| Feb022009 | Blade Runner – The Final Cut |
Did you ever watch Blade Runner? I’m sure a lot of you did. Please tell me you did. I’m going to talk about it here but there will be zero spoilers because I want you to enjoy it.
We had to study it as part of our Year 11 curriculum and I found it an unintelligible mess. It was way too dark, the music was dated and it was overflowing with dramatic symbolism. All the while, our teacher kept banging on about the heavy borrowing of themes and devices from film noir and all the mentions of death.
Previous to this, I think I had seen it on TV as a kid. “I like science fiction,” I told myself as I sat down to watch it. I was impressed by the cityscape but fell asleep soon after. Snore.
But I got my hands on the hi-def version of Blade Runner – The Final Cut and I love it. Seriously, the visuals make up 75% of this movie. It’s so crucial they’re there. My high school teacher showed us a terrible VHS taping of a television airing. Blade Runner is the kind of movie that was never meant for VHS because the scenes are drenched in darkness. You could not see shit.
The opening shot of the film – Los Angeles cityscape. (Click for larger version.)
Interior of the Bradbury Building. (Click for larger version.)
I picked these two shots at random to demonstrate how important the visuals are. The cityscape is our introduction to the world of Blade Runner. It shows Los Angeles of the future; a dense city with these scary smokestacks that belch fire. When viewed as an aging VHS bootleg on an old TV, it looks like a mass of grainy black with some twinkling spots inside it. There’s no feeling of exactly how far the city stretches or how grimly beautiful the eruptions of fire are.
The second shot is the interior of the building where the face-off between the good guy and the bad guy. One lies in wait with his gun drawn, his heart still racing from the previous fight. The other steps out from the elevator, calmly approaching after hearing the death cries of his now-dead comrade. It’s a integral piece of suspense-building but in the VHS world it translates to, “What the fuck am I looking at? There’s a light patch there with blurry stuff and black everywhere else. This is worse than The X-Files.” It’s distracting and it pulls you out of the scene.
This is without even opening up the can of worms when you talk about the different versions of Blade Runner (some spoilers). The television airing has less violence and various focus-group-inspired changes that were against the director’s wishes. Worst of all is the protagonist’s narration that mostly detracts from the dramatic tension.
Bottom line, Blade Runner is a film that takes itself very seriously. There are a lot of themes you can eek out of it. All the words are very carefully weighted to be a part of a greater whole; nothing is wasted. All the visuals build upon these themes and, more importantly, serve to convince you that the movie should be taken seriously.
For me, The Final Cut is a brilliant work of art. It removed everything that I hated in the original version. It revived these luscious visuals and absolutely none of it looks as tacky and disappointing as the crap in the remastered versions of Star Wars. It elevated the film from a pulpy detective story to a thought-provoking tour de force. I love it.
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