Blade Runner [Director's Cut]

Rating:
Summary: DVD note 2 sided!
Review: Just wanted to point out to people that this DVD is printed on both sides of the disc. One side has the fullscreen presentation(aka "formatted to fit your television") and the other side has the widescreen (aka "letterbox") presentation.

I mention this because it took me a day to find this out, a day which I grumped around the house about the lack of a "letterbox" presentation! :-)

Rating:
Summary: Truly profound symbolism
Review: What an impressive movie! However, it requires knowledge to understand it, otherwise a lot of it won't make much sense. The unicorn, for example, is a symbol of purity, humanness and virginity. And the emotionally dead Deckard dreams of a unicorn when Rachel visits his apartment. Then there is the nail through the palm (that doesn't need explaining, does it?) The white dove that Batty holds in his hand is a symbol of the Holy Spirit--artificial or not, he's still human, still has a soul. Eye symbolism runs rampant through the movie. Something much more subtle is that each character is associated with an animal--fish, racoon, snakes. The replicants are "fallen angels," especially Batty, who is quite literally Lucifer. And for that matter, also Christ! What a movie, and all hidden under a futuristic (yet grungy) detective story.

Rating:
Summary: best movie... ever
Review: This is my favorite sci-fi movie. It is self contained and doesnt sell out (unlike starwars). It is never boring (unlike dune). It ages well (unlike Logan's Run). It has just about everything you could want going for it: Interesting idea, cast, charachters, plot, action, etc. If you havent seen it you owe it to yourself. Only one word of caution, it is violent and probably should not be watched by young viewers.

Rating:
Summary: unicorn introduces new interesting possibilities
Review: Blade Runner is one of the best sci-fi films of all times, together with 2001. The best quality it has is that the fact of being a sci-fi film does not overshadow the interesting plot. Far from being vacuous and pretentious like f.ex. The Matrix and many other sci-fi movies, Blade Runner presents us a very interesting story which revisits at the same time the myth of Frankenstein and the life-myth of Christ: very very interesting indeed. The actors are good, especially Rutger Hauer, who interprets the more human character of the film. The new scene (well, old one but not added in the 1982 version) of the unicorn (the dream-the paper unicorn) introduces a new nuance in the story: since the unicorn has been a dream dreamt by Deckard, he is a replicant himself; they know his past, his dreams...

Rating:
Summary: The Director's big mistake or how to ruin a great film.
Review: The director didn't know what he was doing when it came to editing this film, the producers did a much better job. My problem is that I loved the original and hate with a passion this version. Why don't they release the orginal movie so I can throw my directors cut in the trash. I would give this DVD a zero star if I could. The soul of the movie is gone. I'm a believer that androids with this level of ability have as much right to live as humans. The fact that we think they are our slaves and property with no rights is outragous. Equal rights for machines are coming in the near future and a man-machine war for equal rights is ahead (see Terminator I/II). The union of harision ford and the replicant in the ending of the movie is soooo significant. The beginning of the next phase of man-vs-machine.

Rating:
Summary: I don't understand these opinions?
Review: Ok, Blade Runner has got to be one of the greatest stories I know. I love this movie and is one of my fav sci-fi movies, but I don't understand why so many people think the Director's Cut is better than the original. There are many pros and cons to it. First, the voice over narraration is so much better to have. Deckard doesn't have enough dialogue in the movie for the story to flow through in the DC ver. It really helps the story move and you know what he is thinking. But, a pro for the DC is that the unicorn seen is a must. I really added alot of element on wondering if Deckard is a rep or not. The endings are neither here nor there. I like both the ending in DC where you were wondering what they were going to do, bu the happy ending was good too! It didn't seem phony at all to me! Plus, the happy ending goes along with the book, Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human by K.W. Jeter, an ok novel but not great.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Movie, BUT....
Review: Blade Runner was an incredible movie. I have a strange feeling that the world will one day turn out like this. Everything is rock-solid and great in this movie, but I had a lot of trouble understanding a part or two because the Hard-to-Understand Chinese/Japanese/Korean man strapped to the tubes couldn't be understood, or some things were just unexplained. The second time I watched it, I switched on the subtitling, and this helped considerably. Why does the DC have NO special features? For a movie as good as this, there should be at least something...

Rating:
Summary: Why can't I get the original version?
Review: The original Matrix was perhaps the finest science fiction movie made to date. That is what makes the Director's cut so disappointing. Although the changes were actually few - there is no narrative from Harrison Ford and the ending changes - it changes the whole picture.

The director had done a superb job in creating his future world - it was dark, drear, and gave us a real feeling of hopelessness. But the producers knew what they were doing, obviously, when they insisted on making a few subtle changes before releasing the original movie.

The original was dark and pessimistic, but in the end, there was hope - not a storybook ending, but hope.

NOrmally you get extra material in the director's cut. Never have I been so disappointed in a movie as when I ordered the DVD widescreen version and got the Director's Cut and watched it. I sent it back. Those few changes turned what I thought was the greatest science fiction movie made into a bad movie. Sure, the visuals were great - Ford and Hauer were excellent, as well as the rest of the cast, but too much was missing.

Pass on this and wait for the original version to be re-released.

Steve in Alexandria

Rating:
Summary: Not as Good as the original cut!
Review: Well this is the "directors cut", usually this means they put in the previously edited portions that end up on the floor. In General this is good, as has been shown in directors cuts of both Dune and Terminator 2 (I understand they cut out 45 minutes of Highlander, that they included in the UK version that had his feelings about living that long in favor of offering us blow up things happy americans shorter waits between action sequences, I am still waiting to see that one). However the perhaps 10-15 minutes they cut out of blade runner, and put back in do not make up for the ongoing thought verbalized in Harrison Ford's head. Ok sure they make you think perhaps that Harrison Ford is a replicant himself with the vision of the unicorn, and Edward James Olmos character(perhaps his first job on sceen before Miami Vice?) leaving a unicorn origami, lending one the idea that perhaps the police dept knew more about Harrison Ford than he himself did, but that in No way makes up for the superb remeniscing done by Ford as the movie moves along, I even Showed my 15 year old son the whole DVD and then took out a VHS copy I had from an old showtime or HBO version of the original and played the ends back to back and even he agreed the original explained more about the characters thoughts and made the movie not only more intelligent but more desirable. The Dvd ends in blackness, while the original cut has them flying over what is perhaps virgin North American Forests giving you the hope that they found happiness as Harrison Ford remarks, true they did not give an inception date for Rachel, but then again as Gaff said who knows how long we may have. The end of the original, much as less the internal musings of Harrison Ford on the original cut are supremely superior to the directors cut, and if the original cut makes it to DVD i would buy it in an instant and sell my "directors cut" , which not to be redundant, however breaks the mold of directors cuts being better, this one is actually a disgrace to the original cut!!!

Rating:
Summary: A classic sci-fi flick with one major flaw
Review: The director's cut of Blade Runner is clearly the better of the two releases. While I find Harrison Ford's performance simply adequate, the supporting cast, especially Rutger Hauer as the leader of the replicants, do a bang-up job. My biggest gripe with the DVD version is that it's not in letterbox format. It seems like a complete blunder to me. Anyway it's still worth checking out.