Blade Runner: The Final Cut
29 September 2007 • humanity, movie, sciencefiction
Update: fixed typo in title
It’s gonna have computer-generated Jabba the Hutt.
But Ridley Scott is releasing a huge-ass box set with five versions of the movie (including the workprint!), and evidently none of them is a crappy 4:3 letterboxed transfer from a laser disc, so at least he has more respect for his own work than George Lucas has for his.
I don’t see the point, though. I suppose you could tinker and improve any work of art forever, but I think it’s better to just let it go. One director’s cut to get rid of the godawful voiceover narration that the studio forced you to include is a fine idea, but a third revision is pushing it.
Or is it? The new version is a new digital print with “updated” and “cleaned” special effects, according to Wikipedia. Whatever “updated” and “cleaned” mean. Hopefully they don’t mean pasting in Hayden Christensen’s ghost and making Greedo shoot first. Well, Scott already did the Blade Runner equivalent of making Greedo shoot first when he inserted that unicorn dream, and he claims he always intended Deckard to be a replicant. Anyway, with a movie like Blade Runner that relies so much on how it looks, maybe it makes sense to go back every decade or so and update the special effects, keep them from looking too dated.
Speaking of Deckard being a replicant, here’s what Fred Kaplan has to say about that in The New York Times:
This may disappoint some viewers. Deckard is the film’s one person with a conscience. If he’s a replicant, it means that there are no more decent human beings.
Is that why anybody is disappointed that Deckard is supposed to be a replicant?
If all humans died off and were replaced by robots which are entirely indistinguishable from humans, would that be sad?
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.
Scraps says:
30 September 2007 at 12:42
The reason I hate the idea of Deckard being a replicant is because Scott clearly didn’t intend it in the original film, but heard the speculation about it over the years, decided it was a great idea, and inserted it into later cuts despite it being inconsistent with the story and the nature of replicants as given. And it’s a dumb, half-baked idea, a “twist” so obvious that it’s hackneyed right out of the box, profundity for stoners.
Steven says:
30 September 2007 at 15:18
I don’t disagree! Well, I think it makes sense for Deckard to wonder whether he’s a replicant and for us to wonder what difference it would make if he were, but inserting wonky clues for fans to analyze and obsess over is dumb, and then blowing the clues and revealing the supposed truth behind them is dumber. When an artist decides he needs to step up and explain what people are supposed to think about his work, his artistic vision has failed somewhere.
Rose says:
1 October 2007 at 9:57
That’s the problem with discussing Battlestar Galactica, too, I find. It’s interesting to me to look at how the humans have lost their humanity, at least in the really limited moralistic way I’d define that, and so I find it very hard to identify with or more aptly root for them. And so I’m pro-cylon because I think maybe we should grade on a curve for these beings who are making up their own humanity as they go, seemingly no more cruel than their creators’ version. And yet it doesn’t make me despair for humanity any more than just watching the news would; humans do a lot of horrible things. I’m babbling at this point, so maybe I’ll come back to this if I can say something sensible instead. But I agree that I see no problem with not having good humans if we have good people however that’s defined, and that the problem we do have now and in fiction is the lack of both.
Scraps says:
1 October 2007 at 13:58
You remind me of an argument I had on the Well several years ago with a woman who loathed AI (N.b.: I’m not saying there aren’t good reasons to loathe AI, though I think it’s a fascinating movie and I’ve seen a lot of great thinking done about it by people who liked it, so I respect it at least – has this parenthesis gone on long enough?) because it presented artificial intelligence as human, or as good as human. You know. And she thought this was the most offensive thing ever, the idea that machines could have that, that, whatever-it-is. I guess you’d have to fall back on calling it a soul, but she wasn’t religious. And I thought, here we have a bit of Asimov’s future coming true right in front of me: anti-robot bigotry. So I think Kaplan may be right: There may well be a critical backlash against the movie from moralists, who will probably call it “nihilistic”.
Steven says:
1 October 2007 at 14:28
Yeah, I suppose some people have that reaction to any story about strong AI. But still, in the case of Blade Runner, I think most people are offended by Scott’s revelations about Deckard being a replicant because it’s sort of dumb.
In real-life AI research, whenever somebody figures out a mechanical, computational solution to a problem that used to be considered solvable only by true intelligence, everybody decides that problem doesn’t require true intelligence after all. People used to think image recognition required true intelligence, but now we can write computer programs that learn to recognize images. Well, people used to think even mathematical computation required true intelligence. So if it turns out strong AI really is possible, and our brains are mere squishy wet computers, then what? I suppose people will continue to deny it as they do with evolution, for similar reasons. Reality doesn’t care much about our need for meaning in life.
Scraps says:
1 October 2007 at 14:58
I remember the goalposts being moved in just that fashion with regard to chess. For years, chess genius was supposed to be an ineluctably human quality; when Deep Thought beat Kasparov, a whole lot of people retreated to the position that it was just number crunching after all. Except a few paranoids like Kasparov, whose insistence that there had to have been cheating involved was at least consistent: he still didn’t believe a computer could beat him.