Today I sat down with a Blade Runner double bill on VHS in anticipation of the Final Cut coming to DVD and selected cinema’s. *** contains SPOILERS for those who have yet to see any version of Blade Runner!!! ***
The last time I saw this sci milestone was quite a few years ago and I am not sure if I ever saw the original theatrical version ever before. What I remembered most from it beside a few iconic images and the c-beams speech was that it made me sleepy. That is not a memory a classic movie deserves and the reason why I had wanted to revisit it for a long time. Last month I first read the book (for the first time). “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” surpassed every expectation I had for it. It’s deep, full of ideas and Dickean paranoia and the setting and characters are different from those in the movie. It made me want to see the movie even more. To see how much subtext that I didn’t get before had been put into it for instance 
The original theatrical cut in unglorifying 4:3 format
I don’t have to review the movie itself too much I guess, just skip to the particularities of this cut. First the film noir style voice over narration. I agree with Ridley Scott it’s not very good. It does give a lot of exposition though and it helps you understand what kind of a guy Deckard is. That’s why it’s mainly at the beginning of the movie and forgotten when the story get’s going. That never get’s too exciting however. The plot is pretty straight forward and Scott takes his time to set a kind of dreamy mood. I can see why that was slightly sleep inducing when I first saw it, but it is not necessarily a negative for me now. This time it bothered me more that the post-apocalyptic setting of the book was largely abandoned which took away the importance of animal life that is hinted at in the Voight-Kampff tests. And the relation between Deckard and Rachael never really seems to come off the ground… but it leads to the ‘and they live happy for more than four years after’ ending. As endings to fantastical stories go, that usually works and I have no real problems with it here. My overall impression of the movie is that it’s beautifully shot, with great characters, good acting, good atmosphere, (only) a few good ideas and a few minor flaws. Would the director’s cut improve on them???
the director’s cut, again 4:3
I don’t miss the voice over exposition at all, but then I heard it only a few hours before, so I can’t say for sure if the beginning of this Blade Runner version gives first time viewers all the impressions they should be getting. I did not spot a lot of structural differences with the first version but on the whole it feels better. The scene where Pris and Roy are at the home of J.F. Sebastian is extended a bit and there is the insert of the famous, and very short, dream sequence of Deckard where he sees an unicorn running. That sequence, combined with a shortened ending, that now stops with Deckard finding an origami unicorn in his home, brings a bit of that Dickian paranoia back into the movie. Big twist, Deckard is also a replicant!?!, the end. It’s hard to deny the influence of the look of this movie and the more time I spend with the movie, the more I like it I hope the final cut improves the movie even more than the director’s cut has. And I am sure finally seeing it in crystal clear wide screen will prove once and for all why this is one of the last true scifi milestones, to this day, in cinematic history.
