The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

Had no idea about the origin of the original director's cut in the 90s (thread):

Director’s cut of Blade Runner accidentally shown instead of the theatrical cut. I then mounted a campaign to get it released. And succeeded. https://t.co/lTShwIgVVQ

— Bruce Wright (@heybrucewright) February 4, 2021

absolutely wild, and that showing launched an entire revitalized fan community

Blade Runner notes from the producers to Ridley Scott. pic.twitter.com/ZnI1HvyZIS

— Will McCrabb (@mccrabb_will) April 20, 2021

you can kind of suss out who forced them to do the voice over (and finds it dreadfully delivered) and who didn’t like it at all

lol @ "this movie gets duller every time we see it"

No intention to be pedantic, but the actual quote being "gets worse every screening" makes it even funnier.

both quotes are in there! presumably they meant it gets worse after each recut of the film, since this seems to be notes on version 4

but you can see how we arrived at TikTok and reality TV, these dudes seem to think anything that isn't constantly stimulating the audience needs to end up on the cutting room floor and their instincts don't really seem to be wrong when it comes to popular entertainment

even though theyre wrong, tbh its also funny to me how the real time/proto-livetweeting feel of the notes captures that feeling of how when youre watching something thats really irritating you, every new element can feel like a fresh offense: "THIS guy again? MORE slow motion? what is this, synagogue music?"

"for fucks sake, is he a goddamn robot or not, already??"

"movie suddenly ended when they got in the elevator WTF?!?!?!"

xpost - ha, I missed OEO's quote in my first pass, sorry!

To be fair, the film wasn't exactly a huge success upon release.

I'm sure David Toop was at that first LA screening. He wrote a piece for The Face about a very early screening of the new cut.

Need the full set of notes from the prior screenings imo

i am quite ambivalent about blade runner. the world-building, atmosphere, and the transformation of the filming locations - many of which have been used before and since, but never in remotely the same way - is great, as is rutger hauer's roy batty. from a story point of view it is a little inert. a neo-noir but our detective doesn't do a lot of detecting (i think harrison ford said something of this nature about the film). there's not much in the way of plot points.

I saw 2049 again, at home this time, but on a very nice TV and sound system, and I loved it again (and it reminded me of the nice time i had with mark s at the cinema the first time around). The sound and the image are tremendous. Both pretty important things when watching a movie imo

When you already know the story though the flaws tend to stand out a little more. The story is pretty clever until you realise it relies almost entirely on coincidence. Leto is so dreary that it puts a ceiling on how great the movie can be. I would have loved Wallace to be a nerdy bureaucrat, a can-do zealot with efficiency spreadsheets. They went in a different direction - they wanted a kind of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, impatient, dolorous chaplain with a frustrated messiah complex. Sure. But choices have consequences and while Leto may have "nailed" what he was going for it sucks the movie into quicksand. Ford also barely registers. I'm sad to say that Robin Wright - also terrible!

On the other hand the love story with Joie is fucking amazing. Leto's henchman, Luv, is awesome. All the violence is so brutal and tense and close-up and painful. And Ryan Gosling is so good it pretty much makes up for everybody else who is bad

How’s the TV????

I never understand why Deckard is doing fine in the irradiated empty city of Las Vegas

because robot?? or maybe antioxidant properties of wild honey

Leto just ruins the role. He's putting on performance and none of his attempt at understated menace is convincing or believable.

Comes across as a Meisner Acting School student's mid-term acting assignment

Luv rules. Her brutality when she kills Lt Joshi is awesome

i'm the best one

honey and Jack Daniel’s. not sure where the bees are getting their pollen mind you.

i almost forgot to mention the truly godawful CGI of Rachel. if i was Villeneuve i would want to get a “special edition” out toot sweet. use your own money if you have to.

the TV is outta sight. tbrr. I have gone into some detail on the New TV thread.

I watched Black Rain the other week and realized it's a better Blade Runner movie than 2049 is.

Also loved Luv. Terrific baddie. I’m surprised it didn’t get seen as a breakout role (unless I missed something - and I suppose the movie hasn’t been that popular anyway)

Science Fiction Encyclopedia has a good article, incl this passage, which I found helpful:

The numerous cuts of the film are essentially minor variations on three main versions: (i) the workprint version, originally shown to preview audiences only, but given a limited theatrical release following its chance rediscovery in 1990; (ii) the studio version, with new voiceover and happy ending grudgingly added for release; (iii) the unicorn version, without voiceover or post-getaway scene, but including the bizarre unicorn reverie which seems to confirm that Deckard himself is a replicant. (Scott was firm on this notoriously contested point; Ford and producer Michael Deeley roundly rejected it; Fancher wanted it to be ambiguous; Peoples had Deckard understand himself as a merely metaphorical replicant, escaping into a belated true humanity.) The last is now the authorized version, first seen in a now-lost preview cut, but only released to audiences with the misleadingly branded Blade Runner: The Director's Cut of 1992 (actually an edit by other hands adding the unicorn sequence to a tidied-up recreation of the workprint version) and definitively realized in Scott's own digital Blade Runner: The Final Cut of 2006, which like its predecessor also restores some of the more brutal sequences seen originally only in the UK/Europe release.

