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>> Blade Runner: The Final Cut is Ridley Scott’s latest version of his gorgeous sci-fi classic

SUBLIME SCI-FI: Blade Runner

by MARK SLUTSKY

Along with Alien, Blade Runner was such an aesthetically accomplished imagining of the future that I’ve always wondered why Ridley Scott never bothered to make another science fiction film. Maybe he felt like he’d done it all, but I’d rather see him putting xenomorphs and flying cars up on the screen than the hum-drum true crime of his recent American Gangster.

Despite never returning to the genre, Scott’s returned to Blade Runner many times—a new DVD box set features no less than five different versions of the movie. When directors revisit and re-cut their early work, the results aren’t always an improvement, though. Think of George Lucas catastrophically CGI-puking all over the original Star Wars movies, or to a less disastrous degree, Francis Ford Coppola’s momentum-killing additions to Apocalypse Now.

Blade Runner, though, at least in its 1992 Director’s Cut incarnation, did benefit from Scott’s futzing, as he cut the studio-mandated happy ending and Harrison Ford’s bored-sounding voiceover, as well as added some ambiguous clues about Ford’s identity. Now he’s gone back and tweaked the film again, for a “Final Cut” opening in theatres this week, and available on DVD in December.

For this version, Scott hasn’t made any big changes along the lines of the Director’s Cut, though some sequences have actually been re-shot, most notably Joanna Cassidy’s death scene, which in previous versions featured a really obvious stunt double. Cassidy herself now flies through the plate glass window, and despite the fact that the new stuff was shot some 25 years after the fact, it looks seamless.

To be honest, the new stuff is incorporated so seamlessly I barely noticed it all; if you’d told me I was watching the 1992 version of the film, I would probably believe you. With one exception, though: the Final Cut has been restored so beautifully, scrubbed so clean, that it really looks magnificent. It’s an incredible restoration, and any fan of the movie owes it to him or herself to see it on the big screen. With its brilliant art design and use of light, it still looks better than nearly any other movie version of the future, dated special effects or not—and thank God Scott didn’t try and bring those up to date.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut opens this
Friday, Nov. 30 at the Cinéma du Parc

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