BLADE RUNNER: UHD Blu-ray (Warner Bros./Alan Ladd Co. 1982) Warner Home Video

The postmodern sci-fi epic that redefined its generation and beyond, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) remains an influential and apocalyptic vision of the not so very distant future; one dominated by the Asian markets of a policed state, perpetually dark, dank and horrendously over-populated.  This neon-lit dystopia with its sub-tropical climate has become such a cultural touchstone in American movies today it is easy to forget Blade Runner was begun, conceived, photographed and edited in abject chaos; costing the Alan Ladd Company a mint and putting a strain on its coffers. That it under-performed at the box office amidst the fun and ‘feel good’ film fare of the whack-tac-u-lar eighties is perhaps regrettable but fathomable. For all its exceptional art house style, Blade Runner is an imperfect movie at best, not a popcorn crowd pleaser, but philosophically probing at a time when audiences were plugging into the warm and fuzzy of E.T.; and this, despite Scott’s clear-eyed vision and the movie’s own ever-widening cult status, yet destined never to become the mainstream forerunner to all this mid-grade depressingly futuristic plunk since saturated the market and ravenously embraced as ‘the new norm’ in picture-making today. Blade Runner is better than that – thank you very much! But Blade Runner was decidedly ahead of its time; its plot, too sinister; its characters, more transient and replicant-esque – all of it suffering from a sort of oppressive ennui, threatening to kill off promise for the future of the human race. Despite our increasing verve to thrill at our self-destruction, in our hearts we remain suckers for the proverbial ‘happy ending’ – or, at least, the glimmer of one. Blade Runner received such an ending in 1982 – perplexing film goers and picked apart by the critics as unlike the 116 minutes gone before it.  Even as contemporary society has caught up to Blade Runner’s dour outlook, and perhaps even more so because of it, today Blade Runner plays with a more prescient set of criteria for that awkwardly reconstituted optimism – brutalized and fractured – though nevertheless, feebly left intact. 

Blade Runner is very loosely based on Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' - a property initially brought to the attention of studio executives by struggling screen writer, Hampton Fancher; who showed general disinterest in the book, but thought it 'commercial' enough as a typical cops and robbers 'chase' movie, gussied up with noir trappings and a heavy smatter of futurism. The mind-boggling SFX yet to infiltrate Blade Runner were hardly of value to Fancher, whose initial drafts showed little of the big booming visual spectacle Blade Runner eventually became. Indeed, Fancher had conceived Blade Runner as an intimate low-budget movie, taking place mostly in claustrophobic rooms. It is perhaps prudent to recall Fancher wrote Blade Runner from hunger after nearly a decade's dry spell of quiet desperation and failure to establish himself as a writer in Hollywood on someone else’s coin. At times, Fancher's thirst for commercial success is woefully transparent; in tandem tempered and upset by the hiring of Ridley Scott to direct. Along with newly hired screenwriter, David Peoples, Scott began to re-envision Fancher’s ‘little movie’ as a sci-fi epic to challenge and perhaps even eclipse the meteoric box office returns gleaned from George Lucas' Star Wars. At least, this was the promise…and the dream. It would not be. For as pre-production on the titanic sets began at the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, it became immediately apparent the $7 million dollar budget afforded Blade Runner was not enough to complete the movie as planned; nor would another $7 million from private investors satisfy Blade Runner's cost overruns. Even before a single strip of film was exposed, the project had already burned through $2 million.

