Blade Runner : Director's Cut

As I was paging through old reviews of Blade Runner, a line from Roger Ebert's 1992 review of the Director's Cut version jumped out at me -

"The movie's Los Angeles, with its permanent dark cloud of smog, its billboards hundreds of feet high, its street poverty living side by side with incredible wealth, may or may not come true."

True, this was written nearly two decades ago at this point, but even then - I have to wonder how often Ebert actually visits Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or New York, or any other major, trendy American metropolis and center of wealth and power - visits them outside of the limo-and-jet bubble afforded to prominent figures such as himself, that is.

Blade Runner's vision is here - the technology and pollution simply have not quite caught up yet, but we are getting there, and we have over a decade yet to match the movie's setting in the year 2019.

Most of the really great movies of cinema history are simply re-imaginings of some great novel or literary work that came before them, usually lacking at least a little of the impact and value that said literary work had. Blade Runner is no exception. It is based on Phillip K. Dick's 1966 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", sharing a similar plot structure and themes and characters, but taking it in a more "hard-boiled noir detective" direction, and excising some of the more challenging social commentary of the novel.

Not to say that this makes these films valueless, or of low value, because they are able to do things that a novel cannot. Blade Runner creates a visible, tangible atmosphere that even Dick praised as being exactly the way he saw things in his mind's eye. Due to it's "noir" stylings, the film leans more towards mass entertainment than thought-provoking art, but it does raise and treat some worthwhile points and questions. Implied in the setting of Blade Runner is a future that we very well could see fully realized if we continue on our present course of action in civilization; coming decades in advance, it makes for a striking and memorable note of caution. It also is centered on a question that we may not face in our lifetime, but our grandchildren or their children may - what happens when artificial life becomes so advanced it is essentially sentient? Is it life then, or not? And how should we treat it? Is it right to treat something with sentience as a slave, and create it to self-destruct when it is no longer practical to use?

The Director's Cut removes the crappy Ford narration from the original theatrical release and adds a couple of scenes to give the movie an ambiguous ending. If purchasing on DVD this is the version I recommend, as prices have plunged since the Final Cut came out, yet Final Cut really adds so little that only the most obsessive nerds will really find any advantage to it.