Blade Runner 1982
Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies. It creates a textured future world full of flaws and lots of rain. Star Wars did some of this by taking bright white spaceships and then adding dirt and a lot of detail, but Blade Runner really goes all in with crowded multi-ethnic cities, cool skyscrapers and flying cars, as well as decaying buildings and lots and lots of rain. While the plot is pretty simple, the setting and the details stand out with humanoid robots dealing with their mortality, people playing god, and nature as we know it pretty much extinct. Without a lot of exposition, the movie just jumps in and lets the viewer absorb all of this. There is more style than substance maybe, but Blade Runner, while it may not be the best movie of all time, has to be one of the coolest.
In 2001 I bought the “Director’s Cut” DVD which included a letterbox and cropped version of the movie on different sides of the disk. So you could watch the whole movie on the middle half of your screen or half of the movie on your whole screen, back before widescreen TV’s. Then on Black Friday last year I was able to get a copy of the newly released 4K version of “The Final Cut” for a decent price, which Ridley Scott says is the definitive version of the movie. It is hard to say how much difference there is between the 4K version and Blu-ray, but I will say the movie still looks great, even on my TV which isn’t 100% HDR compliant. Even some of the special effects still look pretty good. On re-watching I feel like the story is a bit of a let-down, and Harrison Ford’s character seems not that talented, almost getting killed by at least 3 of the 4 replicants he is trying to catch, failing to kill 2 of them. But that’s all part of a great movie. While the movie takes place in 2019 and we seem to be way behind on genetic science and flying cars, maybe our communications are a little better. After being a little disappointed with last year’s Blade Runner 2049, I do think the pacing of the original is better and the way all of the science is more incidental to the story than a big part of the story, which always works out better.
The day after watching the movie, I pulled Disk 2 out of the case, which contains “Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner” on DVD, made in 2007. I hadn’t seen it before and did not realize going in that it is three and a half hours, going into some pretty good depth about all of the aspects of making the movie, including budget politics and on-set animosity between the crew and Ridley Scott. It is interesting to hear about the different iterations the story went through and how they fired the original screenwriter who wasn’t cooperating with changes Ridley Scott insisted on. One of the changes was originally when Rutger Hauer’s character kills Tyrell, he was supposed to realize that Tyrell is a replicant and then would go find Tyrell’s tomb in the building since he died four years earlier. They talk about some of the different versions that did make it to print, including earlier versions with voiceover and without, plus some extra scenes thrown in. There are still two more disks included in this edition that I haven’t seen.
Written: 12 Aug 2018
Owned on: UHD, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital