Blade Runners: The 1982 Version Revisited

I have seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in a theater of some kind either on 70mm, 35mm, or digitally projected twenty times altogether over the past twenty-seven years, starting with its first release in 1982.

This is NOT because I am a fanatic about the film, or any film really. In fact it is rare for me to see any movie that many times. I know part of the reason is, as for most viewers, Blade Runner’s uniqueness as a movie on almost every level. But also I feel that for me it is the fact that this film, perhaps like no other, has undergone revisions by its director that impact the picture’s tone and focus and yet leave its original creative core untouched.  

While the phenomenon of a popular film, or in the case of Blade Runner also a cult film, finding an afterlife in theaters is not at all unusual, especially in the last twenty years or so when so many films from the recent and distant past have been “restored” and “preserved," what makes Blade Runner unique is that it has been released to theater goers in three separate official theatrical versions over the course of its existence.  

The first two of these versions (what we’ll call the main two versions); the original 1982 release and the 1992 re-issue entitled Blade Runner:The Director’s Cut when watched side-by-side create a paradox. 

While both versions are distinct films in the ways they portray their protagonist as well as their emphasis or deemphasis of certain ideas, differences due entirely to how the respective versions are edited into finished films, at the same time, despite these differences, I maintain that since Scott’s use of cinematography along with his painstaking art direction and a strong social commentary are so tightly a part of the 1982 original as well as the 1992 reissue that both versions possess a commonality between them that goes far deeper than any mere editing choices.

Before I am through with this discussion I fear I may end up arguing, without intending to, the merits of watching the original 1982 version, despite how much maligned it has been by critics and fans in the past twenty-eight years or so. Well so be it, then.

Many of you if not all, I am sure, are quite aware of the distinctions between these 1982 and 1992 versions of the film. But let us first look do a quick review of these specific editorial choices for both versions, so we can better understand how they weigh against each other. 

If we look first at the Director’s Cut from 1992, we the viewer are steered in the direction of believing that protagonist, Rick Deckard, the Blade Runner police detective whose job it is to hunt down and destroy dangerous android replicants who trespass onto Earth and “retire” them because of the dangers they pose, is himself likely a replicant. Given this, the audience feels a strong sense of irony as they watch this version of the film, noting that Deckard is basically hunting down and “retiring”  his own kind and doesn’t seem to know it.

The Director’s Cut puts Deckard in such a light through editing.The Director’s Cut, as we will recall, contains the crucial “Unicorn Dream” which Deckard experiences about a quarter of the way through the movie. This dream sequence, without making it definite, to a large degree forces viewers to seriously question Deckard’s true origins as they see his close-ups  juxtaposed with this unique, mythical creature, this other species. Viewers tend to ask themselves: is he a human or is he a replicant? 

Thus it is an editorial choice, adding the “Unicorn” footage at a crucial moment in the story line, in this case just after Deckard’s first intimate encounter with the replicant Rachael, herself only just discovering her true origins, that motivates the viewer to start questioning Deckard’s identity.

By contrast, anyone who has seen the original,1982 version of the film, will likely agree that it tends to push away almost entirely any such ironies or ambiguities about Deckard’s identity and his role in the story in favor of a straight-line narrative of a tough cop/good guy going after evil, homicidal androids and in the process more or less falling into a relationship with one of them.

What everyone, it seems, over the past nearly three decades has seized upon with the 1982 version is its use of a voiceover narration track in which the Deckard character (Harrison Ford) leads the audience more or less by the hand through most of the events in the movie, effectively telling the audience what they should think and how they should react.

It is this voiceover track which more than anything else, at least in terms of practical film editing, distinguishes the 1982 original release from Scott’s 1992 cut. 

And as is well known fans and critics alike and even director Scott and star Ford have, over the years, excoriated the voiceover narration tracks in the 1982 release. The bitter remarks stem from the arguments that it “dumbs” the film down for the audience and it grossly distorts what Scott originally intended with the finished film--that is to convey the ambiguity of Deckard’s true nature: human vs. replicant; and to allow the audience to more fully take in the visual and aural landscape that he created along with a host of moral ambiguities, without it all being spoon-fed to them.

Equally criticized is the “happy ending” coda effectively tacked onto the end of the picture. 

Scott has commented many times over the years that both of these elements--along with the complete deletion of the “unicorn” dream footage he shot at the time--were forced onto him by studio executives who feared the film might be confusing to audiences and as a result be a box office failure.

I am NOT here to debate what any of the executives involved in the production may have thought or wanted. I will say though, that whatever ways the editing choices made back then impact how people react to and feel toward the 1982 version, as a film producer, director, and editor myself--admittedly on a far more modest scale than Ridley Scott’s projects--I can state my observation that everyone who invests their money or their reputation into a film worries; they worry themselves sick sometimes, over whether or not the film will make sense to an audience; whether viewers will not only understand the story but will appreciate the characters’ drives, and in the end whether they will “like it,” tell others to “like it” and make the picture a financial success.