To some extent, Blade Runner remains a fabulous work of post-modern art. There are visuals within it that hold up spectacularly and put to shame most any sci-fi picture gone before it, and a good many since to have followed in its footsteps; Scott's high and wide establishing shots, attesting to a level of scope in production design not seen on the screen since the mid-sixties road show and pictures helmed by the all-time ‘master builder’, John De Cuir. The enduring problem with Blade Runner as pure entertainment is that virtually none of its players manages to strike the resonant chord in raw humanity to make us sincerely care one way or the other about what happens to them. Sean Young's Rachel is a frozen asset, deliberately so, tricked out in her Joan Crawford-esque hairdo and shoulder pads; a sexpot relic from another time and place. And while she is, of course, a replicant, isn’t the trick of that robotic species meant to be their ability to so convincingly mimic real humans to faultless perfection? Even Darryl Hannah’s nearly mute Pris shows more emotion than Young. Harrison Ford's butch bounty hunter, Rick Deckard (a part Fancher originally wished to go to noir legend, Robert Mitchum and for a time almost went to Dustin Hoffman) is soulless and simpering; too low key for heroics and too bored with his job to apply anything more or better than half-ass competency in his pursuit of the replicant escapees from their off-world colony. I admire Ford as an actor. But he is not particularly well-served by this characterization. It does not allow for those atypical ‘Han Solo-ish’ moments of male machismo Ford is so good at; his downplaying as low sustained mumbles mostly, make him appear even less secure in the part than one might anticipate. The best of the lot remains Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty; a murderous brute, intent on destroying his creator: reptilian puppet master, Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel). Hauer gives a mesmerizing performance as the self-possessed A.I., acutely aware of his battery life is set to expire and hellishly intent on selectively destroying the human brain trust responsible for his creation. The other great bit of casting is Joanna Cassidy as Zhora; the Amazonian-esque replicant, far too easily dispatched by Deckard after a harrowing fight/chase sequence through the smoky neon lit ‘red light’ district in the movie. Cassidy is both erotically charged yet overtly masculine – a very strange combination, particularly for women in films of the eighties.

Ridley Scott’s sensitivity to visual mood augmenting character development is evident in virtually every shot of Blade Runner. Usually, in film terms, such moments are referred to as ‘the money shot’; used sparingly, where virtually every dollar spent is self-evidently up there on the screen for public consumption. But the clairvoyance of Scott’s vision for the movie in totem ensured Blade Runner would have no ‘money shots’ as virtually every shot in the movie is afforded such visual textures in Scott’s keen camera eye to be rightfully considered ‘the money shots’. Case in point: Deckard’s ‘cute meet’ with Rachel inside Tyrell’s cavernous office. Scott arrived on set early and ready to shoot it, only to discover construction workers had inverted the eight massive columns in Lawrence G. Paull’s production design. Displeased and ordering the set immediately rebuilt while they waited, art director, David L. Snyder was also informed by his director that the floor tiles in the set were not sufficiently polished to give off an oppressive glare: also, of Scott’s desire to add reflections of rippling water bouncing off the floor, ceiling and walls. Asked to explain the source of these watery effects, Scott merely shrugged his shoulders.  Evidently, the effect was more important to him than explaining it away.

Ridley Scott faced biases on the set – both his own (regarding American crews as lesser than their foreign counterparts) and from the crew, somehow refusing to either see, or even more importantly, buy into his vision for the finished film. Unaccustomed to shooting multiple takes, Harrison Ford was decidedly unhappy with Scott’s work ethic. By his own admission, Scott generally came to work harboring a slight chip on his shoulders, determined at whatever the cost to achieve his ideas on celluloid. “That’s what you’re paying me for!” Scott bristled when financiers at the Ladd Co. began to complain about the movie’s mounting expenditures, “The job of a director is not to consult a half dozen people but to get in there and direct – do the job.” Scott’s myopic view of his ascribed duties may not have set well with either cast or crew, but it undeniably gave Blade Runner its singular modus operandi as, if nothing else, a visually arresting science fiction movie. Shooting in the Bradbury Building (as the home of William Sanderson’s humanoid inventor, J.F. Sebastian) Scott and his crew took the immaculate ironworks to task, transforming its long and stately corridors into decrepit and shadowy halls by sprinkling the floors with crushed cork and simulating a leaky roof and rainwater from overhead showers. Shooting from 6 pm to 6 am, the use of cork proved fortuitous as the water quickly absorbed into it; thus cutting down on the crew’s nightly cleanup of this fully functional office complex before the crack of dawn, just as its regular workers began arriving for their shift.

