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So I watched the Blade Runner workprint (this is the one that was shown to preview audiences and then later caused a sensation when it was accidentally shown at a film festival which got the ball rolling on the Directors Cut and Final Cut) and right off the bat there's an underappreciated difference that I think helped contribute to why the movie bombed so hard. It doesn't begin with the text crawl! How Blade Runner usually begins:  What the workprint has:  I've always maintained that the reason Blade Runner is so goddamn boring was because the Replicants' plight was immediately sympathetic. It's not thrilling to watch Harrison Ford hunt down and kill escaped slaves, and you just spend the whole movie waiting for him to come around. But without the background in the text crawl the motivations of the Replicants aren't immediately apparent, and I don't recall if there's anywhere else that makes it explicit that their penalty for being on Earth is to be killed outright. Suddenly the setup becomes "future detective tracks down terminators who are killing people for as yet unknown reasons" and the realization that they're just an oppressed class of people comes to the audience more gradually. So while I imagine first watching the movie without the text crawl was likely a disorienting experience (apparently attendees afterward struggled with questions like "why is the movie called Blade Runner"), the text they eventually went with killed any momentum the story had dead before it started. SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Apr 24, 2021 |
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Apr 24, 2021 21:12
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Oh, and the workprint is darker and grainier and the end has a temp score that makes the scene come off like a horror movie and I definitely recommend tracking it down.
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Apr 24, 2021 21:17
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every version of this movie sucks OP. All the replicants are assholes and deserve death for killing the short goony nerd guy
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Apr 25, 2021 03:04
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banned from Starbucks posted:All the replicants are assholes and deserve death for killing the short goony nerd guy What's wrong with that??
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Apr 25, 2021 03:48
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he just wanted to play with his toys op and possibly touch a replicant boob
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Apr 25, 2021 04:01
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banned from Starbucks posted:he just wanted to play with his toys op and possibly touch a replicant boob I guess they made Roy kill a goon to be more sympathetic to the average audience member then. The main thing that irritates me about all the extended/director/etc. versions of Blade Runner is how they add scenes that push Deckard must be a replicant. I don't mind the idea per se, but I think it works much better as a mystery unsolved (or more accurately solved how the viewer prefers) rather than straight up making it obvious he's a replicant. Helps with thinning the line between humans and replicants that way; I was pleased 2049's only answer when they touched on it was "Deckard's a person, the rest is irrelevant" which really is the important take home message to me.
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Apr 25, 2021 19:49
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It's because you've got to run the blade
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Apr 27, 2021 00:15
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MadDogMike posted:The main thing that irritates me about all the extended/director/etc. versions of Blade Runner is how they add scenes that push Deckard must be a replicant. I don't mind the idea per se, but I think it works much better as a mystery unsolved (or more accurately solved how the viewer prefers) rather than straight up making it obvious he's a replicant. Helps with thinning the line between humans and replicants that way; I was pleased 2049's only answer when they touched on it was "Deckard's a person, the rest is irrelevant" which really is the important take home message to me. I'm a "he's a human" guy myself, but you can make the argument that without the extended cuts the movie never actually raises the question in the first place (Rachel at one point asks "have you ever run that test on yourself?" but that always struck me as rhetorical). The annoying part is that the "he's a Replicant" people tend to be like "he finds an origami unicorn so OBVIOUSLY that means he's a Replicant, it's the only logical explanation." There's a DVD feature about the topic where in a series of talking head clips mostly of a polite back-and-forth of the merits of each side you get a visibly irritated Frank Darabont basically going "of course he's not a loving Replicant you idiots!"
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Apr 27, 2021 02:28
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The workprint also has a different title sequence that is way chintzier but has its own 80s charm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjOmA7SQJD8
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Apr 27, 2021 04:06
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I do appreciate that the sequel just went and threw up it's hands and said "WHO loving CARES? It doesn't change what happened and what he experience so what difference does it make?"
