Hence the word “later” in my post. 
That’s funny. 
I completely agree. I saw it when it first came out, and never considered that Deckard could be a replicant.
This is purely from a memory of twenty or so years ago. My interpretation at that time: Gaff (Olmos) knew that Rachael (Sean Young) was a replicant, but also knew that Deckard was in love with her. He left the unicorn to let Deckard know they had to disappear, or he would lose her - hence the flight at the end.
Damn, I bought the 5 DVD set, but haven’t had the chance to watch it. It’s long past time to fix that.
Scott offers the choice of which version to watch. Lucas chose for us.
Sure, but why retcon in the first place?
Heinlein wrote about this late in life, when many of his predictions should’ve come true, but never did. He said something to the effect of trying to re-write to fit reality is futile, and that a good story is a good story, no matter how dated. I think he pointed to H.G. Wells or maybe **Verne ** to make his case. It doesn’t matter since I agree.
Take Forbidden Planet (I can’t get over Leslie Nielsen, even though I first saw it way before LN got his late fame in Naked Gun). It’s a poor re-write of Tempest, the science is stupid, the fx is really dated 50 years later and the acting is, true to the times, over the top. Somehow, it’s still an enjoyable movie. As is the original Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, **The Birds ** and… On the beach, to just pick a title. This whole director’s cut bullshit stems from some kind of auteur entitlement issue, to wit: I had to release it as it was, but my intentiones were really something else. I blame the studio.
But the studio system wasn’t in place in '82, nor in '77. The creative controll of the director was much larger in the 70’s and 80’s than in the decades before.
To me, Scott retconning Bladerunner seems more like a business decision, than an artistic decision, i.e. a way of sellingthe same thing over and over. As a marketing ploy, it’s pure genious. Artistically, it shows a lack of integrity.
As does exchanging guns for radios in E.T. and, of course, having Gredo shoot first. I’ve actually never seen a “director’s cut” that was better than the original release. Things are left out for a reason and one of the first rules a director learns is “kill your darlings”.
I saw the original version for the one and only time in about 2001 or 2002, and the first thing I said when the movie ended was “Deckard’s a replicant!”
YMMV.
Well… yes, and no. The book wasn’t even read all the way through by the folks who made the damn movie, but reading the book does help on clarify that a major issue that the movie explores is one of “life thieves”, be it natural of synthetic life.
I’ll try to track down the stories, but Scott has claimed it was intended from the word go, and Ford said it wasn’t justified by the script and was a tacked on interpretation.
Scott may have just screwed the pooch, but in recent interviews he certainly seems to say that it was intended all along.
Wired: It was never on paper that Deckard is a replicant.
Scott:It was, actually. That’s the whole point of Gaff, the guy who makes origami and leaves little matchstick figures around. He doesn’t like Deckard, and we don’t really know why. If you take for granted for a moment that, let’s say, Deckard is a Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human. Gaff, at the very end, leaves an origami, which is a piece of silver paper you might find in a cigarette packet, and it’s a unicorn. Now, the unicorn in Deckard’s daydream tells me that Deckard wouldn’t normally talk about such a thing to anyone. If Gaff knew about that, it’s Gaff’s message to say, “I’ve read your file, mate.” That relates to Deckard’s first speech to Rachael when he says, “That’s not your imagination, that’s Tyrell’s niece’s daydream.” And he describes a little spider on a bush outside the window. The spider is an implanted piece of imagination. And therefore Deckard, too, has imagination and even history implanted in his head.
Wired: You shot the unicorn dream sequence as part of the original production. Why didn’t you include it in either the work print or the initial release?
Scott:As I said, there was too much discussion in the room. I wanted it. They didn’t want it. I said, “Well, it’s a fundamental part of the story.” And they said, “Well, isn’t it obvious that he’s a replicant?” And I said, “No more obvious than that he’s not a replicant at the end.” So, it’s a matter of choice, isn’t it?
Wired: When Deckard picks up the origami unicorn at the end of the movie, the look on his face says to me, “Oh, so Gaff was here, and he let Rachael live.” It doesn’t say, “Oh my God! Am I a replicant, too?”
Scott:No? Why is he nodding when he looks at this silver unicorn? I’m not going to send up a balloon. Doing the job he does, reading the files he reads on other replicants, Deckard may have wondered at one point, “Am I human or am I a replicant?” That’s in his innermost thoughts. I’m just giving you the fully fleshed-out possibility to justify that look at the end, where he kind of glints and looks angry. To me, it’s an affirmation. He nods, he agrees. “Ah hah! Gaff was here. I’ve been told.”
Wired: Harrison Ford is on record saying Deckard is not a replicant.
Scott:Yeah, but that was, like, 20 years ago. He’s given up now. He said, “OK, mate. You win! Anything! Just put it to rest.”
