Gladiator II

Maximus Carnage

Gladiator II
aka GladIIator
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK/USA 2024
Paramount Pictures
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Very small spoilers.

I really wasn’t expecting much from Gladiator II (or GLADIIATOR, as the actual film print reads) as I didn’t think too much of the first movie when it hit cinemas. For me, the first Gladiator had some nicely staged battles and a fantastic score by Hans Zimmer. Those were the two standouts for me... other than that, it was an okay movie, not a great one. So I really wasn’t expecting much from this sequel which, honestly... did anyone want a sequel to a movie where the title character, Maximus, died at the end... thus going a good way to negating any attempt at a possible follow on.

Well, I have to say that, although Gladiator II is a completely unnecessary follow up, I actually preferred it a lot more to the first film. I mean, it’s still not a great film but, yeah, it kept me entertained for much longer and, despite running for two and a half hours, it didn’t really drag either (I thought the first one did drag, somewhat, it has to be said).

This one is, in terms of story content, a kind of toned down remake of the first movie where, this time, it’s Lucius, the grown up son of Maximus, played here by Paul Mescal, who is captured after his wife is killed by his mother’s new husband. Said husband, Marcus Acacius, is played by Pedro Pascal but he’s not really a villain and he plays the character sympathetically. Lucius goes about conquering the new games devised by two Caligula-like ruling emperors (who are essentially the main villains, for a bit), with the intention of taking his revenge on Acacius but there’s more to it than that. Denzel Washington plays the guy in charge of the Gladiatorial school, so to speak and he wants to use Lucius to rise up for his own political ends. Washington is amazing in this, as is the returning Connie Nielson as Lucilla.

There are political conspiracies paced with, frankly, somewhat over the top Colosseum games which include... I dunno... some kind of genetically altered killer ape/dog creatures and a flooded arena filled with sharks. Um, I assume there are going to be one or two accusations levelled at director Ridley Scott that he’s jumped the shark with this movie, for sure. That being said, although the action sequences are maybe not quite as consistently engaging as the first film, they still work very well and the quieter scenes where violence suddenly intrudes into the narrative have positively Japanese levels of arterial spray (well, more like arterial floods) and certainly liven up those moments considerably.

But, I don’t really care, as escapist fantasy it’s fast moving and, well it’s Ridley Scott so, whatever you may think of his movies post-1982 (after his three masterworks The Duellists, A L I E N and Blade Runner, reviewed here), you know that the cinematography is going to be nothing less than stunning so, yeah, no surprises there (and he seems to be using the different qualities of image tone between the two films for the flashbacks as the very thing which makes them feel like a window to the past). What did surprise me was the last combat scene in the film as I didn’t expect to see a certain character turning out to be the real villian until about half an hour before the end (I thought he would become an ally)

And as an added bonus, we get a score by one of Zimmer’s stable, the great Harry Gregson-Williams, who of course gave us the incredible score to Wonder Woman. And yes, Gladiator II is on CD and this was the real motivating factor that dragged me into cinemas to see (well, hear) this thing and, on the music front, I was not disappointed. I can’t wait to hear this thing as a stand alone listen, for sure. It does have a fair few nods to Zimmer’s leitmotif on occasion (although not the Holst derivative, from what I could hear) but it does its own thing and has some nice orchestration.

So yeah, I think that’s me done with Gladiator II other than to acknowledge that Derek Jacobi’s returning character feels somewhat wasted, Connie Nielson is the absolute glue which holds the film (and the story, to an extent) together and I didn’t even mind the tongue-in-cheek ‘I Am Spartacus’ moment after the Coliseum sea battle scene. Definitely worth seeing this one at a cinema if you can spare the time.

Alien: Covenant

Xenomorphing Cower Strangers

Alien: Covenant
USA/Australia/New Zealand/UK 2017
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK cinema release print.

Warning: There’s a clearly marked SPOILER ZONE in this article. So I’ll warn you when you get there.

