Blade Runner 2
- Thread starter WarpFactorZ
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Yeah most Director's Cuts tend to be highly overrated in my opinion, and mess up the flow of the story too much with their little tweaks and added scenes. But the Blade Runner Final Cut is definitely one of the exceptions, and really does feel like the movie at it's absolute best.
This seems like a bad idea, the original had a distinctive theme that was fully explored. The only choices are to retread or make something completely dissimilar. A huge amount of the appeal was that we didn't see much of the world, like the "off-world colonies", expanding what we see on screen is going to wreck some of that mystique.
Those aren't the only options. It can expand on the ideas of the original with a new story.
I'm trying to keep my expectations low, thanks to Ridley Scott being on the Deck-a-Rep side.
Special police squads - BLADE RUNNER UNITS - had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
Deckard: I was quit when I come in here, Bryant, I'm twice as quit now.
Bryant: Stop right where you are. You know the score, pal. If you're not cop, you're little people.
If Deckard's a replicant, it's unlikely the police know about it, with the possible exception of Gaff. Reps are killed. They aren't given an apartment and a pension. Why keep him around? And that's without getting into the actual point of the story, and the perspective of the original novelist, and the perspective of the screenwriters...
Special police squads - BLADE RUNNER UNITS - had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
Deckard: I was quit when I come in here, Bryant, I'm twice as quit now.
Bryant: Stop right where you are. You know the score, pal. If you're not cop, you're little people.
If Deckard's a replicant, it's unlikely the police know about it, with the possible exception of Gaff. Reps are killed. They aren't given an apartment and a pension. Why keep him around? And that's without getting into the actual point of the story, and the perspective of the original novelist, and the perspective of the screenwriters...
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Not all replicants are killed, just the renegade ones, right? I mean, Rachael was pretty clearly a replicant and Deckard didn't kill her on sight.
Personally, I think Deckard is probably a replicant, but I also think the point of the film is that it doesn't matter -- that replicants are human in every way that counts, so it's a distinction as invalid as any other basis for discrimination. So it's probably appropriate that it was left ambiguous.
From the opening crawl:
After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6
combat team in an Off-world colony,
Replicants were declared illegal
on earth - under penalty of death.
This certainly seems to imply that ALL Replicants were illegal on Earth. Of course this doesn't explain why the Tyrell Corporation has one and the police know about it.
As long as Rachael was still working for Tyrell (who, after all, is making all the replicants and the government wants to stay on his good side, so the police turn a blind eye to the 'prototype'), she was apparently ok. Once she 'went off the reservation' and skipped work, that's when shoot-to-kill orders went out.
And that's exactly what Deckard was doing when we first met him, which supports Steve's theory about the police being in the dark. Otherwise Gaff (who didn't want Deckard around anyway) could have burned him down without a second thought and told Bryant he was resisting arrest.
And that's exactly what Deckard was doing when we first met him, which supports Steve's theory about the police being in the dark. Otherwise Gaff (who didn't want Deckard around anyway) could have burned him down without a second thought and told Bryant he was resisting arrest.
Yep. If Deckard is a replicant, why let him quit the police? Why let him live after he quits the police?
As for Rachael's existence... she was essentially the property of a hugely rich and powerful businessman, next to nobody knew she was a rep, and she was safe until, as Nightowl1701 points out, she tried living her own life. Then she became a target.
The essential irony of the film is that humans believe only they have true empathy, but the most dramatic moment of empathy in the movie is Batty -- whose replicant status is clear and unambiguous -- letting Deckard live. The most empathetic human we see is JF Sebastian, who's suffering from a disease that gives him a shortened lifespan, accelerated decrepitude, like a rep. He can relate to them. The rest, including Deckard, are generally not nice people.
As for Rachael's existence... she was essentially the property of a hugely rich and powerful businessman, next to nobody knew she was a rep, and she was safe until, as Nightowl1701 points out, she tried living her own life. Then she became a target.
The essential irony of the film is that humans believe only they have true empathy, but the most dramatic moment of empathy in the movie is Batty -- whose replicant status is clear and unambiguous -- letting Deckard live. The most empathetic human we see is JF Sebastian, who's suffering from a disease that gives him a shortened lifespan, accelerated decrepitude, like a rep. He can relate to them. The rest, including Deckard, are generally not nice people.