Also mentions making-of doc being incl. w later DVD releases.

I watched Black Rain the other week and realized it's a better Blade Runner movie than 2049 is.

one of the main plot points in gene wolfe’s “book of the new sun” series is the existence of aquaestors, which are beings created by superior intelligences from the memories of other characters. they are made of some sort of energy field (generally described as light, although they seem to have mass and substance and can pick things up, etc) and can be more or less autonomous. i suppose the best way to describe them is like holodeck characters who are free to wander the universe. over the course of the series, wolfe (who is catholic) repeatedly makes the point that even “real” people and objects are ultimately no less ephemeral (deepak chopra and other people who like to point out that “we’re just empty space filled by fields of energy, maaaaaaan” would probably agree)

this is all to say i like peoples’ interpretation, and it seems to me to match the themes and characters in both movies. sure the replicants have a limited lifespan, but so does jf sebastien, is leon kowalski’s casual disregard for life any more inhuman than harry bryant’s, etc. probably old hat for the purposes of this thread but “we’re all metaphorical replicants” is a good summation of why i’m no longer hung up on the question of whether deckard is a replicant or not

i’d never heard the term “metaphorical replicant” before but i sure do like it!

2049 gets short shrift
Leto is pretty bad tho

Black Rain apes some of the atmosphere and orientalist vibes but otherwise is a rote cops vs bad guys story. Noting conceptually interesting or sci fi about it.

That's why it being better than 2049 shows what a failure 2049 is. 2049's story is moving pieces around on a chess board by someone who doesn't know how to play chess. At least Black Rain makes sense, has thematic coherence.

lot of thematic coherence in 2049! almost too much, you might say. is k's love for joie real? is joie real? if she's not, what difference does that make? if she has her own memories of k, memories that can be erased forever, doesn't that make her unique - almost human? is k's sense of loss any less for her being an AI instance? is it a coincidence that joie wants k to be called "joe" - basically her own name? because he is equally artificial? but equally unique, insofar as he has had a unique set of experiences and memories (well, all the ones since the implants)? when any of us kiss another, aren't there ghosts in our heads of how one ought to kiss, or of others we have kissed before? or even fantasies of someone else we wish we were kissing? what status does that confer on the person we're actually kissing? if we feel a memory deeply, does it matter that it's false if it feels true to us?

i get really hung up on the ways people delude themselves and whether or not those delusions make a difference, and this movie is catnip for that stuff

Yeah, and I think this is the subtext appeal of several Philip K. Dick novels.

Is anyone really watching 2049 for the plot?

just the articles

I read the novel and have little to no recollection of how it ends, but I seem to remember it does not end happily.

I've always been disappointed with Blade Runner. At heart it's essentially a 1970s-style "Vietnam veteran returns from the war" film that for the most part follows a bunch of dull nobodies who are tangental to the actual story. It's not a case where the Replicants would have lost their impact if they had been overused; I wanted to know more about them. They escaped from hell into a city where people lived forever, but they were treated like pests, hunted down and killed. As if they were the guest workers who built the World Cup stadium in Qatar. Superfluous unpeople who were no longer necessary. It's essentially a lefty film in which the ruling classes create disposable workers who just happen to be living creatures, and then kill them when they're no longer necessary so that they don't have to pay pensions etc. Which might explain why it didn't do boffo box office in the United States.

Imagine a society that executes guest workers and vagrants just for existing. Executes them in the streets so frequently that people just walk around the bodies. What would that society be like? How did it get that way? What do the pests feel about being hunted down? That would be the basis for an interesting film, but none of it comes through in the limited glimpses we get of the world circa 2019. The film introduces a bunch of interesting ideas but never explores them in great depth, which is why twentysomething men on the internet love it - it feels like a substantial work of art. It's an imitation of art without any of the boring stuff, or any of the girly emotional stuff. Not like e.g. Balthazar. And it looks great on a big TV.

I saw the sequel at the BFI Imax when it came out. 07 October 2017, according to my emails. It started off with an interesting mystery but fell apart like one of those TV shows where the writers didn't know how it was going to end. It had all the same problems as the original. There were germs of good ideas that were thrown away. Individual sequences worked - e.g. the drone strike sequence - but it didn't go into any great depth. I can't remember what happened to the chief villain (he seemed to fade out of the narrative) and the central question of engineering an artificial life form that can reproduce sexually doesn't make a lot of sense on a technical level. I hoped that the film would play up the idea of robots replacing Replicants in more detail, just as how in real life waves of ever-cheaper labour are imported by the ruling classes in order to wipe out the previous wave of imported labour, but that went nowhere. Again, it has the form of substance without any substance.

After watching the credits I realised I had met someone who worked on the film - I think she did some of the motion capture modelling. It's a small world. It's been said before but Blade Runner, ET, The Thing, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out within a few weeks of each other, so that must have been a great time to be a regular cinemagoer. Imagine a Smash Brothers fighting game that mashes all of those franchises up! Obviously the Replicants would die if the match went on longer than four years. I just want to see topless George Takei in his prime kicking ET in the face. Is that too much to ask?

I just want to see topless George Takei in his prime kicking ET in the face.

This I would watch!

I saw it in the theater when it came out in 82--I was about 16, and so at a pretty good age for this kind of thing. (I had seen Alien a few years prior with my dad and was blown away.) At the time, I found it a letdown for reasons I couldn't articulate beyond "this was a weird part for Harrison Ford." Reading the excerpt from Pauline Kael's review upthread, I realize now that that was exactly my beef with it: there is little to no dramatic tension. It's primarily, if not exclusively, a visual experience, and I've since come to appreciate it for that. I have also realized that the tensions between Ford and Scott come through in the film's execution. IIRC, Ford intentionally read his voiceovers in the most obnoxious tone he could come up with. That said, I find the film without the voiceovers almost dull. I watched that version with my own kids when they were around the same age I was when I first saw it, and they were, to put it mildly, underwhelmed.

Maybe it helps to have read the novel first: I seem to recall seeing things that didn't make it into the film, at least the cut I saw. Like with having read Going Clear before seeing The Master, but I think I would have gotten most of that anyway.
I liked the intentionally overbearing voiceovers; they reminded me of Sterling Hayden!

The film without the voiceovers is almost incomprehensible.

I read the book sometime after seeing the movie; as I said above, I can't remember much about it. I remember Deckard being married, and near the end of the novel he's wandering in the wasteland and finds an electric toad which he mistakes for a real animal. Typical PDK mindfuck and a very different vision than Scott's.

good post ashley but part of the reason we don’t know much about the replicants is they don’t really have lives or pasts. they were just created and are what, four years old or something? (iirc their incept dates are all 2015 or 16)

besides if there had been a bunch of offworld colonies flashbacks it would have made roy’s line about having “seen things you people wouldn't believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of orion … beams in the dark near the tannhauser gate”. as it is, since we have no idea about that stuff until right then it’s like a “holy shit, he’s not wrong!” moment

meant to write it would have made his line *fall flat*, robbed it of its power, etc

also i’ve read the pkd book several times, actually recently reread in a small “library of america” hardcover edition, collected with man in high castle, stigmata of palmer eldritch and ubik. made me do a double take when i saw it in the sci fi section of the bookstore!

not much to say about it here except it’s sooooo far off from the film that reading it doesn’t give much insight into blade runner imo

It's not one of Dick's best books. Don't even know why it was chosen for adaptation when much more interesting books like Flow My Tears The Policeman Said weren't.

I remember seeing the poster for the movie when it was new but I was 11 so wasn't going to R-rated movies. Bought the Marvel comic adaptation (which used the voiceover as captions), and eventually saw the movie years later on VHS, I think when the "director's cut" was released. I own the 4DVD box that came out some years ago that has the "final cut" on one disc, the long-ass documentary on another, the other cuts (theatrical, international from '82, early '90s director's cut) on another, and a whole disc of extras.

i like it! and i’d recommend it to sci fi or pkd fans, but yeah, there are definitely several others by him that are much better. definitely the weakest in that set

Seemed like there were some details in the book that may have helped me get into the movie's backstory, the deteriorata.

Hmmm

Amazon has ordered a ‘Blade Runner’ sequel series. The live-action project, titled “Blade Runner 2099” will take place fifty years after the events of ‘Blade Runner 2049’. Silka Luisa serves as showrunner with Ridley Scott as executive producer https://t.co/iVscokBeQ3

— Lost In Film (@LostInFilm) September 15, 2022

How many Nexus 8 replicants are still banging around

Also will Ford be in this with prostheses making him look 115 years old

They will use computers to make CG Sean Young look like Harrison Ford.