a replicant by describing memories that only she should know. "Remember the spider that lived outside your window?" he asks. "Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer, then one day, there's a big egg in it. . . Implants. Those aren't your memories, they're somebody else's." She flees his apartment, and he drinks himself into a stupor, eventually dreaming of a unicorn running through a forest. (In this world, the forest is probably about as fanciful as the unicorn.) In the last scene, he finds an origami unicorn left outside his apartment by his fellow blade runner, Gaff. Suddenly Gaff's taunts ("You've done a man's job, sir!") have a vicious twist. Gaff knows Deckard's innermost thoughts as surely as Deckard knows Rachael's.
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Which of course leads to the question of why we should even care. If Deckard, Batty and Rachael are all replicants, who do we relate to in this movie? Maybe the answer comes down to whether you believe in God, or an eternal soul. (Now we're playing hardball, eh?) If you do, you're probably better off with Ford and Hauer's concept, which draws a sharp line between men and machines. But if you don't — I don't, and maybe you don't either — well, we're all replicants here, aren't we? We're all biological machines, and death is an annihilation, the loss of all memories and experiences. We all want more life, and we're all out of luck, just as Batty is when he finally breaks into the home of Eldon Tyrell, the man who designed him. "What seems to be the problem?" asks Dr. Tyrell. Batty: "Death." Tyrell: "Death — well, that's a little out of my jurisdiction." (In an early draft of the script, the maker Batty meets turns out to be a replicant himself, with the real Tyrell dead years before — further emphasizing the impotence of this God.)
Seen in this light,
Blade Runner is one of the greatest movies ever made about mortality. Though the major changes came in the Director's Cut, the polish of the new Final Cut makes it clearer than ever: drawing an us-and-them distinction between replicants and humans is missing the point. We'll let Gaff have the last word, as he does in the movie — a warning to Deckard as he flees with Rachael: "It's too bad she won't live — but then again, who does?"
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