Blade Runner: The Final Cut (The Ladd Company, Shaw Brothers, Warner Bros., Blade Runner Partnership, Michael Deeley Productions, Ridley Scott Productions, Scott Free Entertainment, 1982, revised 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, October 30) my husband Charles and I ran a 4K HD Blu-Ray disc of Blade Runner: The Final Cut, a 2007 re-edit of the science-fiction classic originally directed by Ridley Scott in 1982 based on a script by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples itself adapted from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Alas, Dick died just before the release of Blade Runner and therefore didn’t get the boost in income from a film that, though its initial box-office returns were disappointing, ultimately became a cult classic and encouraged other filmmakers to make offers to the Dick estate for movie rights to his other stories. Dick said his inspiration for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had been reading transcripts of the Nuremberg trials of high-level Nazi officials just after World War II for his counter-factual historical novel The Man in the High Castle (in which Germany and Japan win World War II). Dick was shocked at how flatly and unemotionally the captured ex-Nazis described the terrible things they’d done as soldiers for the Reich, and he got the idea for a novel about a race of rebel robots who get tired of being humanity’s slaves. So they start rebelling and slaughtering the people at the “Off-World” colonies to which Earth’s surviving people are being relentlessly urged to migrate. Six rebel robots, called “Androids” or “Andys” for short in Dick’s novel but given the snazzier name “Replicants” in the film, slaughter an entire Off-World colony, then commandeer a spaceship and use it to fly back to Earth. Hero Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a “blade runner” – essentially an executioner of killer robots, though the official term used is the euphemistic “retirement” – is assigned to hunt them down and kill them. To find them out, the company that made them has set up a series of tests to see whether the subjects feel emotions, including empathy, the lack of which would indicate “androidicity.”

Though Blade Runner was officially released in 1982, I hadn’t seen any of the various versions (more on that later) until June 17, 2018 (I posted about it the next day at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/06/blade-runner-warner-bros-ladd-company.html), when I dug out the DVD of the so-called “director’s cut” from 1991 and screened it for Charles and I, at least partly because the next day the San Diego Public Library was showing the sequel, Blade Runner 2049. (This turned out to be a truly terrible movie, written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green and directed by Denis Villenueve, which in my blog post at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/06/blade-runner-2049-warner-bros.html I called “one of the worst sequels ever made and a total disgrace to the memory of the film it was supposedly a sequel to.”) Blade Runner exists in no fewer than seven different versions, though only three are considered canonical: the original 1982 theatrical release, which included a voice-over narration written by veteran screenwriter Roland Kibbee and inserted into the film over Ridley Scott’s objections; the 1991 so-called “Director’s Cut” (actually the version Ridley Scott had the least to do with because when it was created he was busy directing his Christopher Columbus biopic 1492: Conquest of Paradise, though he sent notes to the studio indicating what he wanted); and the 2007 “Final Cut.” Since I first saw the “Director’s Cut” in 2018 I’ve participated in a podcast to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original release and I’ve also actually read Dick’s original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

It’s no surprise that Dick’s novel is a considerably richer and more moving work of art than the film – that’s what usually happens when books are converted into movies (though the 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon is as good a work of art as the Dashiell Hammett novel, mostly because it is the novel; director John Huston simply took the story and dialogue from Hammett and cut it down to the length of a feature film; and at least one science-fiction novel, Raymond F. Jones’s This Island Earth, was actually improved when it was filmed). If I’d read the novel before I saw the film, I’d have probably had a similar reaction to it that I did to the movie of The Hunger Games, which I liked but it wasn’t the film I’d envisioned when I read the book. One of Ridley Scott’s motivation for wanting to re-edit the film once again and create the “Final Cut” was he wanted to use digital technology that hadn’t existed in 1982 to tweak the special effects, including erasing the wires that had originally suspended the flying cars over the miniature sets. Key elements in the book that barely made it into the “Director’s Cut” and were hardly present at all in the “Final Cut” include the electronic animals that have taken the place of real pets, which have become so scarce due to mass extinction events as the climate becomes progressively worse that they are prohibitively expensive. Indeed, when I first heard of the book I had assumed the “electric sheep” in the title was a poetic metaphor, but it turned out that on the very first page there’s a reference to the real-life electric sheep Deckard owns, which is malfunctioning and he wonders whether it’s worth spending the money to have it repaired. There’s a scene in the “Director’s Cut” in which Deckard marvels at a toy horse made of wood, which itself has become an ultra-rare high-end material, but it’s absent in the “Final Cut.”

There are other changes that reflect the typical Hollywood meat-grinder: Deckard is married in the novel (in fact, one of his key motives in working as a blade runner is he’s hoping to make enough bounty money to buy his wife a real animal) but single in the film, and the book is set in the San Francisco Bay Area (where Dick was living when he wrote it) while the film takes place in L.A. In fact, certain key scenes take place inside the Bradbury Building, an iconic location for 1940’s films noir. I was also bothered that Fancher and Peoples changed the occupation of one of the replicants, a female, from the opera singer she was in the book to a woman who does a cheap nightclub act with snakes. (Apparently Philip K. Dick was a huge opera fan and he and his friends, including fellow science-fiction writer and opera buff Anthony Boucher, would have long discussions about it.) The plot features Deckard chasing the killer robots through a dystopian L.A. landscape and more or less falling in love with Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant but one who’s been spared the artificial four-year lifespan built into most of them so they won’t learn to simulate human emotions and therefore be able to pass the tests. At least two of the most chilling scenes in the film were retained in the “Final Cut” version: the opening, in which replicant Leon Kowalski (Brion James), being interviewed by test-giver Holden (Morgan Paull) and realizing he’s failing the test, pulls out a gun and shoots Holden dead; and a later sequence in which Batty (Rutger Hauer), leader of the rebel replicants, confronts Tyrrell (Joe Turkel), CEO of the company that invented the replicants, gives him the Judas kiss and then strangles him and also kills the company’s chief genetic engineer, J. F. Sebastian (William Sanderson). As I wrote in my initial post on Blade Runner, “The confrontation scene between the three is by far the best in the film: it seems to me to come closer to the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein than any of the films of Frankenstein itself.”

But the great irony of Blade Runner is that, even though it’s a movie whose basic premise proclaims the superiority of human beings who can feel emotion towards each other over replicants who can’t, it’s an oddly cold film – and by deliberately short-changing the elements of pathos and humanity from Dick’s novel that had somehow survived in Fancher’s and Peoples’s screenplay, the “Final Cut” seems even colder than the “Director’s Cut.” Blade Runner has been called the first science-fiction film noir (which it isn’t; I’d give that honor to the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel from a script by Daniel Mainwaring in 1956 and a much better movie than either of the remakes, and later I discovered an even earlier antecedent, a 1946 Monogram movie called Decoy in which a crook is literally brought back from the dead through scientific means by two fellow criminals who want to find the location of his secret stash of loot, though the sci-fi elements in Decoy are used only in passing), and when I first saw it I thought it was the kind of science-fiction film Josef von Sternberg would have made if he’d ever done one. But I still think there was a better film lurking within Dick’s novel than the one that got made, no matter what the version!