captainsolo said:
Anybody remember trying to see all the versions back years ago? You couldn't see anything besides the Director's Cut for years. I finally tracked down the original VHS of the International cut, popped it in, and readily said: WTF? Then I saw the broadcast version. Ugh!
I've had an LD rip of the International Cut since the early 2000's, then DigitalFreakNYC came out with his brilliant little multi disc set. I remember following his thread for a long time and getting my hands on that set as soon as he released it. Waiting for that set is what prompted me to make my own version picking and choosing the bits I liked best. I never liked the DC much, save for the nifty quick cut to the credits at the end. Perfect ending for the film, IMHO. Probably one of my favorite movie endings of all time.
ChainsawAsh said:
A major theme of the film - one of the reasons I love it so much - is that the replicants, the individuals who are not human, turn out to be much more human than Deckard, the human whose job it is to hunt them down. (That's part of why I like the "I'm sorry, Sebastian" line - it humanizes Roy a bit, which is part of the point of the movie.)
This also makes the Tyrell Corp.'s slogan more relevant and chilling - "More human than human." It's true - Batty, an artificially-created being, is more human than Deckard, a human.
But all of that gets thrown out the window if Deckard's a replicant, too. It destroys one of the core themes of the film, one of the themes I latched onto so strongly.
I was actually going to post something almost exactly like when I made my last post, but looked at my watch and realized I needed to run.
That is what the film has always meant to me. The "maybe Deckard is a replicant" idea has always felt a bit like an after thought that was shoved into the film to give it a heavy handed plot twist (and to make a nod at the book). Nothing else in the film seems to connect to or support the theme of Deckard being a replicant. It has always felt like a lose string tackily dangling off an otherwise almost perfect film to me.
It was the theme of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and it worked very well in the book. But the book and the movie have very little in common beyond the setting, character names, and the basic plot outline of a bounty hunter sent to hunt down escaped rogue synthetic humans. Blade Runner kind of evolved its own philosophical questions independent of those of the book (more human than human, humans=cold, lonely, lifeless, disinterested; replicants=emotional, tight bonds, full of life and desire). I think adding in the the books philosophical questions, which were basically, "do androids dream of electric sheep?" (Deckard, a man living in a society where the type of robotic animal you own is a status symbol and longs to have one better than the one he has, is thrown for a loop when an android he is about to kill desires a painting, which among other things, causes him to begin to doubt his humanity), just muddled things and distracted from the relevancy of the "more human than human" theme.
