A Bleak Future Worth Going Back To

Harrison Ford is the cop tasked with tracking down androids gone awry in Ridley Scott's 1982 film, "Blade Runner," which offers an engrossing dystopian vision of Los Angeles in 2019, below. (Afi Images)

Some things that are new and different about this cut of the movie? The voice-over is gone. It's a little more violent, as when Rutger Hauer murders someone by squashing his head and we now see blood popping out of eye sockets. The situation of one of the central characters is no longer ambiguous (more on this later, behind a SPOILER warning). And that ending, which showed star Harrison Ford and beauty Sean Young helicoptering across a green panorama, is now gone; that escape is only implied. As a whole, the movie seems clearer, the skein of clues leading its hunter to its hunted tight and logical.

Magnificently evident on the Silver's big screen is Scott's work-up of dystopia. It's not just steamy, littered, crowded streets but -- influenced by the dark stylings of film noir and the dreamings of a French comic fantasist calling himself Moebius in a magazine called Heavy Metal -- a sense of milieu on the edge of a nervous breakdown. At street level, L.A. has become Japanized, and you can buy noodles just as easily as you can buy replica snakes (all animals have perished because of plague; android replacements are all the rage).

Against this backdrop, the story plays out in dialogue that reflects both the tough-guy patois of Raymond Chandler and his many imitators, with a frisson of sci-fi technospeak thrown in for the power of odd juxtapositions. Meanwhile, the few richies -- like Mr. Tyrell -- live above the miasmatic clouds in skyscrapers that seem designed by Frank Lloyd Wright off plans from L. Frank Baum, replicating a theme from another dystopian fantasy, Fritz Lang's great "Metropolis."

Ford's cop moves smoothly between these worlds, as fantasy cops do, able to shoot it out and chase down a violent replicant from an "off-world kick murder squad," whatever that is and it sounds dangerous as hell, and at the same time parry wits with Mr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel) and seduce his young mistress (Young). In fact, he's a little too good, and this time the movie makes clear why this beat-up old Philip Marlowe clone is so preposterously smart and tough.

Okay, SPOILER time:

That's because it's now clear that Deckard is a replicant, too. Who else could do such a dirty, dangerous job, never show fear, boast amazing feats of strength (hanging by one hand with two recently broken fingers from a skyscraper beam)? Of course, he's a Nexus-5 as opposed to the four skin-jobs' Nexus-6 classification. Almost, but not quite as good. This possibility has haunted the film ever since its initial release and indeed Ford and Scott (who reportedly didn't get along during the arduous, hurried shoot) disagreed on it. Evidently Scott wants it settled: This version makes clear the meanings of the origami foldings that second-banana cop (Edward James Olmos, who, for some reason, speaks frequently in Hungarian) has been leaving for Deckard. The last one is a unicorn, which matches up with a waking fantasy Deckard had of just such a beast (Scott lengthened the unicorn sequence from a shorter version in a '92 release so there could be no doubt about it).

Deckard dreamed of unicorns because at his center was a romantic notion of white-horsed masculinity, of heroism and nobility, his ideal in a sordid gutter of a world where his job was to kill. Now he realizes that image was inserted from someone else's memory, that his most personal ideal is artificial. He's nothing but a machine. Another grand dream has come to nothing.