I think Blade Runner plays better on 2nd viewing than 1st viewing, so I'd say give it another watch in a year and see if it grows on you.

I happen to fall in the "it's a masterpiece" camp. That the visuals/music/art-direction are mind-meltingly amazing goes without saying at this point, but what I really love is how the movie fucks with genre conventions in terms of heroes and villains. Deckard is essentially a total piece of shit, completely burned out by the job, dead inside. Batty is just a guy fucked over by the system desperately clawing to stay alive, and yet he still saves Deckard in the end. I've always seen the final scene as a turning point, where Batty's death gives Deckard a renewed sense of humanity and breaks him out of this terrible cycle. I think this is what messes with people a lot on first viewing, that they go in expecting Ford to be playing the hero, when Batty is the real protagonist of the movie. It's like if Return of the Jedi was the 1st Star Wars movie, and we followed Vader the whole time until Luke turns him around at the end.

As for the origami, I kind of never pay too much attention to it. To me, it's like the top at the end of Inception, it's just a beat to add a little ambiguity to the ending, but in my mind Deckard is always human, since that both makes more sense and works better thematically.

This is my favorite edition of the score, if you ever just want to zone out for 2 hours:

Last edited by bullet3 (2013-08-11 07:55:09)

A couple of random thoughts on the Final Cut version:

(1)  The new edit of the chase scene between Deckard and Zhora is for me is a big improvement.  In all previous versions, I find that sequence almost totally incoherent, in terms of understanding who's where, what the street looks like, how the chase progresses, where they are relative to each other, etc.  In the Final Cut it's clear.  Zhora's here and Deckard's there, she runs across the street, Deckard follows her, she ducks into the subway, etc. etc.   If you wanted to complain, I guess you could say that the previous version provides a surreal, kaleidoscopic impression which mirrors the confusion and desperation in the characters' minds, but I'm not sure that's what they were actually going for.

(2) The revisions to the effects are nice and well-done, except for one that completely ruined the picture of the film that I had in my head.  I loved the fact that after Roy Batty dies, his dove flies off into a clear blue sky that looks nothing like the set they've been on. I thought it was a beautiful and very moving 'subjective' shot, indicating that Batty's soul, his nobler instincts, were rising toward a better place, somewhere that didn't have the problems of their world, the grit, the rain, the darkness, etc. I was totally heartbroken to hear Ridley Scott say that it was just a shot they stuck in because they didn't have the time to do it properly.

I would go even more strongly here.  I think for Deckard to be a replicant almost completely undercuts the central theme of the film, namely "what does it mean to be human?".  Essentially the key criterion that the film offers, which is referenced explicitly in the descriptions of the Voight-Kampf test, is empathy -- the ability to understand that another object in the world is, in a fundamental way, like you or the same as you.  The way I read the film, this is what Roy Batty understands at the end, and why he rescues Deckard.  And this is why Deckard is able to be redeemed through his relationship with Rachael.  If Deckard is a replicant, then kind of none of this matters or is relevant.  For this reason actually, I've drifted back toward the original theatrical version, warts 'n' all, as my preferred version (though I do stop the film after the elevator doors close).

You do then have to say something about the origami, and you can always make up whatever I guess.  Continuing the theme of Gaff's origami as making observations about Deckard (doing the chicken as Deckard shows reluctance to come back to the Blade Runner unit, for example), my thought was that it's saying that Deckard is living in a fantasy world.  It's just as impossible for a human to have an actual relationship with a replicant as it is for there to be unicorns.

[Edit:  And just to show what you can make up off the top of your head, you could also relate the origami unicorn to Gaff's comment after the fight with Batty.  Unicorns are traditionally kind of 'girly', so he's sort of impugning Deckard's masculinity.  But then after he sees him defeat Batty he says "you've done a man's job, sir", meaning "you're not as much of a wuss as I accused you of being."]

Anyway, the fact that Ridley Scott has, as far as I know, always said he intended Deckard to be a replicant at least shows that Prometheus was not an aberration. He needs to go back to making perfume ads.

Last edited by sellew (2013-08-11 19:31:52)

Ya, I dunno, although he was very in love it visually, at least the stuff he got to see early. http://www.blastr.com/2013-3-26/read-ph … ers-impact

Also, I always saw the dove flying away as just a production mistake, so I really liked that they fixed it in the final cut, though your reading is a pretty decent justification for it.