Blade Runner - The Final Cut

Abandoning The Practice

The normal format for my reviews are 'What's Good', 'What's Bad', and 'What's Interesting'. I'm chucking it out for this film. This is because this film is by far the most important film in my youth, if not my life. I love it to death, I will love it unto death and like a long lost lover, I can claim it ruined my life. :)

Certainly, from the moment I saw the stlll above, before the film even came out, I knew this film was it. This film was for me.

A Long Time Coming

Way back when in the early 1990s when the 10th year 'Director's Cut' came out, I wrote a review for the Nub's Rejectamenta calling for Ridley Scott to go back to the cutting room once more to finish a job half-done. At the time it felt ludicrous to even suggest it, given that the director himself had said the 1992 version was his cut. Of course projects of any kind being what they are, they are never finished - clearly he felt he had to go back to it, which does not surprise us at all.
And so Ridley Scott presents us with his Final Cut this time.

'Blade Runner' is a funny film in time as it became a phenomenon all of its own. Its fans are so loyal that basically kept allowing the marketing machine to come back and re-Present the picture over and over again. I think I once shot a scene for an educational show on marketing where I brought in all my Blade Runner paraphernalia. This included the reprinted book, poster, The mocked up LP sound track, the CD of the sound track, the proper Vangelis soundtrack on CD, the VHS with the original film and a DVD of the Director's Cut. Needless to say I will fork out the cash for 'The Final Cut'. In a sense the die-hard fans allowed Ridley Scott to repeatedly re-visit his film, honing, it, making it better at each pass. The fact of the matter is, this version was 25 years in the making, and it took a lot of audience support.

As I explained to my friends Walk-Off HBP and Gra-Gra, I always felt it was the one film I had emotional ownership thereof. Yet as the years go by, I feel like it has owned me. Walk-Off HBP thinks the film is so important to Gen-X it is impossible to explain the phenomenon without taking it into account. And yet, the film clearly has a wide appeal. During the screening I sat next to an elderly lady who was guffawing at all the right bits and really taking in the movie. As incongruous as it seemed, she was really in to it. Then there were kids who were clearly born after 1982. Heck, some looked like they were born after the 1991 Director's Cut. And they all looked like devout fans.

Technical Merits


'Blade Runner' has always been a watershed film. It essentially fuelled the VHS sales boom of the mid1980s; it was the first film to be re-released with a 'Director's Cut due to its strong following; it was the flagship Warner Brothers release when DVDs first hi the market; and now we're seeing the 4K projection system in a theatre for its 'Final Cut release. Quite an achievement for a film that barely ran 6weeks at Village in George Street when it was first released in 1982.

The Sony 4k projection system was astounding. I have seen this film so often with scratches and missing frames I'm used to seeing it through a green-scratch glaze. When the DVD came out I was delighted to see the thing without scratches, but then it was beset by the compression artefacts instead and I was never a great fan of the Director's Cut. I think I've watched my DVD through thrice at the most.

By contrast, the 4k projection was pristine as any film could ever be projected as well as being absolutely free of blemishes. It was a surreal experience in of itself to be able to discern so much detail in the dark shadows that were obscured in other versions, both film and video. It's a blast to see such a perfect representation of any film. This 4k system will signal the death-knell of projected films. There may never be a technical specification reason to print another projection print - from now on, people will do so "for the look" i.e. artistic reasons. Print is dead, and last night's screening of 'Blade Runner' was there to announce it - It's that good.

Whither Now Empathy? - Digging The Pet Artificial Snake

In the original novel, Voight Kampf test was used to test Empathy. As in, the androids were incapable of empathy and therefore susceptible to being found out. Androids couldn't care abut anything - except Dick was able to delineate a distinction for that lack of care. The Voight-Kampf test machine was Philip K. Dick's way of saying there were psychopaths in our midsts, but science could diagnose them. A very 1960's take on psychopathy. Of course at the end of the book, we get to the point where Rick Deckard faces off against Roy Batey/Batty and simply guns him down.

An interesting aspect of the book is that because people needed to show they had empathy, they got pets. So pets signified empathy - but what it signified was meant to be our humanity. Of course, humans being perverse, we see in both the book and film that the more elaborate the pets, the more display value they had - hence the pet ostriches in the film and the Q&A between Deckard and Rachel
"Do you like our owl?"
"Is it artificial?"
"Of course."
The assumption of fake-ness is what makes it brilliant.
Humanity's attachment to animals both real and electric represents our dying grasp at coming to terms with Gaia, even though our rampant commercialism is tearing apart the Earth. If you had the power to create an artificial owl so well, why didn't you just preserve the owl's habitat? The rhetoric is pointed, but we can see in the world that people just don't understand that sort of abstraction.

Lately because of my new parrot, I've been forced to ponder this point. Because there are only a few thousand of barrabands left, my caged bird represents an important part of the diminishing barraband genome. I'm seriously worried for his brethren now, and by extension, the Earth. By keeping him and caring for him, I have inadvertently stepped into the world of 'Blade Runner'. I'm amazed at Philip K. Dick's insight.

'Blade Runner' As Fetish Object

One of the things that popped into my head as I watched this film for the thirty-something-th time in parts and first time in others, it occurred to me that one of the subtexts of the film is about fetishism. Nary has there been a film that lavishly brings to light the texture of objects. And the objects are so manifestly inviting to the touch; or we recoil at the quality of objects. The entire film is loaded and layered with *things* - books, leather, plastic, steel, textured concrete blocks on the wall, hair, skin tones, make-up, glass, sequins, scales on the fingertip, haze in the air.

The overwhelming sensory overload of the film actually is brought even more into focus (so to speak) with the 4k projection. The film which is about the objectification of everything presents itself as one big object. Now, I've bought this film over and over and over again, so I can lay claim to the truth that this film is an objectification in of itself. But it's not just that alone. The film actually presents a kind of materialism that enables us to understand our own consumer instincts. We yearn for the beauty of nature so much, we devise the means to replicate and re-create. This re-creation of nature with its fake owls and replicants becomes recreational; and this very Recreation - and therefore our instinct for beauty and pleasure - in turn becomes the adventure and misadventure when what we create turns on us in a classic Frankenstein twist.

It's still wonderfully relevant and thought-provoking, which was the greatest thing to walk away with at the end of the night.