Gosh... this is kind of a difficult film to process. I really liked the ALIEN films up to and including the fifth in the series, the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie (despite the glaring continuity error in that last one and not including their cameo appearances in any solo Predator movies). However, the last two in the franchise, ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM and the so called A L I E N prequel Prometheus (reviewed by me here) really didn’t sit well with me. AVP: REQUIEM pretty much reduced the beautiful Alien Xenomorphs to the level of a teenage slasher movie and might better have been called 'Aliens Meet Jason' or some such dreadful thing (although, it has to be said the movie did have one thing going for it... an outstanding score by Brian Tyler)... and Prometheus, which I and pretty much everyone I know had high hopes for, suffered from some really bad artistic choices.

In Prometheus the three biggest sins were the reduction of the beautiful space jockey designed by H. R. Giger for the very first film... transformed into tall men wearing bone suits (known as Engineers), the absence of the actual Xenomorphs themselves and, finally, the absolute lack of actually leaving us in a place where the first movie could actually pick up from in the first place. The film was beautifully executed and absolutely gripping during the first half and then it just got really disappointing very quickly, not long after the crew went on board the alien ship.

This new film in the franchise, once again directed by Ridley Scott, is pretty much more of the same combination of awesome movie making coupled with some disappointingly poor artistic choices as far as I’m concerned. I’d rate it a definite improvement on Prometheus but this is very much a sequel to Prometheus than it is a prequel to A L I E N, it has to be said.

The film starts off, after a scene with Michael Fassbender reprising his role of David, which is set some time before the events of Prometheus, before fast forwarding past the previous film by a good ten years. My first danger signs that made it feel like Ridley was trying way too hard and, more importantly, too clumsily, to win franchise fans back came with an opening credits sequence that tried to mimic the first film badly in terms of the typefaces appearing in sections but with the twin mistakes of having them appear way too fast and also going to a second line of the same for the film’s subtitle at the bottom of the screen. This already felt a bit rubbish but then having the composer Jed Kurzel, who does an appropriate job for a lot of the time, using a new variant of Jerry Goldsmith’s famous, unused opening titles for the original A L I E N to play out over them was just a little bit too much.

Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Kurzel’s score to this and am looking forward to acquiring the CD of it at some point soon, the first third to a half of the movie seems to be intent on parodying various moments of Goldsmith’s original score for A L I E N. Now, this maybe wouldn’t have seemed so out of place if the Alien franchise had a very definite musical identity grounding it. Alas, as far as I am aware, every single movie in the Alien series (including the Predator versions and Prometheus) have had a different composer and, while some of the orchestral textures shared a commonality in some of the movies, there is no underlying style which has given them a consistent, coherent musical identity (the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe films are guilty of exactly the same crimes against musical filmanity, by the way). So, much as I appreciated hearing all of this pseudo-Goldsmith pumped through the cinema speakers... it just seemed a little misplaced here.

Although the film makers have tried to at least retrofit the space ship Covenant to the Nostromo of the first movie, they somehow neglected to remember that they never had a load of hologram style technology in A L I E N, which was obviously set some time after the events in this film (although a big shout out to the set dressers for the return of one of my favourite things to the series, the drinking duck). We also have the continuation of the synthetic David character, portrayed so brilliantly by Michael Fassbender, who is, in himself, something of an anomaly. In James Cameron’s ALIENS, we had the idea that a synthetic crew member as part of the family, so to speak, was a normal thing to take with you on board a spaceship. However, people should maybe remember that the second film was set quite a long time in the future from the original A L I E N movie so, you know, things had moved onto where it became normal to have a synthetic on board. Before that, though? In A L I E N, Ian Holm portrayed Ash, a synthetic who was not known as an android to the rest of the crew. He was a secret plant by the Weyland Yutani company. So... and Prometheus had this problem too... how come that before the events of A L I E N, having a synthetic human on board seems to be par for the course already? It kinda makes no sense.

Okay... this is where the spoilers start, people.

