Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1992)
The Director
Ridley Scott
The Actors
Harrison Ford (Rick Deckard), Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty), Sean Young (Rachael), Edward James Olmos (Gaff), M. Emmett Walsh (Bryant), Daryl Hannah (Pris), William Sanderson (J.F. Sebastian), Brion James (Leon Kowalski), Joe Turkel (Dr. Eldon Tyrell), Joanna Cassidy (Zhora), James Hong (Hannibal Chew)
The Trailer
The Cause
Pollution/War
The Story
"Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase - a being virtually identical to a human - known as a Replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Offworld colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth - under penalty of death. 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." - opening text crawl.
The Rundown
Sometime in the early 1990s an unauthorized release of the work-print of Blade Runner was shown in theaters. Ridley Scott decided it was finally time to cut together the version of Blade Runner he had always intended to make, but he was deep into the making of Thelma and Louise so he made detailed notes and the task was entrusted to film preservationist Michael Arick.
Director's Cuts are a mixed bag in general, sometimes they add the crucial thing that a movie was missing, sometimes they're just longer versions of the same movie, and in rare cases like 1999's Payback starring Mel Gibson, they're an entirely different movie. Blade Runner The Director's Cut is really none of those.
Blade Runner: The Director's Cut is notable not so much for what it adds but for what it takes away. First of all, the film removes Deckard's dispassionate narration. For the most part this is just removing redundant explanations of stuff the audience can figure out on its own but it also removes explanations of unintuitive stuff like who Gaff is and what his relationship to Deckard is, what Cityspeak is, and Deckard's thoughts are on being a Blade Runner.
Speaking of Blade Runners, there is no more egregious example of doing a nonsensical thing because it's cool than calling Deckard's profession Blade Runner. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Deckard is called a Bounty Hunter because that's what he is. The title of Blade Runnner comes from a book called The Bladerunner by Alan Nourse. A bladerunner is a person who deals in black market surgical instruments, it has nothing to do with androids and Deckard's job has nothing to do with blades. The movie is literally named Blade Runner because Ridley Scott saw a thing and thought it was cool.
The other big change in the director's cut is that it removes the original "happy" ending of the theatrical cut. Now, the "happy" ending is shit for one reason and one reason only, it's composed of badly edited stock footage (allegedly b-roll from The Shining) and it's the only brightly (and poorly) lit bit in the entire movie. It's not really a happy ending, this is nothing so dramatic as the narrowly avoided "Love Conquers All" ending of Brazil. There's no reversal of the message left at the end of the first movie, Deckard and Rachael are still on the run to who knows where for who knows how long and though Deckard claims to know that Rachael will live longer than four years he's unsure of how long she will actually live. Much like the rest of the voice-over in the movie it's not horrible, just redundant.
And now I guess it's time to address the slow-motion unicorn in the room. The director's cut was the version of the movie that brought the "maybe Deckard's a replicant" theory to the forefront. In this particular cut it's left up to interpretation and I'm going to really dig into the meat of this argument in my write-up of The Final Cut so let me instead answer a question with a question. You ask: is Deckard a human or a replicant? To which I respond, who the fuck cares?
The movie doesn't really do a great job of defining whether Deckard is a human who grows sympathetic to the plight of replicants whilst murdering them as a profession or a traitor to his own people only starting to come to the realization that what he's doing is wrong and honestly whichever one it is is pretty irrelevant to the deeper themes of the movie.
Since the movie is all about this very humanly flawed character coming to realize that these organic robots he massacres on a day-to-day basis are as human as he is, does it matter if he is a human or not? What matters is that Deckard thinks he's a human, it doesn't matter whether his assumptions are true because as the protagonist of the story Deckard's perspective is the only one that actually matters.
Deckard the Replicant is a cute fan-theory (along the lines of the "it's all a dream" theory of films such as Minority Report and Total Recall) that the director of the film just happens to agree with but it's not actually important.
The problem with the Director's Cut is that it fixes very few of the film's flaws and just adds what amounts to a short Easter Egg and presents it as something that changes the film entirely. It doesn't, it's a brief scene and the movie remains virtually the same. At best the Director's Cut was a nice remastering of the film that cut out some mildly annoying studio junk but it's not a massive departure from the theatrical version.
The Shill
The Director's Cut of Blade Runner is a little easier to track down in physical media, but only on DVD. But the good news is that this cut is available on Amazon Instant as well.
Next Time on Doomsday Reels
"Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?"