Well, sure. That's the key to the whole story (as long as we're discussing the ending without spoiler code): That ultimately, Deckard is the bad guy. Or at least, he's working for the wrong side. He realizes that when Batty saves him, and that's why he runs at the end. Which is why I didn't like the movie until I saw it without the narration -- because the narration hamfistedly dismisses Batty's act of mercy as an inexplicable, random moment of weakness in an otherwise villainous figure, and that reinterpretation robs the whole film of its meaning. Only when I saw the film without narration did I realize that Batty wasn't the villain, Deckard was. Batty was a freedom fighter, an escaped slave defending his people, and Deckard was working for the slavemasters to perpetuate the oppression. We'd been led to think this was a standard story where we were following the good guy, but then we were shown at the end that we'd been seeing something totally different all along, and it inverted the meaning of everything before it in a classic Phildickian way. That's what makes it such a potent story, and the narration totally ruined it.
There's a version of the film where they narrate?
I guess I'm lucky I didn't see it till 2000 or so.
The point of the movie(to me at least)is the contrast between both Deckard and Batty.
Both trained killers but Batty,the replicant,is out there living as a man complete with friends,a beautiful lover and a mission in his life(to be more than what he is).
Whilst Deckard,the human is just going through the motions of his life.
If Deckard is a replicant,then the movie is just robot vs. robot...a better version of Transformers IMHO.
Both trained killers but Batty,the replicant,is out there living as a man complete with friends,a beautiful lover and a mission in his life(to be more than what he is).
Whilst Deckard,the human is just going through the motions of his life.
If Deckard is a replicant,then the movie is just robot vs. robot...a better version of Transformers IMHO.
Replicants aren't robots, though -- not in the modern sense, though they're a perfect fit for the original meaning of the word in Karel Capek's R.U.R. Capek's roboti were synthetically made organic humans that were created as a slave race and that launch a rebellion against their masters. Blade Runner is nominally adapted from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and named after a completely unrelated book, but it's almost a remake of R.U.R. in a way.
In any case, the point is that replicants are human, regardless of how they're born. So, as I said, the distinction between human and replicant doesn't matter, and the nature of Deckard's identity has no bearing on the story. Whether or not he's a replicant, he's a person working for a system that kills people who rebel against enslavement, and he learns to question and reject that system.
I'd be happier if it wasn't Scott making this. I don't like most of his stuff and view the couple I do like as abberations.
He wasn't - Philip K Dick said so, and Harrison Ford played him as human. Scott's wrong...
He wasn't - Philip K Dick said so, and Harrison Ford played him as human. Scott's wrong...
Movies are often different from the books they're based on. And there's the whole unicorn thing...
"How can it not know what it is?"
He'd already bailed out of that system - and had gotten forcibly dragged back in. When we first meet him, he's a broken shell of a man, looking for other jobs while staying in town (his first mistake). He was a recent divorcee because, in his ex-wife's own words, he'd become a 'cold fish.' Yet a cold fish with a conscience, one who could no longer tell any difference between the replicants he was hunting and humans. He accepted the Batty job only because he didn't want to end up a corpse lying in an alley (Bryant's 'little people' threat) and saw no other way out (his second mistake). What was there for him outside his job?
'Replicants are humans too' isn't what he needed to learn, he already knew it (even if he tried to deny it to himself for the purpose of getting the job done). It was that he was human too. He'd become more replicant than the replicants. Between Rachael and Batty, he regained his ability to feel and the courage he'd needed to strike out in a new direction.
With respect Christopher,the distinction between replicants and humans does indeed matter.
Being an unauthorised replicant on Earth is a matter that will get you killed.Being a human in Batty's way will get you equally dead.
And for me the nature of Deckards rekindled human identity is exactly what this film is about.
Being an unauthorised replicant on Earth is a matter that will get you killed.Being a human in Batty's way will get you equally dead.
And for me the nature of Deckards rekindled human identity is exactly what this film is about.
Yes, it matters to the bigoted establishment, in the same way that race mattered to the people who hunted runaway slaves in the pre-Civil War South. What I meant was that it shouldn't matter -- that the establishment's belief that replicants were less than human was wrong. There is a gigantic difference between what the villains in a story believe is important and what the story is saying is actually important. The message of the film was that the difference between human and replicant intrinsically, morally does not matter, regardless of the hateful, murderous beliefs of the institutions the film was condemning.