Another quibble (I love quibbles), but I think that the ending is still a very happy ending. It just doesn’t have the idiotic voiceover. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy’s homicidal coworker lets her live. boy and girl run off into the night together.
- Not all the replicants were of equal strength. Leon was designed as a massively strong ordinance loader, and Deckard was able to manhandle Rachel quite easily.
- Because then you run the risk of him refusing his orders, which was already a problem. Or going postal, which would be even worse.
N.B. I think that Scott pulled a bit of a hack stunt, and that Ford was right.
All the replicants except Rachel were stronger and faster than Deckard, and she was a one-off.
Then why not tell them they *are *human, and solve the problem?
Well… maybe, maybe not. We have a very small sample size to judge for, but the fact that Rachel is weaker then either Replicant Deckard or Human Deckard does mean that replicant strength levels can vary. Having an exception to the rule proves that the rule isn’t absolute.
And I think there’s evidence that strength levels varied between the others, too. Leon was able to punch a hole through metal, Roy put his hand through a plaster wall, but Pris’ blows didn’t even crush Deckard’s skull and Zora couldn’t snap his neck/crush his windpipe.
So if Deckard was a replicant, then he could’ve simply been a weaker one.
Well, with Rachel they did. And it did solve the problem… until she figured things out due to her VK test. The others, it most likely wouldn’t have worked. After all, replicants were legalized slaves. They were looked down upon as being merely machines that weren’t actually alive, “skin jobs”. Telling them that they were humans, and thus had equal rights, would’ve been counter productive.
As I said, Rachel was a one-off. Every other replicant we meet has superhuman strength. Some more than others, but all more than human.
And why create a replicant whose job it is to overpower and kill other replicants, and make him as weak as a human? And who in the world created him?
Deckard was a man who was beaten down by life. It would take a replicant far more than four years to develop such a persona, and Rachel was the only one with complex emotions pre-programmed.
Fine, except it contradicts interviews he gave around the time of movie’s original release.
I also vote marketing ploy - Scott’s retcons keep alive interest in his movie at a time when there’s big bucks to be made in selling alternative versions on DVD, and it’s not like the alternate versions are hard to make. Any complicated movie leaves miles of film on the editing room floor. All you need is a cool dry place to store it for a few years, then reinsert it with the claim “This is what I really wanted to say”, and a few years later, do it again.
I actually prefer the story with Deckard being human – he’s lost or surrendered his humanity, while the artificial replicants have found their own.
Sean Young, on the other hand, is definitely a replicant. (The actress, not the character.)
Maybe not. If Deckard was a human, then Rachel was weaker than a human. If Deckard was a replicant, than all we know is his strength releative to other replicants.
We don’t know that Deckard is as strong as a human, only that he wasn’t as strong as some of the other replicants. For what it’s worth, I’ll reiterate that I think Scott pulled a hack-director’s trick, and the movie doesn’t justify calling Deckard a replicant. But I don’t think that the strength issue necessarily would disqualify Deckard from being a replicant.
As for who made him, (if he actually was a replicant) I’d say the Tyrell corporation.
After all, it was illegal for any replicants to be on Earth, upon penalty of death. But Tyrell had Rachel there, and it wasn’t a problem until she went rogue. Maybe Tyrell cut some sort of deal.
Of course, that’s all rationalizing and retconing, but my point is that there’s not necessarily anything firmly in the way of such a retcon.
Well, beaten down by his job, at least. I’m not sure that there was much in the movie to justify anything more than that, however.
Well, the second statement is only true if we assume that Deckard wasn’t also given such memories and a complex persona. And we did see how Roy, for instance, developed rather complex emotions and a very involved stimulus-response matrix. I don’t think that something like “I hate my job and I’m tired of killing replicants” would be too much of a stretch for Replicant Deckard.
Agreed without reservation. I’ve loved the movie since I was a young kid, but I was skeptical of buying the new release. I already had the director’s cut, and I liked that much more than the original. But then I had the misfortune to tune in to NPR at the exact moment of Scott’s interview where he says that the new movie is supposed to somehow ‘make clear’ that:
deckard is a replicant.
Well, fuck. When I was done being angry at NPR for including a spoiler like that in the middle of an interview without warning people, I went out and bought that sucker, because that I wanted to see this marvelous new footage. Boy oh boy was I ever pissed off when I watched the whole thing. There’s also the fact that the Final Cut version has a miniscule amount of new footage, most of which I didn’t even notice. I assume a few seconds were added to a pan here or a scene there, but other than an expanded elaboration on Leon’s slave-job, I didn’t notice anything worth catching sight of.
I’d definitely place money on thinking that Scott figured he could make a few more bucks by adding some window dressing, creating a buzz, and releasing what was, essentially, the same movie.
Phase42 writes:
> Hence the word “later” in my post.
