Also, The Villain's Name Is "Batty," Which Is Pretty Obvious, If You Think About It
I wrote a blurb for the Willamette Week, available by clicking here, about the recently released Blade Runner: The Final Cut. On the off chance that the link bugs out on you after the screening listings are no longer timely, I've reproduced the whole thing below.
One quick funny story, though: Sitting behind me at the theater were a man and his son, who couldn't have been older than 9 or 10. This immediately struck me as shoddy parenting, since Blade Runner features the kind of (literally) skull-crushing violence you shouldn't let a kid see, and even if he looked away, there's not a chance in hell he'd be willing/able to keep up with the plot. The kid actually made it through almost the entire movie, too. But in the final sequence, when Batty and Deckard face off in the abandoned apartment complex, Batty drives a nail through his own palm to keep himself alive and invigorated, at which point the kid just totally lost it, bursting forth in choking sobs at the nightmarish vision before him. His dad calmed him down with a soothing, "It's okay, we'll go, we'll go," at which point they stood and exited as discreetly as is possible in a packed theater on the Westside. Poor kid. Hope he sleeps well.
My brief review, below the line:
Blade Runner has been such a milestone of neo-noir sci-fi for 25 years that it's easy to forget just how big of an impact the film had on the genre. The rain-soaked streets, the apocalyptic future, the robots rebelling against their masters; hell, Blade Runner is now used as a reference point for a certain mindset, a tone that wouldn't exist without Ridley Scott's haunting, ground-breaking film. And seeing it all on the big screen, digitally remastered and expanded and buffed up and generally just looking fantastic, brings home again just how influential this film has been. Blade Runner: The Final Cut has been fleshed out with a few extra scenes of violence previously available only on a Criterion Collection laser disc that's long out of print; the voice-over narration from the original that was dumped for the 10th anniversary "director's cut" is still blessedly gone; and the polished visuals and sound are phenomenal, making the film look as vibrant as it must have in 1982. But through it all, I was struck not merely by how beautiful the film looks, but how the little tweaks are ultimately just flourishes on what is, underneath it all, one of the best sci-fi films of all time. It's a shame it took Scott 25 years to lock the thing down, but I'm glad it's finally here.
Comments: 4
i'm far more excited about the release of the Work Print Cut, screened only for a week at the Nuart back in 1991. The success of that limited run (it was essentially entirely sold out) was the driving force behind the eventual first director's cut
the Work Print Cut is an odd combination of elements ... it drops almost the entire voice over, but retains it for the moments right after batty's death
there is no unicorn (i'd prefer that deckard WASN'T a replicant, even though that unicorn or not, that fact is in the movie, regardless of the version)
the love scene between rachel and deckard is much rougher, almost feeling like near-rape. scott acknowedges that interpretation in the recent wired interview and pointed it out as something they consciously changed, personally, i think the film (whether deckard is a replicant or just a severely emotionally damaged human) is stronger with the scene as orginally edited
Yeah, I'm curious to see the work print as well. The "love" scene is already pretty close to rape, so there's no telling what it used to look like before Scott tweaked it.
My parents took me to see "Alien" when it first came out. I was three. This continues to explain a lot about me.
The weirdest example of bad parenting I witnessed in a movie theater was a mother bringing in her two little boys (neither of which could have been any older than 6 or 7) to a showing of "Jackie Brown". Yikes.
Scott grouched me out with that "Deckard was a replicant" comment, and ever since I've been mildly soured to the movie despite a long-standing and abiding love for it. I still think it's interesting that the shots of Rachel and Deckard driving along the coast in the original theatrical ending was actually stock footage shot for "The Shining".
Yay! Can't wait to see it.
Side note: My parents let me and my sibs watch all sorts of violence, like the rawest stuff imaginable, but almost had heart attacks if there was the mere potential for sex, making us put our hands over our eyes (through which we obviously peeked). I'd say we're pretty normal, though, if regrettably well-versed in all things Van Damme.
Oct 26, 2007 2:16 PM