A 25^th anniversary special cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner premiered at the New York Film Festival this weekend. It will run in theatres in New York and LA afterward. This latest version is called Blade Runner: The Final Cut. This name signals either of two things: This is indeed Mr. Scott’s final and definitive version of a film that was, due to initial poor test screenings and budget problems, severely hacked up, or it’s a slightly ironic reference to the dizzying number of “cuts” this movie was released as after it attained cult status.

Come December, it will be released as 5-disc (!) DVD set. A Christmas gift that will take until New Year’s Day to finish.

All of this current hoopla aside, I was quite taken by this film back in 1982– narration, happy ending and all. It’s look was unprecedented; the subject matter was fascinating; It had Indiana Jones in it. I’ve since seen this film many times. When the first (or second) “director’s cut” came out in 1991 I saw it under rather momentous and creepy circumstances. Me and a friend caught it at the Castro during a matinee, and when we came out a long plume of black smoke bisected the sky over the theatre, so thick it blocked the Fall sun and chilled the air. The Oakland Hills firestorm had started while we were watching the film.

But now I’m in the process of revising my estimation of Blade Runner. Ridley Scott, former commercial TV director with a strong visual style, makes the film work with incredible art direction and effects. Fred Kaplan, in his New York Times review of BR:TFC, says the same:

What’s hypnotic about the film is its seamless portrait of the future, a sleek retro Deco glossed on neon-laced decay: overcrowded cities roamed by hustlers, strugglers and street gangs mumbling a multicultural argot, the sky lit by giant corporate logos and video billboards hyping exotic getaways on other planets, where most English-speaking white people seem to have fled.

True, all true. Notice he’s talking up the peripheral details? The plot is, in the long view, plodding and oddly static. The main character is a reactive, dull punching bag, trying to solve a whodunit that is decidedly unsurprising in it’s denouement. It’s a warmed-over Film Noir shell surrounding a gooey Philip K. Dick center.

It’s a great center, though. Philip K. Dick has had a surprisingly good run in big-budget films for an allegedly drug-addled sci-fi novelist who died in 1982, several months before Blade Runner premiered. I think he was such a favored source of big-budget Hollywood science fiction because the conceptual theses of his stories were so untethered from realpolitik it was exceedingly easy to greenlight his stuff.

Science Fiction can generally be broken down into two camps: High-Concept and Speculative. High-Concept, in which Philip K. Dick was a pioneer, explores ideas so original and strange they bear little resemblance with, or are incongruent to, our intrinsic reality. Speculative is an extrapolation of our current world, which then often reflects back as social commentary.

Dick’s High-Concept ideas were so far out they actually had little bearing on the world around us. This made the job of building a film around them easy, as he didn’t deal much in disturbing dystopian jeremiads, which tend to make investors nervous. (You may notice that even with the high profile of An Inconvenient Truth nobody is exactly lining up to remake Soylent Green.) I ain’t saying there was not a “the world has gone to hell” feeling in Blade Runner, but as said above it was mostly conveyed peripherally as detail and art direction. One can see the pattern of studio approval based on concept divorced from relevancy:

BLADE RUNNER (based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool if androids thought they were people?” RELEVANCY: next time I see an android, I’ll ask it. That’s the right way to address them, right? “It?”

TOTAL RECALL (based on “We Can Remember That For You Wholesale”) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool if virtual vacations seemed totally real?” RELEVANCY: Wouldn’t it be cool if vacation hotels served seemingly real food? Let’s perfect that first. Baby steps, people.

MINORITY REPORT (based on short story) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool if cops could solve crimes before they happen?” RELEVANCY: Hey– this film raised a lot of important constitutional issues concerning people thinking about doing stuff, then maybe not doing them.

PAYCHECK (based on short story) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool to make millions and not remember how you made it?” RELEVANCY: Huh? Besides, this was a Ben Affleck movie, and it came out the same year as Gigli. You won’t be tested on it.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 7:55 pm and is filed under General, Long Tail, Motion Pictures, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.