BLADE RUNNER
The Director's Cut
A film review by Jim Gillogly
Copyright 1991 Jim Gillogly
The definitive version of BLADE RUNNER runs until 10 Oct 91 at the Nuart in West Los Angeles. The test audience that saw this version before the initial release was befuddled and depressed, so the studio added lots of lame Harrison Ford voice-overs and tacked some tacky aerial footage (recycled from THE SHINING) onto the end, together with more lame voice-overs suggesting your standard Official Hollywood Happy Ending. This release reverses those losses, turning a good and artistic (but flawed) film into an impressive, integrated film that deserves another two stars on *anybody's* scale.
Getting rid of the patronizing and distracting voice-overs achieves most of the gains. The story flows just fine without them, and we're allowed to concentrate on the wonderful dark sets and the Vangelis score. The score appears to be utilized differently; I don't have it all memorized, but I noticed one change -- when Deckard is noodling with his piano in the Criterion Laser Disk version, the Vangelis score is woven around the notes he's playing; the piano stands out more in the Director's Cut. I believe we're hearing more of it during the long approaches to Tyrell Corporation where we used to hear voice-overs.
[SPOILER WARNING -- I'm about to go into detail that you may not want to read]
Some of the gorier scenes that had been added back into the Criterion LD were not present in the Director's Cut (DC). The extra footage of Dr. Eldon Tyrell's eyeballs getting popped and dripping down his face were left out, as was the second shot at Pris which resulted in her flailing around even more vigorously on the floor, and the nail popping out the back side of Roy Batty's hand. Good riddance to all of them, say I: they didn't advance the story or our identification or lack of it with any of the characters.
The movie ends with Deckard and Rachel getting into the elevator at Deckard's building after finding the silver foil origami unicorn; we still hear the echo of Gaff's parting remark: "She won't live, but then, who does?" It's great -- just perfect.
For the real aficionados, two of the more blatant continuity errors have been fixed: Bryant tells Deckard in his office that *two* of the replicants were fried in the electric field when they tried to break into Tyrell Corporation. This means we no longer need inside knowledge about Mary, the All-American Mother Replicant, to count the bodies. The other bug that was fixed was the Asian lady reading the serial number off the snake scale in her electron microscope: she now reads the same one we're seeing. Those are the only ones I noticed; there might have been more changes.
The issue of whether Deckard is a replicant was not clarified at all in this version (and I was glad of it). We still have the classic lines from Rachel ("Have you ever retired a human by mistake?" "This Voigt-Kampff test of yours -- have you ever taken it yourself?") and Gaff ("You've done a man's job."). [Quote accuracy not guaranteed] We still have Deckard's eyes glowing gray in two places (as opposed to the gold glow in Nexus Six replicants' eyes): when Rachel says "I'm not *in* the business: I *am* the business." and when Rachel is playing the piano while Deckard is resting. Some have speculated that Deckard's unicorn dream would appear in this version, definitively settling the question, since Gaff's origami unicorn would indicate that he knew one of Deckard's mind implants. However, there was no hint of this dream in the DC.
All in all, it was a wonderful experience... the same feeling you would get if you'd seen only the colorized version of CASABLANCA, and finally got to see the original black and white.
-- Jim Gillogly jim@rand.org
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