Also, while I’m on the subject, it also makes no sense that he would posess superhuman speed and strength. Certainly Ash and Bishop in the first two movies displayed none of that and yet, here, they are hurling people around like action figures. So... yeah, the continuity is screwed. And the continuity is also screwed when it turns out that the Alien Xenomorphs we are familiar with through the original Giger designs are, in fact, engineered by David. Because this is still set many years in our future folks so, if this is the case, how in heck did they come to the planet Earth many years in our past, as established in the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie? None of it is really making much sense. Honestly people, we laugh at how screwed up the continuity is from film to film on those old 1940s sequels to Universal’s The Mummy but modern franchises like the X-Men films, the Resident Evil films and this ALIEN franchise are just as bad, if not worse. Future generations of film fans will look at these movies and laugh at how quaintly people of our time must have forgotten what was going on between films.

Okay, so I was hoping for a reappearance of Noomi Rapace as the sole human survivor of the last movie... Dr. Elisabeth Shaw... but she really doesn’t get anything more than an illegible visual recording and a sound recording in here. Which is a shame because, opening credits aside, the first half of the film is quite strong, leading all the way up to an attack by alien life forms of some sort, not long after the spaceship Covenant touches down on the Engineers planet. What’s left of the crew are ‘rescued’ by a hooded figure and I was really hoping the rescuer would be Shaw but, alas, it was Fassbender as David. Now Fassbender also does double duty here as a later model of the same character called Walter but, it has to be said, the story is really crude and obvious from this point on. Once we are shown that a synthetic human can grow hair (seriously?), we have two almost identical looking characters, one who is a good and loyal android and an evil/mad version of the same. So I have to say I defy anyone who doesn’t know what’s going to happen towards the end of the movie here. And when David starts cutting his hair it’s pretty much spelled out long before we ever get to that point in the film. It’s a crude plot device which wouldn’t seem out of place in the early days of TV but to still be using this whole ‘evil twin’ surprise thing here (and this franchise is not the only modern franchise using this tired, over played, intelligence insulting template) really shows how sloppy and uninventive modern movie writers have become.

End of spoiler zone.

Another bad thing about this movie is the xenomorphs themselves. For most of the film the key alien monster is a whitish pink thing not unlike the terrible ‘Casper The Friendly Ghost’ looking Alien at the finale of Alien Resurrection... it’s not quite as crude as that but... yeah, really not impressed, in all honesty. The smaller, ‘just hatched’ versions of these are much more effective here in terms of suspense than the grown versions. The xenomorphs do feature in this eventually... just not very much and, it has to be said, they looked really clunky in some scenes. In fact, they looked almost more like a man in a suit (which I’m told they’re not, here) than the original version in A L I E N and, it has to be said, are far less effective. The face huggers are way better used here but... well... remember when the acidic blood of these creatures could eat through several hulls of a spaceship? Well here it can’t even eat its way fully through the front of a human face so... seriously some major continuity errors here, I feel.

Well that’s all the bad stuff.

The good stuff is... it looks and sounds awesome. Ridley Scott makes beautiful looking films... of that there is no question. The cinematography is amazing and although a fellow movie goer was complaining that it was too darkly lit (especially compared to the same scenes in the trailer), I think this works in its favour to cover up some clunky CGI in some parts and allow the audience to bring their imagination to the party... which is always more effective. I think Scott really knows what he’s doing visually and it certainly shows here.

We also have a cast who are quite brilliant. Michael Fassbender always brings a lot to the party and seems to be extraordinary in anything he puts his mind to. His costars are all great in this too and with a special mention for Katherine Waterston who is the ‘strong but emotionally vulnerable female’ Ripley surrogate of this movie. She does some good work here, especially when it comes to one of the film’s key themes... how characters deal with the emotional loss of a loved one when they are suddenly taken from them with no warning. There’s a fair bit of that in this movie for several of the characters and I suspect I know just why that theme is touched upon quite so often here but, due to my own, admittedly slightly twisted, moral compass, I don’t want to point it out here because it’s an issue which may be sensitive to at least one of the artists involved with the making of this film.