Blade Runner’s overall look is owed as much to cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth as it is to Scott’s genius. Cronenweth began work on the project in very ill-health that progressively worsened as shooting got underway. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s somewhere along the way, Cronenweth would complete Blade Runner confined to a wheelchair; Scott’s loyalty to the man assuring he would be afforded every comfort without studio intervention to have him replaced for insurance purposes. At the crux of Dick's novel is a contemplation of what it means to be human. This message is largely absent from the movie; replaced by the constant 'is she or isn't she?' motif as Decker unmasks Rachel as a replicant; then, strangely refuses to accept the truth as much as she does, delving into the promise of a thoroughly flawed dead-end sexual détente with these manufactured goods. Could it be? Is Deckard a replicant too?  The movie is far more about asking than answering these questions. Open-ending finales are fine - to a point. But Blade Runner leaves too much unfinished before its final fade out to satisfy even its homage to those stylish neo-noir trappings.

Blade Runner opens in Los Angeles, circa 2019; a bleak, decaying and congested landscape of sequoia-high skyscrapers; their dimly lit windows barely penetrating the perpetually dense fog lingering in the air. Ex-police officer, Rick Deckard is detained by Officer Gaff (Edward James Almos) and briefly reacquainted with his former superior, Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh). Deckard’s job is to ‘retire’ (kill) bioengineered Nexus-6 models from the Tyrell Corporation’s replicant franchise since their four-year lifespan has caused their artificial intelligence to begin thinking for itself and defy its human handlers. Deckard observes a video of another blade runner, Holden (Morgan Paull) administering the tried and true Voight-Kampff test designed to separate the replicants from the humans based on their emotional response to scripted questions. The test subject, Leon Kowalski (Brion James) assassinates Holden after he cannot succinctly answer a simple query about his own mother; replicant programming, deliberately omitting such back story and thus revealing they were not ‘born’ but rather ‘created’ to serve. Deckard is ordered to retire Leon and three of his escapee cohorts: Roy Batty, Zhora, and Pris. Initially turning down this assignment, Bryant’s veiled threats are enough to get Deckard to reconsider and accept the job.

Beginning his investigation at the Tyrell Corporation, Deckard is startled when Eldon Tyrell’s suggestion he ‘test’ the Voight-Kampff on his assistant, Rachael, reveals she is an experimental and near perfect prototype of the next generation in replicant engineering. Expertly programmed with an entirely childhood and family history stored in her memory banks, Rachel has no idea she is not human. Meanwhile, Roy and Leon investigate a replicant eye-manufacturer, Hannibal Chew (James Hong) who reveals to them the whereabouts of J. F. Sebastian, a genius geneticist, socially inept and thus reclusive. Chew is dispatched by Roy. Almost at this same moment, Rachel pays an unexpected visit to Deckard’s seedy apartment to prove her humanity by showing him a portrait of her mother. Reluctantly, but very cruelly, Deckard explains the process by which such memories have been implants from Tyrell's own niece into her artificial brain. While Roy continues to struggle in locating Sebastian, Pris stumbles upon the man and quietly preys upon his social anxieties to gain his trust. Searching Leon’s hotel room, Deckard discovers a photo of Zhora, a stripper who performs with a synthetic snake. Deckard confronts Zhora in her dressing room at the strip club and is mercilessly pummeled by her super strength before he manages to shoot her dead.  

Now, Bryant orders Deckard to also retire Rachael, who has since vanished from the Tyrell Corporation. Despite his misgivings, as some oddly empathetic attachment seems to have formed between Deckard and Rachel since their initial ‘cute meet’, he nevertheless pursues her through the crowded streets; surprised in a back alley by Leon. Leon gains the upper hand momentarily and threatens to put Deckard’s lights out for good. At the last possible moment, Rachel comes to his rescue, killing Leon with his discarded pistol. Afterwards, Deckard promises not to hunt Rachel. However, as she abruptly tries to leave, he physically restrains her, forcing an awkward and very frantic kiss. Meanwhile, back at Sebastian’s apartment, Roy informs Pris the other replicants have been killed. Sebastian is sympathetic to Roy. After all, the technology that made Roy came from Sebastian’s fertile imagination. Sebastian informs Roy of the ‘Methuselah Syndrome’; a deliberately engineered ‘fail safe’ to put a period to Roy’s programming. As time is of the essence, Roy convinces Sebastian to help him gain access to Tyrell’s secure penthouse. Confronting his maker at dinner, Roy demands ‘more life’ from Tyrell, who coolly explains it is impossible. Roy confides his ‘questionable past’ to elicit Tyrell’s sympathy. He then quietly kisses and murders Tyrell by pressing the creator’s eyes through the back of his head. Fearing for his life, Sebastian makes a valiant attempt to escape by the elevator. Although never witnessed, Bryant’s voice over the police transmitter suggests Roy has murdered Sebastian too.

