Blade Runner: The Director's Cut

Ridley Scott, USA 1992, 117 minutes

Twenty years on, and Blade Runner still evokes an image of futurism which is all too close for comfort. From the opening sequence, swathed in neon and building-high adverts to the rain-filled streets, it strikes you that 2019 may really look this way if we're not too careful.

Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a 'Blade Runner', a specially trained police officer whose duty it is to seek and 'retire' genetically engineered humans called Replicants (including actors Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah). Formerly retired, he is called back into service due to 6 Replicants who escaped from an off-world colony. The

The Director's Cut enhances Deckard's increasing unease about his job, while removing both the drab voiceover and cheesy ending which Hollywood demanded to be included on the original release. Included footage on the Director's Cut also poses a crucial question beyond the minds of the 1980's audience: Is Deckard himself a Replicant? An answer we have to decide ourselves, but this is the superlative Phillip K Dick book (who also wrote Minority Report, which was so savagely butchered by Spielberg in 2002). An absolute must watch on the big screen.

Review by Niko Ovenden
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2002

On its original release, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (from the story by the imcomparable Philip K Dick) was almost universally panned by critics who attacked Harrison Ford's "lifeless" portrayal of Deckard, a bladerunner who is taken out of retirement to hunt down a group of replicants who have infiltrated LA, and the sugary, tacked on, happy ending, at odds with the rest of the film.

However in this, the Director's Cut, a few changes are made which turn this into the most important sci-fi film since Star Wars. Gone is the ridiculous ending. Gone is the annoying voice-over which detracted from the lush visual imagery on screen. Added is a short but telling sequence which leads the audience to doubt whether Deckard is in fact human, or whether he is another of the replicants he is paid to kill. Overall the audience is allowed to let their imagination play a greater part and this benefits the film.

Ford's character is, like in much of his work, solid but dull. It is the wonderful set of characters around him that light up the film. Sean Young is exquisite as a replicant who has been implanted with human memories so she does not realise who she is, but sadly underused. Daryl Hannah uses her amazing legs as an innovative form of self-defence as one of the renegade replicants. But this is Rutger Hauer's film, pure and simple. As the leader of the group of replicants, he brings the film to life, in contrast to his own, which is slowly dying within him. Propelling the film to its climatic finale, he has by far the best lines: including the oft-misquoted "I have seen..." monologue.

The preternaturally talented Vangelis contributes a haunting soundtrack to the film which serves to highlight the loneliness of Deckard's miserable existence on a dying world.

This film has not aged since its release, its sets more "realistic" than the glitzy attempts in films such as Judge Dredd. Some of the technology shown looks truly futuristic and have helped Bladerunner to become the benchmark against which all others are compared. The action sequences are perfectly paced and the entire world in which the film is set is horrifyingly believable. The critics were wrong - this film is a modern masterpiece.

"The atmosphere of a hellish planet, overpopulated and polluted, is beautifully created ****" - Empire

Review by Neil Chue Hong
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97

When computers/androids get a mind of their own the results can be devastating - witness 2001 and Terminator 2 - which is why the Tyrell Corporation made sure that their advanced Nexus-6 android replicants had a short 4 year life span to minimise the danger.

In Ridley Scott's cult sci-fi film, Harrison Ford plays Deckard, a retired Blade Runner, who is forced to hunt down and kill four such replicants, who have escaped from slave labour in space colonies. Their leader, Roy Batty is portrayed by Rutger Hauer.

These replicants are so advanced that they only lack memories to make them human and give them identities. Their self-awareness causes them to resent their absent past, for which they long, and to desire to live longer than their allotted time. It is for this that they return to Earth to seek help from their creator Tyrell. Such a quest for survival is very human indeed, and were it a tale of human struggle to survive against a hostile alien race then the audience's sympathy would then lie with the hunted instead of the Blade Runner as happened in the version previously released.

The Director's Cut is the original version of the film before test screenings forced Warner Brothers to impose a voice-over so that American audiences didn't need to think in order to understand what was going on. The other crucial change was the removal of the implication that Deckard himself might be a replicant with an implanted memory. The new version restores this and removes the silly up-beat ending. The result, within the rich, dark atmosphere spawned by the magnificent set showing both the seedy Chinatown and technical splendour ol the Tyrell building in LA in 2019, is now much the better. In just 25 years time you'll see it for yourself

Review by Neill Harcus
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94