Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel, Joanna Cassidy, James Hong, Morgan Paull, Kevin Thompson, John Edward Allen, Hv Pike, Kimiko Hiroshige, Bob Okazaki, Carolyn DeMirjian.
Classics never die, they may slowly start to rust away or fade into the obscurity afforded all things great and small, but like the Mona Lisa, Concorde or a 40 year old bottle of Balvenie, if someone is still thinking of them then like a replicant caught doing a Marilyn Monroe pose over a steam vent in a future New York City, then the image will remain forever.
Such is the ferocity of charm, of the allusion to other states of being commented upon and the immensity of the cinematic experience that is laid at the door of Blade Runner, it comes as little surprise that it has had so many releases, so many definitive versions, that its popularity, its epic nature has never lapsed or faltered. With news that a long awaited sequel is in the pipline, who can blame anyone associated with the film for seeing it return to the big screen one more time in what is entitled as Blade Runner The Final Cut.
By the end of this particular marathon, it could quite well be conceivable that fans, legendary in their appreciation as much as Star Wars enthusiasts or any follower of Tolkien’s much loved Hobbits, will be arguing for months, if not years about which one is the true authorative version of events in the lives of Deckard, Batty and Rachael. It is feasible to imagine such conversations because it has already happened and like the universe, keeps on expanding at an exponential rate.
Yet, different versions aside, those conversations are warranted, for in the mind of any Philip K. Dick reader, in the sense of any true film lover, Blade Runner should be seen as one of the pinnacle of Science Fiction/Future Film Noir, even love stories, committed to screen.
In this, The Final Cut, that argument is impossible surely to counter. Modern film goers not versed in cinema before the advent of the new century might find it implausible to comprehend but when it was originally released in June 1982, Blade Runner was considered to be one of the finest films of all time, 33 years later nothing has changed, nothing has distorted that view with time and viewers who are drawn to visualising the final cut should relish with every passing moment the oblique, the highly cerebral and the fantastic aspect that The Final Cut has to offer.
Film appreciation is speculative at the best of times; one person’s ultimate restaurant dish is another’s greasy spoon but despite being 33 years old, Blade Runner is still a film in which the cinema was built for.
Ian D. Hall