When exactly did this “group-think” occur? It wasn’t at first when the film came out, since not that many people liked the film. Are you claiming that group-think occurred in the several years afterwards as it slowly became a cult film? “Group-think” is a poor explanation for its popularity. Note that this does not mean that I particularly like the film. It also does not mean that I think that a popular film is a good one. It’s just that saying that a popular film that you like is really a good one and a popular film that you don’t like is only generally popular because of group-think is totally arbitrary.
Hah! I was watching her carefully when she was sitting at the piano in Deckard’s apartment. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody go that long without blinking.
I was mostly theorizing out loud, and perhaps “group-think” is the wrong term. But yes, I’m talking about “the several years afterwards as it slowly became a cult film”. As I said, I just watched it for the first time. But I probably first heard about it 15 years ago, still well after it came out, so I missed the original poor reviews. Instead, I’ve consistently heard it described with terms like “great”, “awesome”, “classic”, “seminal”, “influential”, etc. here on the SDMB and elsewhere.
My point is that even though I missed the early negative reviews, neither have I heard any negatives about it in the years since. Didn’t it make that recent list of the Top 10 best sci-fi films of the last 25 years? I decided to finally watch it based on all the positive things I’ve heard over the years, and I suspect that a great many other people have made the same decision for the same reason. I don’t think anybody can argue that there are people who will then parrot the same glowing praise even though, like me, they didn’t “get it”, in order to not stick out from the crowd of fans. Emperor’s new clothes, and all that.
Hence my starting this thread. The responses I’ve gotten here contain, honestly, the first less-than-positive comments I’ve heard about Blade Runner (with the qualifier that this is the first time I’ve actively sought out an in-depth discussion of the film).
(On an unrelated note, I’ve been meaning to mention to you for some time that I was once acquainted with a pretty girl named Wendy Wagler, and her father’s name happened to be Wendell. It took several readings of your screen name before I realized it was Wagner.)
Riddley Scott is a pompous ass, and doesn’t know a good script from a bad one – but, damn, sometimes the guy’s a visual genius. In a couple of years, with two movies – Alien and Blade Runner – he deeply influenced what the whole next generation of cinematic science fiction would look like.
Longinus, but,
CMC +fnord!
personally I think the Replicant/human question about Deckard is best left as a question. its valid to wonder one way or the other. is he a human who is so down and beaten and depressed that hes for all intents and purposes an automaton? or is he the automaton who is slowly discovering his humanity?
what I do know is that the replicants in the movie are obviously more alive than the humans, even if you just chalk it up to their childlike nature they are much much more aware of life.
the humans are all cold, humorless, and closed off. the scene with Rachel where hes kissing her and it looks like some weird borderline rape scene works from the perspective that Deckard has rediscovered a human connection (discovered?) that has long been gone from his life. the fact that he doesnt handle it very well and that its with a replicant are also very telling.
I think a lot of people who dont like the film because of the story (or lack of) are looking for an action film instead of a drama. as a drama I think the story works well.
as for the happy ending, yeah it sucks. not because its happy but because its totally completely out of context for the film. fucking riding off into the sunset please. the ending with them in the elevator obviously scared but together is happy enough.
I think you’re being way too generous to the pro-DeckRep crowd. I’ve never seen an argument that suggests the film is improved in any way by Deckard being a replicant. If anything, it would just screw the whole thing up. I guess if everything in a movie being screwed up works for someone, more power to them.
I think you’re forgetting at least one earlier scene in the movie that firmly does establish the context, if not a blatant foreshadowing. Somebody with a DVD copy can confirm this, just find the dialogue where Rachel mentions going “North”.
I prefer to think Deckard is human.
But, every other replicant we meet was designed for hazardous off-world work and never intended to be set loose among humans on earth. It makes sense they’d be built stronger.
Deckard, if a replicant, wouldn’t have been designed to physically overpower other replicants. He was designed with a personality and mind good at finding them, and shooting them with a gun. You can’t program replicants to do exactly what you want. You can make them smart, and able to quickly learn what you want them to do, but then you have to give them short life-spans precisely because they won’t forever do what they’re told. But Deckard, thinking he’s human and not having any physical reason to suspect he’s not human, could be used for a longer time, probably.
As for the unicorn origami signifying Gaff knows what Deckard’s thoughts and dreams are, well what was up with the origami of the guy with a huge dick? Was Deckard dreaming about that? I don’t think Gaff’s origamis always had meaning, other then at the end of the original version, it meant he’d been there and would eventually come back, if Deckard didn’t run.
It’s could be that OR it could be the other Blade Runner is also having dreams about unicorns because he is also a replicant and just happens to make origami about what is on his mind which is the same thing as Deckard because they are both unaware replicants. Dude, did I just blow your mind?