These are all basic and highly understandable motivations for any film executive who wants his or her production company to stay in business. So, while I am not seeking to be an apologist for studio bosses, their mentality does on occasion make sense and the questions they ask are sometimes valid and necessary for a major movie.

The narration track, “the happy ending” coda, and the loss of the “unicorn” footage all are part and parcel of the 1982 version. It is what we got back then so let’s look at the experience those choices give us when we watch the 1982 release.

First, with the Rick Deckard protagonist narrating the picture for the audience--as in the case of any voiceover narration--the overall effect is to illicit the audience to give that protagonist their trust at a basic level. So therefore, the question of Deckard, the good guy leading us along through the universe of the movie, is probably what he seems--and in this case, I mean human. We get Deckard’s point-of-view and it is clearly that the replicants are something other than himself.

With the narration pushing aside ambiguity about Deckard, his comments about Rachael and the other replicants and his confrontations with them (Zhora, Leon, Pris, and ultimately Roy Batty) cast him clearly in the light of a man going up against what are, at the end of the day a dangerous other species of beings.

The “happy ending” coda of the 1982 version also helps to maintain and strengthen Deckard’s position as a human for the viewer with his final voiceover lines: “Tyrell had told me Rachael was special: no termination date. I didn’t know how long we had together...who does? ” 

These words are voiced by Deckard as he and Racheal drive off into the mountains and freedom from the oppressive, noir city, and when he says them ambiguity is pushed aside. So, the viewer likely asks themselves: how can Deckard be anything else but the human we took him for at the film’s start? Sure, maybe he has decided to run off with an android but why would we think that he himself is one? Effectively the voiceovers are intended to shut down the viewer’s questioning and wrap the whole film up in a neat ribbon with no question marks.

By huge contrast, we have the 1992 Director’s Cut which totally strips out the the voiceover elements as well as the “happy ending” coda, while adding Deckard’s “unicorn dream” sequence, originally deleted in 1982, back in.

With these editorial changes, the viewer is far less sure about Deckard’’s true nature and his question to Tyrell about Rachael after she has failed the Voigt-Kampff test: “How can it not know what it is?” takes on a whole new level of possible meaning and irony in that as the film progresses and we see the Deckard/Unicorn sequence we wonder if our protagonist himself is the one who does not know what he really is.

And again without the reassuring voiceovers and the coda the viewer is forced to stand off from Deckard and make their own appraisal of him and his literal and moral place in the story with none of the narrative assuredness, albeit very clumsy, that the 1982 version offers. 

I mentioned a paradox earlier. And this is what the two differing Blade Runner versions present to us because whether the film does or does not have the voiceover tracks or the coda--and the unicorn footage notwithstanding--the main reason, I believe, that people view the film  over and over like me is not in my opinion to debate Scott’s film editing choices and their consequences on the finished movie or even whether or not Deckard is a replicant. Instead we watch it because of the lush, post-modern visual landscape which, as far as I am concerned, remains almost entirely unequaled in other films. What Ridley Scott and his cameraman Jordan Cronenweth did with art direction, texture, and lighting on that picture, along with Douglas Trumbull’s incredible effects work and Vangelis’ near subliminal score, are what truly bring people back to Blade Runner (all versions aside) again and again; I have never doubted this.

For Scott, creating an intense visual pastiche was the goal in Blade Runner, with conventional plotlines and clear story resolutions all very, very distant and secondary goals. That complex visual and aural environment that he created so painstakingly is the film, totally regardless of what version you watch.

I could stop here and end with just saying that I obviously like and admire both the 1982 original release as well as Scott’s subsequent director edition.

I could even add that for me the voiceovers only serve to pull me more into this stunning and mysterious world of Los Angeles in 2019; they have certainly never pushed me out of it--with the one unforgivable exception of Deckard’s VO right after Batty’s eloquent “tears in the rain” death speech; without question a terrible creative choice even for the most narrow-minded of studio executives in that the beauty of the words that Rutger Hauer utters make Roy Batty’s last moments on screen some of the most moving and engaging in movie history and the scene in no way deserves to be undercut.

Yet, back on the positive side, the voiceover tracks perform another function, one that I have not touched on yet and I feel many fans and critics neglect to remember, let alone appreciate. 

Recall that in the opening prologue of the film (any version) the replicants are identified as “slave labor” and it is made clear that the replicants who flee their involuntary servitude are subject to recapture or “retirement.” Also, regardless of version, both Roy Batty and Leon comment on “what it is to be a slave” and how it means living “in fear.”