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Apr 27, 2021 05:00
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Rutger Hauer was never convinced that replicants were people. "Frankly, I thought Deckard was a little sick, because he ran away with a vibrator that looked like a woman."
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Apr 28, 2021 09:03
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Kinda wish I could have watched that TNG episode with the little robot cube helpers that Data declares a new life form alongside Rutger Hauer now
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Apr 29, 2021 18:38
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I have a brother that was a big Star Trek TNG fan from the beginning, and when Data eventually died he was a little offended that they gave him a funeral, because he was just a robot.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:48
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I have a brother that was a big Star Trek TNG fan from the beginning, and when Data eventually died he was a little offended that they gave him a funeral, because he was just a robot. When I'm dead just throw me in the trash! -Frank Reynolds, Lt Commander Data
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Apr 29, 2021 19:57
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Blade Runner at the Oscars! https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1386...unner-oscars%2F
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Apr 29, 2021 22:01
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If you hadn't read the book it's still implied in the movie that the Earth is wrecked and the only people still on it are the ones that couldn't get to the offworld colonies. So anyone with medical conditions or what have you get left behind. Then there's the whole hunting replicants business.
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Apr 30, 2021 09:48
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MadDogMike posted:I guess they made Roy kill a goon to be more sympathetic to the average audience member then. The first version I ever saw of the movie, back as a young'un, was the 'director's cut' that had no voiceovers or unicorn or whatever. So I, too, find all the 'he's totally a replicant!' stuff really annoying. gently caress off, Ridley. The whole point of the movie is that he, a human, is more devoid of compassion and humanity throughout the film than Roy is in his final moments, you dumb old gently caress.
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May 1, 2021 14:32
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Looking at the film from the replicants you can the film as a fairy tale masquerading as a noir tale. Four friends travle a long distance to meet with a powerful wizard to undo a curse. The behavior of Roy and the other Replicants is not unlike that children. There's a odd kind of innocence in thier action as if they are children.
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May 1, 2021 22:28
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David D. Davidson posted:Looking at the film from the replicants you can the film as a fairy tale masquerading as a noir tale. Four friends travel a long distance to meet with a powerful wizard to undo a curse. Oddly enough even their violence kind of fits that; they tend to be overdramatic when they do it - Leon probably would have killed Deckard if he hadn't toyed with him so long, there's also the way he casually drops the eyeballs on Chew when Roy's threatening him. Pris also pretty much got killed because she was flipping around and such instead of just killing Deckard straight up; her death scene even has (rather messed up) "tantrum" overtones to it. And of course Roy does his whole dramatic chase of Deckard at the end. Even with memories they're still not very emotionally mature.
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May 4, 2021 07:55
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Ridley Scott wanted the "love scene" to come off somewhat dark because as he saw it Rachel was something of an innocent, though he admits it might have taken it a little too far.
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May 8, 2021 07:49
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I finally read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I had already heard a lot about how Philiy K. Dick and Ridley Scott had some very fundamentally different views of the androids/replicants but I was still NOT prepared for Rachel betraying Deckard.
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May 8, 2021 07:55
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Blade Runner is pretty straightforward in that it doesn't matter if he's a replicant or not, because he's lost touch with his humanity. This whole question should be handled in the same way that Harrison handles questions about Star Wars plot points.SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I finally read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I had already heard a lot about how Philiy K. Dick and Ridley Scott had some very fundamentally different views of the androids/replicants but I was still NOT prepared for Rachel betraying Deckard. I think perhaps the biggest difference not gotten completely across in the film is that Earth in Androids is plainly the rear end in a top hat of the universe. Most of humanity has left Earth because if you don't, your path to survival is eating street vendor food covered in radiation dust. It's bleak and interesting because it's not about Buck Rogers or the star wars, it's about the lower class in the interstellar age. I've always found Dick's writing really cerebral, like a constant internal monologue, which is what leaves film adaptations of his stuff room to work on the business of making sense of it visually. They don't have to infer much about how the setting works and can evoke more emotion.
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May 8, 2021 13:29
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