Entering Sebastian's apartment, Deckard is brutally ambushed by the acrobatic and contorting Pris. With some difficulty he manages to destroy Pris just as Roy is returning to their base of operations. As Roy slowly begins to die of the Methuselah Syndrome’ he ruthlessly pursues Deckard through the bowels of the building. Eventually, the pair end up on the roof; rain soaked and slippery. Deckard’s attempt to leap to an adjacent rooftop leaves him dangling precariously between the two buildings. Making the super human leap with ease, Roy hoists Deckard to safety, breaking several of his fingers in the process. Nevertheless, Deckard is spared from certain death. As Roy expires he delivers a monologue about how his memories will be “lost in time, like tears in the rain.”  Returning to his apartment, Deckard discovers Rachel fast asleep in his bed. He takes notice of a small tin-foil origami unicorn on the floor, encouraging Rachael to quickly and quietly accompany him from the apartment block; their own future uncertain.

Blade Runner had an arduous journey from page to screen, never more strongly felt than during the eleventh hour of its production as Ridley Scott and his cohorts received their discharge papers from financial backer, Jerry Perenchio, citing a breach of contract for having gone more than ten percent over their initially agreed upon budget. Smoothing out the wounded egos inflicted by this decision, Scott was allowed to ‘complete’ the movie, only under the most stringent conditions. The picture ran long. It was cut, and not always with Scott’s approval. Scott’s expectations for Blade Runner to become another megahit on par with Alien (1979) – his sci-fi blockbuster for Fox, were crushed when opening weekend tallies in the U.S. barely reached $89,150.00. Indeed, critical response to the film was mixed at best to downright scathing and absurd. Good, bad or indifferent, this bad word of mouth began to spread. Had Ridley Scott laid an artistic egg? The public concurred and stayed away…then. Blade Runner had cost the Ladd Co. $28,000,000. It would barely recoup $32,656,328 upon its initial theatrical release; heavily edited by the studio in their frantic zeal to ‘find the story’: inserting a narrative voice over and removing Scott’s dream sequence, depicting a unicorn racing through a spookily lit forest.

In hindsight, Blade Runner is far more than a technically robust visual SFX masterpiece. Nevertheless, we pause here a moment to pay our respects to those high-performing optical composites; a genuine testament to the awe-inspiring discipline and collaborative efforts of Ron Gress and his highly specialized team of experimentalists. The multiple exposures required to create Blade Runner’s infinite universes and netherworld often resulted in shredded 70mm film in the camera or an awkward misalignment of the various exposures, rendering the composite utterly useless for further consideration. The joke on the set was “if it doesn’t work, crop it, flop it or drop it…if all else fails, just add a lens flair.”  But the tools with which Blade Runner’s groundbreaking visuals were ultimately created are decidedly primitive by today’s digital standards. All the more impressive then, because upon renewed reflection they continue hold up spectacularly well and, on the whole, are a document from another time and place in visual effects unlikely to ever be attempted – much less achieved with such mind-boggling precision.  

Over the decades, several alternative versions of Blade Runner have emerged; last minute studio meddling in 1982 depriving audiences then of actually experiencing Ridley Scott’s definitive vision for themselves. In 1992, Warner Bros. agreed to a director’s cut, recalling Scott to perform the necessary tweaks.  Flash forward to 2007 and the studio’s re-release of ‘The Final Cut’: 25th Anniversary digitally remastered version. Together, there have been no less than five different cuts of Blade Runner competing for the public’s attention: from the original theatrical, the international, to the much sought-after (and seldom seen) ‘work print’ and the aforementioned director’s cut.  For this new UHD Blu-ray some 977 cans of original film negative have been scanned at 4K resolution (with the 65mm SFX shots recombined at 8K). The one unforgiveable sin in Warner’s UHD release is, in fact, the absence of all the other versions in UHD already included on Warner’s much lauded 5 disc SE Blu-ray from 2011. I use the word ‘sin’ herein because WB could have, and should have, made these varying editions available, much the same as Sony Picture’s 4K UHD reissue of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), offering all three incarnations of that movie in a comprehensive UHD edition.  