There are a lot of things I could be saying about Alien Covenant, many of them bad and some, probably, fairly good but I don’t want to labour the points and I think I’ve touched on the key things I wanted to cover in this review. The more I think about this film, the more disappointed I am in it... although it was a heck of a lot more focused than Prometheus, that’s for sure. While I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to non-Alien fans, I would certainly shout it out to all of those who do love the majority of the previous movies. It’s going to make some money, I hope, because I really want to see Ridley finish it up with a link back ot the original A L I E N movie (which it gets nowhere near doing here) but, in all honesty, I think the xenomorphs are a little played out now, to tell the truth. Not a terrible film... not a great one. A kind of a quaint, almost 1950s style sci-fi/horror yarn with a few little shout outs, in some moments, to Scott’s greatest masterpiece, the original studio cut of Blade Runner. Glad I saw this one but it’s not a repeat watcher for me.

The Martian

Redded Bliss

The Martian
2015 USA
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK cinema release print.

Okay... the first thing you need to know about me if you’re going to read this review is that I’ve never read Andy Weir’s bestselling novel The Martian, on which this film is based. Therefore, I really can’t give you any idea of how good an adaptation this movie is of the source material, which, with someone like Ridley Scott at the helm, could go either way (I still refuse to watch Hannibal after what he apparently did to it). What I can do, though, is review this purely on its own terms as a personal cinematic experience... which is all a production team would possibly want from a review, I would think.

Ridley Scott used to be my favourite director for a little while, back in the mid-1980s. He directed two of my favourite films, in fact. Firstly, the original ALIEN, the first theatrical release cut of which I would still claim is the best of any of the movies to make use of the titular creature created for it by H. R. Giger. Secondly, he directed what has, since I first saw it as a teenager in 1982 at my local cinema, been my favourite movie of all time (maybe tying in first place with The Third Man). That film being the original cut of Blade Runner (reviewed here)... one of the most moving and spectacular modern noirs I can think of.

Unfortunately he's also let me down quite a bit over the years. The Hannibal debacle was just the start. He also delivered a ‘director’s cut’ of his original ALIEN which, while restoring sequences we all wanted to see, also trimmed footage from the whole experience and sped the film up somewhat needlessly, Scott citing the way audiences change and digest visual information to be the prime motivator in his decisions on that one (if I remember the interviews correctly about that at the time). Similarly, we now have something like five different versions of Blade Runner but, still by far the best, is the one which Criterion put out on laserdisc (now on the latest Blu Rays and DVD box set presentations of the movie) which was a less censored version of the original theatrical release.

So when it comes to Scott I have a lot to gripe about in terms of what he’s done to what were my favourite movies of his, not to mention the abomination of Prometheus... but that’s another story and I reviewed that one here.  The fact that he's about to 'prometheus up' a sequel to Blade Runner is the final nail in the coffin of good taste, it seems to me.

However, he’s visually brilliant, no matter what choices he makes, and since cinema is at least 50% reliant on the visual aspect (I would say) then you can’t deny that the man is a bit of a film making genius... whether you agree with his decisions or not. So I went into The Martian with open eyes and a desire to be impressed because I like science fiction and, also, I quite like Matt Damon as an actor/personality... so, yeah, I thought I’d give it a go.

What we have here is a film about an astronaut left for dead and stranded on Mars with roughly no chance of survival. He then sets about trying to beat all the odds to try and a) survive, b) communicate with his NASA colleagues on Earth and, c) organise some kind of plausible rescue in the kind of time window he has left before the inevitable stranglehold of approaching death comes to claim him.

And you know what? It’s a pretty good film.

