Blade Runner: Final Cut

by Lons

Hard to believe though it may be for hardcore movie fans, several of the patrons at the opening night of Blade Runner: Final Cut in West LA had never before seen the film.  What must it be like to experience the film for the first time, in its present form, the result of perhaps the greatest single restoration of a classic film in cinema history?  This new Blade Runner is the same film as it has always been, at least since the release in the 1990's of Ridley Scott's definitive Director's Cut that finally removed the atrocious voice-over and retrieved the ambiguous ending from the cutting room floor, and yet it's an entirely new experience to see the film with this level of brightness and clarity.  Details never before available on murky VHS prints burst off the screen, as in the details of the decor of Sebastian's loft.  Before, it just looked like a weird, high-ceilinged room adorned with a variety of semi-organic "toys" and devices.  Now, it's clearly an attempt to replicate the aging, art-deco '30s buildings dotting the Eastern Los Angeles landscape, all patterned tiles and wrought-iron sconces.

The film looks like it could have been made last year, and yet it's obviously an '80s film.  The Vangelis soundtrack employs the decade's standard synthesizer soundscapes, the computer read-outs unmistakably reference the monochrone pixellated readouts of that era's Apple IIC's and a youthful Harrison Ford and Sean Young can't help but remind the audience of the movie's year of origin.  And yet, the questions posed by the film - not just in terms of artificial intelligence and the ceaseless and inhumane march of technological advancement, but the continuing deterioration and decay of the American urban landscape - have never felt more prescient or vital.

One scene that struck me upon this most recent viewing concerns the artificial owl constructed by the Tyrell Corporation.  Detective Deckard (Ford) has been summoned to the headquarters of the world's largest Replicant (artificially intelligent android) producer, Tyrell Industries, after four of the company's most advanced models have traveled to Earth and threatened humans.  The company's President, Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), informs Deckard of the impending crisis facing future Los Angeles, and as if to reinforce the point, he has a synthetic owl prowling the skies of his window office.

For an animal, of course, the notion of artificial intelligence is simpler than it is for a human specimen.  Animals function largely off of instinct; their behaviors are already not their own, but behaviors suggested by centuries of evolution and development, behaviors learned via a genetic code every bit as controlled and pre-determined as any written by humans.  Sure, the synthetic owl could be described as a toy, but is it any more or less real than an actual owl caught in the wild and kept as a pet?  These are the sort of difficult questions posed in every scene of Blade Runner.  Some first-time viewers are bound to be frustrated by a film that raises all kinds of issues and then fails to provide any answers.  Perhaps this explains the film's initial failure to find an audience, its early reputation as a disaster, at the box office and otherwise.

Seeing it again after all these years, its massive influence on science-fiction filmmaking stands out, of course, but so does director Ridley Scott's complete mastery of genre and style.  The film, for 2 solid hours, manages to work on three different levels. 

It's a pitch-perfect homage to the detective films of the '40s.  Ford's heavy drinking, disaffected cop mirrors every stock Dana Andrews leading man, and even the classic performances of Bogart.  (Though the voice-over in the original cut obviously referenced these films, the version without the VO works far better.)  Smoldering shots of Deckard considering the smoke-shrouded complexion of newly-enlightened Replicant Rachel (Sean Young) feel ripped out of black and white classics with titles like The Dark Corner and Big Heat.

At the same time, the film sets a compelling police procedural inside a compelling future universe.  In the Philip K. Dick story on which the film is based, Los Angeles culture has become an odd amalgamation of Asian and Mexican influences (explaining the peculiar turn by Edward James Olmos as Gaff, the policeman who seems to know more than he lets on).  In Scott's hands, it's a fearsome, dystopian urban nightmare, a city that has expanded in every direction, beyond all reason, on the verge of being consumed by the very flames it constantly expels.  The background and sets are beyond gritty; they depict a world in which fetid decay has become commonplace, in which we all brush, nonchalant, past one another's waste, so accustomed are we to wallowing in our shared filth.  (A film from the beginnings of the environmental movement, it still feels relevant to current debates about the deterioration and destruciton of the natural world).  Scott's film doesn't just explore this universe, it sets a kickass action film there.  The climax in particular, in which Deckard and his villainous Replicant prey, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) pursue one another across a rainy rooftop, ranks alongside any action sequence Scott has ever directed, including the virtuoso neo-neo-realist theatrics of Black Hawk Down. 

Finally, Blade Runner is a philosophical examination of consciousness, the natural law we simply assume applies to humans and only humans.  What if there were another race, similar to but independent of our own.  Would we apply the laws and regulations of "humanity" to them that we apply to ourselves?  If you own a human-like being, are you a slave owner?  If a creature is aware of its own existence and mortality, does that provide it with any natural rights?  Or do we only afford those to members of our own species?  Steven Spielberg's grappled with many of these same issues in A.I., but in a self-congratulatory manner.  "Hey, look at me," the film seemed to say, "I'm thinking about consciousness and whatnot!"  Blade Runner works these ideas into the fabric of a film that's invigorating and imminently watchable, not a metaphysical exercise but a wholly-realized and complete experience.  And Blade Runner: Final Cut presents this masterpiece with the highest level of clarity imaginable.  It's not to be missed, provided you live in one of the few American cities in which it's playing theatrically.  Otherwise, you'll have to wait until December for the 5-disc special edition DVD.