That’s the bad news here. The very great news is Blade Runner in ultra hi-def is sure to amaze. This disc was produced by restoration expert Charles de Lauzirika, working in tandem with Ridley Scott and WB to re-re-reassemble Scott’s definitive edition – presumably, for the last time.  Now running 117 minutes, as did the original theatrical cut, many minute changes have been made throughout to perfect this presentation beyond anything audiences have ever dared hope for before. Warner has spent its money wisely on a painstaking frame-by-frame digital clean-up. The image has also been color-timed per Scott’s observations and its soundtrack remastered in lossless DTS 7.1 for added kick.  Additional editing has been applied. The original ‘happy ending’ and Deckard’s narration are gone; the unicorn dream sequence slightly extended, and elements from the work print and international versions reinstated for the very first time; chiefly, to augment and add more atmospheric street scenes with beefed up violence. With Scott’s complicity, digital tinkering has also been applied to perfect SFX, as in removing the wires suspending the Spinner, smoothing out obvious matte lines and restoring degraded detail lost in the original composite printing process; also, to restore errors in continuity that were otherwise impossible to redo in 1982 without completely reshooting certain scenes all over again.

We must also address the elephant in the room: Scott’s daring decision to reshoot Zhora’s death. In 1982, actress Joanna Cassidy was denied permission to perform her own stunt work. Alas, in our present razor-sharp digital world the stunt double is woefully transparent to the naked eye. So Cassidy was rehired to recreate the stunt woman’s movements, down to the very turn of her head and body angles. Hence, when Zhora crashes through the plate glass windows now, it really is Cassidy playing the part. But is the sequence better? Personally, I am a purist on such things, regarding all movies as imperfect creations that inevitably illustrate their shortcomings to us. While I cannot deny the newly inserted sequence has been expertly played, relayed and neatly fitted into the existing footage with an uncanny seamlessness, I still have not decided for myself if I prefer it to the original version. It most definitely works. But this is not the Blade Runner audiences saw in 1982.

Blade Runner was shot on 35mm incorporating anamorphic lenses for its 2.39:1 theatrical aperture. In 2007, this negative was scanned at 4K and given HDR color grading. Herein, the results are on full view for the very first time. Prepare to be dazzled. Because Blade Runner looks phenomenal; boasting realistic, fully-saturated colors, exquisitely inky black levels, and fine details in skin, fabric, hair, etc. that will have you salivating. Grain is bang on beautiful. On my 75 inch flat screen it is picture perfect. However, in projection, it looked positively photochemical. I had to keep reminding myself I was looking at a disc and not a reel of actual celluloid. The spectrum of colors is as startling, so subtly nuanced and captivating, even under extremely low light conditions.  Warner affords us two audio options: a new Dolby Atmos 7.1, backward compatible with its Dolby TrueHD. Subtleties between the two are negligible at best; the Atmos ever so slightly more directionalized and spatially aggressive. Extras are all ported over from the aforementioned 5 disc Blu-ray release, including three audio commentaries: one with Ridley Scott, another with Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, along with producer Michael Deeley and production executive, Katherine Haber, and, the third catering to futurist, Syd Mead, production designer, Lawrence G. Paull, art director David L. Snyder, and special effects supervisors Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich and David Dryer. Warner has mercifully included the other cuts of Blade Runner on standard Blu-ray and the same tired old DVD of Charles de Lauzirika’s 3 hr. ‘making of’: Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner. MIA this time around is the Enhancement Archives and Work print BD’s. Given this is the 40^th Anniversary and the first UHD release of Blade Runner, I would have expected a more comprehensive offering, at the very least to include all the 2007 extras and a Blu-ray of Dangerous Days – shot in full HD but never released as such. For shame! Still, I find it difficult to poo-poo the efforts herein. The ‘final cut’ is a masterpiece of UHD engineering and a must-have for Blade Runner completionists despite its ‘incomplete’ packaging of bonus content. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

3.5