Having a likeable celebrity like Matt Damon in the lead role certainly helps lift this and, luckily, he is supported by an absolutely astonishing cast of cool actors such as Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, Michael Peña and Chiwetel Ejiofor... not to mention a load of lesser known actors (to me, at least) who all knock it out of the park when it comes to performance. That is to say, like the best science fiction, the acting makes everything completely credible and, with a plot like this, where credibility isn’t so much of an issue due to the implied scientific know how... everything seems totally convincing in this movie. Even the bits which might not be quite as scientifically accurate as you might hope or expect.

Scott doesn’t direct this in the same way as the earlier movies that I best remember of his (The Duelists, Alien, Blade Runner, Legend or Someone to Watch Over Me, for example) and I was expecting the movie to be full of extremely long, slow pans and a very specific kind of lighting style which I didn’t see once. Instead, we have a way of shooting, or at least editing, which splits things up into smaller cells of time. Now don’t get me wrong here... this isn’t cut/cut/cut for the MTV generation kind of filmmaking... but it is a heck of a lot pacier and it struck me that Scott has done a clever thing here...

What he seems to be doing is splitting up the Matt Damon scenes of isolation and shooting them from different viewpoints and sources in order to somehow pacify the sense of isolation for the character. The director could very easily have gone down a Mr. Forbush and the Penguins kind of route (reviewed here) with the way in which he shot the lead actor but, instead, he goes from maybe a close up or slow pan to a different view as seen from a monitor... or on another kind of visual source. And quite a lot of the action deliberately takes us away from Damon and shows it all from the point of view of either the people on Earth or Damon’s colleagues, who are on their way back home. Though this is possibly dictated by the content of the novel (and like I said, I really don’t know)... the writer and director could easily have gone for a version of the movie which stays with the title character a lot more and gets information from other sources communicated in a different way than it is here. So it’s an artistic choice and I think either way could have worked very well and got us two completely different looking movies.

Scott’s gone this way and it seems to work really well.

The other thing we have here is a movie with no real central antagonist. Okay, yeah, it could be argued that Jeff Daniels character fulfils that role to a certain degree... almost by default because he’s the one who has to make a lot of tough decisions. However, this is more a disaster movie in the aspect that most people are all there pulling for each other (including Daniels) and this does tend to give the movie a strangely unexpected feel good factor. This is not a downbeat film by any means and, I think, Scott has chosen not to emphasise the chronic sense of danger in the way he’s shot this movie...

For instance, when Damon’s title character, Mark Watney, accidentally blows himself up while he is trying to find a way to manufacture water to grow potatoes for food, it’s played mostly for comedy and the moment the calamity happens is almost slapstick in the way it is timed and staged. It certainly got a huge laugh from the audience I was with at my local cinema. Sure, we are aware of the consequences but they’re downplayed to an extent where we can watch the drama unfold without taking things too dryly. Now that’s possibly not the most appropriate decision but it’s certainly a solid artistic decision and, whether you agree with it or not, you have to give the moviemakers some credit for taking a less expected route.

At the end of the day, The Martian is a surprisingly strong 'feel good' movie. I certainly wasn’t expecting that from someone like Ridley Scott, who is certainly no stranger at portraying ‘the black dog’ on film... but it’s certainly what I got. It’s maybe not as bleak or as effective in the sense of filling the audience with the appropriate amount of terror that such a situation presents us with but it’s extremely watchable and a real fun trip of a movie. Perhaps not a complete masterpiece but certainly a fine work of art from a great British director... so give this one a go if you like plausible science fiction wrapped up in an addictive little package of a movie. Not one you’d want to miss having an opinion on, methinks.

Blade Runner

Errors In Replication

Blade Runner
1982 USA/China
Directed by Ridley Scott
Warner Brothers Blu Ray A/B/C

Warning: I doubt if anyone reading this has not seen this masterpiece... but I’m putting this here spoiler warning on, just in case. Also... fair warning, if you’re unfamiliar with the film you may be a bit left out in this article. I’m not going to provide a synopsis... this article is going to be long enough as it is. See one of the cuts of the movie first, then please revisit and read this article again if you have the time.

