Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Blade Runner
Directed by Ridley Scott
A-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Dec. 7

In 1992 Ridley Scott's dystopian box office bomb Blade Runner became one of the first films to be theatrically rereleased in a "director's cut"--the oft-questionabletechnique that either salvages studio-manhandled work (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Heaven's Gate, this) or simply allows another chance for studios to milk some money (too many to mention).

Ironically, Scott, busy at the time with Thelma & Louise, was only partly involved in the director's cutting, and has expressed discomfort with the cut that earned it its rep. Hence, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, an assembly that reveals (or rather, needlessly reconfirms) Scott as a hopelessly fussy OCD type who'll never be content with anything.

Scott mocked the 2003 "director's cut" of Alien, which added only a single superfluous scene. But most of the heavy lifting with Blade Runner was done in '92: the deletion of that awful, narcotic narration; the addition of a suggestive unicorn dream; the excision of the disingenuous happy ending. The Final Cut, meanwhile, merely redoes some special effects, trims down some of the 2001-style oohing and ahhing and reinstates the gore from the original video version (chiefly Joe Turkel's head-crush).

They're all decent face-lifts (except for the loss of Rutger Hauer's classic, "I want more life, fucker"--now a lame "I want more life, father"), but the world wouldn't be terribly different had they never happened.

Not that there's anything wrong with having Blade Runner back on a big screen. You won't realize anything you haven't realized before: It's an ingenious recontextualization of film noir with eerily prophetic mentions of globalization, global warming and genetic engineering. Yet the film's lethargic rhythms and elaborate cinematography are qualities best enjoyed projected on celluloid and away from diversions.

Oddly, the slightly tighter cut (shaving off three whole minutes) serves only to draw our attention to scribe Hampton Fancher's sometimes clumsy, almost too-economical plot mechanics. Major characters (Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Sean Young) disappear for 30, even 45, minutes at a time, then reappear with little motivation, while Hauer just barely makes his character's abrupt change of heart (and subsequent dove symbolism, which would embarrass even Frank Darabont) credible by the sheer force of his gloriously hammy acting.

But seeing it again does reconfirm its multitude pluses, among them a reminder of a time when Harrison Ford knew how to be dry without tumbling into somnambulism. Dig the nasal voice he adopts during the Joanna Cassidy scene--a sly nod to the bookstore scene from The Big Sleep, one of Blade Runner's biggest influences.

Whomp, shlick, splat. That's the sound of a polar bear smacking another polar bear's jaw off. Crumpa crumpa crumpa. That's the sound a polar bear running full tilt across a frozen Northern wasteland with a small girl clinging to its back.

That's about as violent and racy as The Golden Compass gets. Which makes you wonder about the sanity of the Christians who've threatened to picket its opening. After all, these are folks who subscribe to a religion based on human sacrifice and whose God shamelessly extols the virtues of child rape and genocide.

The fuss, of course, is because Compass is the film adaptation of the first book of Philip Pullman's children's triology His Dark Materials. And Materials is not only better than the combined works of Tolkien, C.S Lewis and J.K. Rowling, it's also massively more enlightened.

While fizzing with the fantastic, Materials is a profoundly anti-superstitious work. The baddies are unmistakably the priests, mullahs and rabbis of organized religion, and this is what has upset some Christians. You can see their point.

But sane parents of a religious disposition should fear not. Pullman's warm, thoughtful, socialistic atheism is the backdrop of a story where the baddies just happen to be sexually twisted and power-crazed bigots--just like in The Adventures of Robin Hood and every other adventure movie that's worth a damn ever made.

Purists will be annoyed by the screenplay's shortcuts. Critics will knock the uneven pacing. But everyone else is sure to be thrilled by the chases, excited by the battles, charmed by Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra (and her shapeshifting demon--CGI has never been so cute).

Bottom line: This movie knocks all the Potters into a cocked wizard's hat. And then eats it.

Not Reviewed