Blade Runner: Final Cut (4K UHD/BD)

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968) ...is a cultish favorite Philip K. Dick novel which young Sci-Fi aficionado's such as I went scrambling to unearth after we were mesmerized by his classic masterpiece The Man In The High Castle, the novel which brought him legions of fans. Philip was an unusual writer with an ability to write both in a very literary style and yet come across in a very contemporary ease. He was also a unique thinker in science fiction stories, being able to plow new troughs instead of retreading old worn out paths like most pulp novelists of the time were doing. This is still a fact today and yet amazingly enough, new readers of Dick's stories will find fresh ideas that were written in the 60's. The movie The Adjustment Bureau is a fine example of an old science fiction tale (The Adjustment Team) by Dick which is novel and intriguing in the 21st Century. This is probably a main reason his works are now coming to film and TV in abundance (Next, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Screamers, The Adjustment Bureau, and now on Amazon TV, The Man In The High Castle). In 1981, Ridley Scott was making a new epic based on a relatively unknown (by public standards in 1981) sci-fi authors story!So BLADE RUNNER had audience appeal as a spectacle film to the some audience theater goers, but to geeky Sci-Fi fans and not-so-geeky movie fans in general, it developed a near cult status over a period of just a decade following its theatrical release. It was not that successful on initial release because Indiana Jones now looked like a depressed Philip Marlowe and the Film Noir narration was seriously lacking even though the dystopian color affected a Film Noir feeling. The cinematic style was a huge leap far and above the actual plot and script, so you had a gorgeous film with rather weak main character delivery. If you are new to Blade Runner you may want to skip the Theatrical Version of the movie right away and save it for later viewing. The film went through several incarnations thanks to some interesting theaters that began showing "Road Show" prints of the film a decade after its initial run, these somewhat rare vault copies energized new interest in the film and what we got resulted in a 1992 "Directors Cut" without the tough guy voice over and without the "happy ending" (it in fact more closely resembles the original Dick story). Also included in this set is a 1982 "International" version which played mainly in Europe and had extended scenes to the Theatrical version.The main draw here is 25th Anniversary "Final Cut" assembled by Ridley Scott and which is so superior in so many ways to any other version that it makes Blade Runner into a wholly new and absolutely perfect film. Now Harrison Ford seems to fit better and more interesting than before (or maybe it just is a matter of age and the era in which we live, post-911).There are featurettes in abundance on the 4th disc (The Enhancement Archive), if you are a Sci-Fi geek somewhere on a par with Sheldon Cooper, this will be your pee-in-your-pants bonus disc, but even if you are not, Dek-A-Rep and the two about the novel and the author are very interesting to watch and highly recommended.The Final Cut took over 10 years to complete by Ridley Scott and one can see how painstakingly meticulous he paid attention to detail, especially if you have the gumption to watch it back to back against the Theatrical version.Without spoilers, when watching this film, you will find subtly a treatise on what it means to be human and what it means to have a personal identity, in a rough way it ponders (not nearly as well as) the same questions brought up in Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick's classic AI, Artificial Intelligence.Blade Runner had to work really hard to become a "classic", but when one considers the director and his many masterpieces delivered over the years (still going strong by finishing up the Alien series with finality and about to embark on making Justin Cronin's PASSAGE trilogy into three films), one has to give a big nod to this as a real work of cinematic art and Ridley Scott is truly one of the best directors of modern times.I purchased this over 7 years ago and have managed to watch everything on the four discs at least once, and the Final Cut about once a year, the other versions at least twice each in that time, so entertainment value versus price is premium!

This set is really a must for any fan of Ridley Scott's iconic dystopian future movie, Blade Runner. The movie made in 1982 and set in 2019 involves a group of fugitive androids called Replicants, which have escaped from a space colony where they are forced to work. A cop named Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) is tasked with hunting down and "retiring" the fugitive replicants. The rest of the main cast includes Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos, and Joanna Cassidy. Chances are most people reading this know what the movie is about and whether they like it or not. For those who do not, if you are familiar with Ridley Scott's other sci-fi movies, it very much has a similar feel, with a very dark and moody tone, but does not try to copy a movie like Alien or some of his other works. It can be a bit slow in pacing in parts of the movie, but even the final director's cut comes in under two hours, so it is not overly long. The set includes all the prior editions of the movie (on disc 3), including the 1982 theatrical edition, the 1982 international theatrical edition, and the 1992 director's cut. Each cut of the film has a similar run time, just under two hours, and the 1982 editions are nearly identical. The 1992 cut does make substantial changes to the movie, some of which are carried over into the new final cut which is on the first disc.Really, where the set shines, is the bonus features. On the first disc, there are three separate commentary tracks on the final cut of the film, one by Ridley Scott one by the executive producer and some of the writers, and the third by the production designers and effects supervisors. Each of the commentary tracks provides great insight into the making of the movie. The second disc includes a three-and-a-half-hour-long making-of documentary that combines new and archival footage and includes a ton of interviews with cast and crew members. There are also some trailers and promos for other movies on the second disc. The third disc, as I mentioned, has all of the prior versions of the movie, and disc four includes a ton of featurettes including a comparison of the movie to the novel, features on the graphic design, the costumes, deleted and alternate scenes, and a lot more (including original promotional material from 1982). On the fifth disc, there is a workprint version of the movie that was the pre-release/test screening version of the film. It has an introduction by Ridley Scott and a commentary track by a film historian. Then there is a half-hour-long feature called All Our Variant Futures that details the processes to create the final cut of the movie.Overall, the movie is a classic sci-fi film. It is one that does not have as wide a fan base as say Star Wars, or even the Aliens franchise, but even being more in the cult-classic category, it still holds up well after forty years. This release has every possible cut of the movie, so if you prefer the theatrical release above all others you can watch that one exclusively, or you can watch them all compare the versions. It will definitely take days to watch every version of the movie (which you may get sick of after a while) and all the bonus features, but if you are a fan of the movie, this set has everything you could possibly want, especially if you love watching bonus material.

Even though I had to send this disc back to playback glitches (a problem I've had with quite a few 4K discs), when it did play the quality of the transfer and image quality was just stunning. Amazing for a film this old. Such fine detail and sharpness, with accurate colors that just popped. Even better than Blade Runner 2049 in picture quality (though not in story or acting)