“They don’t advertise for killers in a newspaper...”

I remember hearing those words for the first time in a cinema in Enfield back in 1982.

Watching the original cut of Blade Runner now, 30 years on, those words still bring a special thrill to me and maybe it’s why the movie in the majority of its subsequent recuts and remixes doesn’t really fill me with the same enthusiasm as this initial version did.. although I’m not at all sure, to be honest, the US theatrical release was the one I actually saw in the cinema that day... my memory tells a slightly different story. But I’ll get to that soon.

I guess it’s hard for people to understand the effect that Blade Runner had on the general population of the movie going planet when it first came out that year, if they weren’t around to see it for themselves... especially now that the movie has become enshrined and recognised as the major artistic work it always was. Some people seemed stunned when you tell them just how badly it was received... or to be more precise... just how indifferently.

Here’s what happened back in 1982...

I was at school (school is something you should never subject children to, for the record) and I used to buy, whenever I could find them, two magazines which kept me fairly up to date with what was my version of the news... the British magazine called Starburst, which I’d been buying on and off (mostly off, as I never had any money) since its first issue, and the classier and slightly bulkier American equivalent of this magazine which had been going for a lot longer, known as Starlog. Now Starlog always used to get the inside dope on movies long before they ever arrived in Great Britain, and sometimes you were left in the cold waiting forever for a film to come out that you read about in Starlog but which, it turned out years later, never got any kind of general release in this country at all (and such was the fate, and why I’ve never seen, a movie I was looking forward to at the time called Heartbeeps... but that’s another story). So for months I was waiting for Blade Runner... but another kid got enthused when his Cinefex magazine arrived and covered the movie, so at least I had someone to talk to about it... although I don’t believe he actually got to see it on its initial release in the end. It didn’t actually stay at the cinema for very long, as far as I can remember.

So anyway, the movie gets quickly released and I go and see it with my parents after school one evening and I really enjoy it. It doesn’t stay for long, as I said, and that’s pretty much the last I hear of it until it comes out on the early VHS sell-through market, a few years later. That’s when I rediscover it again and it really hits me, the second time, just how special it was and why I’d loved it so much the first time around... although one of the things I notice about the VHS version is that it isn’t as violent as when I saw it at the cinema. The scene where Roy Batty squashes Dr. Eldon Tyrell’s eyes back into their sockets seems to cut away (quite poetically, I might add) to an owl looking away from the scene... and another sequence where Deckard “retires” Pris seems to be much less “in your face” too... I remembered a lot more thrashing around and shooting than on that early VHS release and, a few years later, when I get an NTSC US cassette edition of the Criterion edition of the movie, with reinstated violence (this movie had a lot of trouble with the US censors at the time, along with Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan), I realised that this version, known as the international cut, is the one I saw back at the cinema when it first came out. Now I don’t know how that happened because, I’m guessing, the UK would have supposed to have been showing the US theatrical cut... but I’m pretty sure my cinema was somehow showing this slightly longer version... I don’t know how that could have been, it’s just what I remember (it wouldn’t have been the first time my local cinema at the time had been sent the wrong print of a film though, to be sure).

So anyway, from about 1986 onwards, there was a time when me and one of my best mates went a bit Blade Runner crazy. I’d watched and rewatched the old PAL VHS version to death and knew the film and dialogue by heart by that point... but what you have to remember is that in those days, a commercial release of a movie in it’s correct theatrical aspect ratio was the exception rather than the rule... and the initial releases of Blade Runner on tape were, well, no exception. I finally figured out I needed to be seeing the thing in its full 2.35:1 aspect ratio again and I noticed one day in my local paper, that a cinema in Barnet was showing a midnight screening of the film. So me and my friend went and we got hooked all over again. I started scouring the local papers for one-off showings, when they really were one-off showings, and lots more screenings followed. Many of them didn’t finish until 2am in the morning but that was okay, we were pretty dedicated to this movie.

