1. Blade Runner
Is there really anything else to say about this one? It's slow, ponderous, violent, and - if you give the theatrical cut a skip - depressing. Blade Runner was the opposite of what audiences wanted out of a Harrison Ford vehicle in 1982, especially after the one-two punch of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard isn't much of a hero... or a detective for that matter. Marketed as a futuristic detective story, Deckard does very little detecting. He has little trouble finding his prey, which he kills with the ease. The violence is sudden and graphic, and Ridley Scott is as much or more interested in the fate of Deckard's victims than Deckard himself (though you could argue that Deckard is also a victim, especially if he's a replicant). There's no denying that it's a sci-fi masterpiece, that somehow feels a little too empty... yet that emptiness becomes a vessel for audiences to fill with their own interpretations on its themes and subtleties. While a seminal film on its own terms, which influenced an entire generation of filmmakers, it also has a separate, more dubious legacy: The Director's Cut. The 1992 Director's Cut of Blade Runner probably is the better version of the film - but it begun the practice of sweeping a film's theatrical cut under the rug to make way for a newer, "better" version of the film. Fans of the original version of Blade Runner - and there are fans of this version - had to wait fifteen years to own a good copy of the original film, which is criminal to a film snob like me. But without The Director's Cut, which removed at least one travesty from the film, I doubt we'd still be talking about it today. Thankfully, The Final Cut release on video in 2007 set a new standard for the now-established practice of re-editing films: if you're going to keep tinkering with movies that we're all in love with, you should at least have the decency to include each version of the film in the same package. In fact, all these different cuts - we're up to four now, if you believe The Final Cut is actually final - create a sort of multiverse for Blade Runner. The various edits change the nature - even the fate - of Rick Deckard. For a movie that was largely up for interpretation to begin with, this is a truly singular experience for film nuts. Each of us takes something slightly different away from Blade Runner. It's no wonder why so many of us have embraced it. Also, Deckard is human. If not, the story doesn't work.
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