It struck me when I first saw Blade Runner in 1982 that right from the start the movie is partly a commentary on black slavery and America’s slave past. 

It is this idea that is pushed far more in the 1982 version owing to Deckard’s voiceover tracks, specifically the one during the scene when he meets with Chief Bryant; here Deckard comments to the  viewer about the kind of man Bryant is: “Skin jobs. That’s what Bryant called replicants. In history books he was the kind of cop that used to call black men niggers.”

It is a powerful and disturbing commentary on the character of Bryant whose hatred of the replicants is demonstrated unceasingly throughout all versions of the film but only in the 1982 version is it given this kind of racist connotation with Deckard’s voiceover.

The viewer is forced to acknowledge more fully Bryant’s racial vitriol as well as to acknowledge how people of color have been treated in this country in distant and recent pasts with the replicants effectively standing in for disenfranchised African-Americans and arguably embodying the specter of slavery and the struggle for human and civil rights throughout the ages. 

Put another way, when fans and critics call the 1982 voiceovers extraneous or even harmful to the artistic quality of the film, I would contend that, in this context at least, they give the movie a level of social relevance that otherwise gets greatly diminished in the subsequent director’s cut.

On a different and less provocative note, I also will argue at least one merit, albeit crucial I think, for the much maligned “happy ending” coda of the 1982 original; not one that lies in any desire of mine for a happy ending because in the noir-film universe that Blade Runner inhabits there is typically no such thing. Instead the coda’s significance rests in the incredible visual contrast that it sets up when we see the daylight, ariel sequence at the film’s end after nearly a two hour immersion in the deep-dark, noir of Scott’s Los Angeles. Given that its nightstreets/nightscapes are so gripping and unparalleled and are at the core of Blade Runner then those elements are only underscored and thus made all the more powerful by having this daytime, nature sequence put in at the closing. 

Yes, in one sense it is contrived but nevertheless in most cases film thrives on juxtaposing contrasting visual elements and styles and to my mind the 1982 ending has this effect however clumsy the studio’s original intend may have been in wanting it there; and in that sense there is nothing truly destructive or distorting about it, at least on a cinematic level. 

Although I will wholeheartedly concede that from a narrative perspective the coda is both of these things and in the end should not have been put there inasmuch as Blade Runner  is, as I said, set in a moral universe with little if any tolerance for such simple and even insulting narrative resolutions.

I would also argue with fans’ and critics’ of the film alike that while some viewers may accept Deckard’s voiceovers as the final word on his origins (i.e., unquestionably human), I feel that many truly discerning viewers may, even watching the 1982 version with its voiceovers, still contemplate whether Deckard is an android. 

I say this because of a visual trope that Scott uses (and that exists in all versions of the movie): We will remember that Tyrell explains to Deckard at one point that the replicants are implanted with memories, taken from the lives of actual human beings. This implanting of experiences, we learn, is intended to compensate the replicants for their own lack of a real personal, emotional history inasmuch as their lifespans are so short.

In Blade Runner these faux-memories are signified by the replicants’ obsession throughout the movie with personal photographs. In one scene, Rachael shows Deckard a series of family photos which we learn are in fact taken from the life of Tyrell’s niece yet she has been led to believe that they are in fact her memories depicting scenes from her life and is shattered to discover the truth. 

Likewise, Leon is obsessed with getting his photos back even if it means returning to his hotel room and risking retirement by Deckard and in fact it is one of these photos that leads to Leon’s eventual retirement given the personal clues it contains.

And most importantly, Deckard himself is shown to have a substantial collection of antique family portraits arranged on his piano so as to suggest to the viewer that he is deeply connected with these images and by extension, these people--or he at least believes that he is.

Therefore, even with the presence of the voiceover tracks, this narrative motif of personal photographs being a key element in the replicants’ lives could lead even the most cynical viewer, including those who have resigned themselves to the less ambiguous path laid out by the  voiceovers, to at least entertain the notion that Deckard might be a replicant.

Essentially, I have argued that both the 1982 version and the Director’s Cut (1992) despite their differences, each stand on their own although from very different perspectives. 

In the final analysis, perhaps anyone who calls themselves a fan of the “film” Blade Runner should see the 1982 release, at least once. See it and then you can judge for yourself. All versions including the ‘82 one are on a single Blu-Ray Edition presently.

As a quick aside, I did not touch on the 2007 Final Cut because the editorial changes are very minute, certainly when compared with the weight of those in the first two versions. 

Yet this is not to say that a masterpiece cannot be improved upon, even if in very small ways and Scott has, with these admittedly slight additions, I think added a few nice touches to the film’s richness and an examination of them might make an interesting discussion for another post. 

In the end, for me, there is no right or wrong version of Blade Runner. A good vintage is a good vintage.

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