After a while, we realised that a small following of people, many of the same ones, were turning up to these screenings and that it was becoming quite popular as a film in a way in which it never was on it’s actual theatrical release all those years ago (this, of course, contradicts the use of the term cult when used in conjunction with film... popularity rules that clichéd notion right out). I even went to a screening at Hampstead where it screened as the second half of a double bill with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, with Rutger Haur in attendance (he was nice enough to sign my storyboard illustrated screenplay for me, which was good of him).

And then something happened in the USA which put Blade Runner back on the map for the bigwigs in the studio marketing departments who can make a difference... and things changed. The midnight movie and repertory screenings of Blade Runner, which had been quite popular for a few years in the UK, had started to happen in the USA and, quite by accident, an LA theatre accidentally showed Ridley Scott’s original workprint, which he’d used to test screen the movies on audiences prior to recutting and releasing the movie in 1982. It was a big hit... it’s a very “different” Blade Runner experience with vast differences to the original release prints and, in some ways, almost like watching a different movie. My understanding is that, when it caught on that this was a different version of the movie playing, all the fans came out of the woodwork for it and it played to packed theatres for weeks, if not months. The film that was a huge flop on its initial release suddenly seemed to have grown some potent, biomechanically engineered legs for the audience of that particular theatre.

Warner Brothers saw dollar signs and got Ridley Scott to put a directors cut out but, sensing the timing was a “now” thing, the deadline was very tight. All Ridley really had time to do, in my understanding of events, is take off the voice over, add a dopey memory flashback of a unicorn (culled from outtakes of his later film Legend, most likely) and remove the entire original ending coda (half assembled from outtakes of the opening of Stanley Kubrik’s opening sequence for The Shining, as it turns out) and that was that. None of the extra footage and shot alterations etc from the workprint edition made it into this new 1991 “director’s cut”, which Warners managed to turn into a win anyway because, as it happens, the film was really well loved by people after all. A lot of fans of the original cut, myself included, were left a little disappointed, though. Here are the five main reasons why:

1. We liked the voice over... which we do understand was added post-preview, much against Harrison  Ford’s wishes but, whatever you think of it, it does give the original cut a certain hard-boiled film noir quality which really helps it along.

2. It’s been widely reported that the revelation that the Rachel replicant has no built-in four year life span in the end sequence was contradictory to everything we’ve known about the replicants up to that point... not true, actually. This flimsy connection only works if you interpret Harrison Ford’s reluctance to tell Rachel about her files as the knowledge that she will only live for four years... but that’s really not acknowledged. What we do know, from the rest of the dialogue in the film regarding Rachel’s origins, is that she’s a special version, possibly pre-Nexus Six or at least an early version, and quite possibly the first to have false memory implants. The main replicants in the film cannot be fixed because the four year life span engineered into them by the Tyrell Corporation is already in place... to quote Tyrell himself, it “cannot be altered in any way”... nobody says anything about not being able to make them last longer from scratch if they wanted to. In fact, the very necessity of them actually having to be rebuilt with a four year life span implies that they already have done so and then seen the need to add that feature in to iron out certain problems. And so on... I could go on all day (and will if you let me).

3. The awful, awful, badly dubbed and completely out of synch sequence where Deckard interrogates the artifical snake manufacturer wasn’t cleaned up in the slightest.

4. We all love the scene where Deckard shoots Zhora in the back a few times and she smashes through all those windows to her death. Especially when the voice-overs are present. It makes you realise just how human (yeah, human, I said it) Deckard is and helps give you a moral viewpoint of the character in much the same way that the “man with a sack” sequence in Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria gives the character of Cabiria a massive insight into herself. But the thing is, even in this version, that darned stuntwoman who looks nothing like actress Joanne Cassidy, appears to be totally ridiculous and mismatched... especially in that dodgy wig! A hard thing to fix (back then) and we certainly wouldn’t have expected him to be able to fix that one post-release... but then again, who does?

5. Reason number five is the dumb unicorn...

A lot of people who compare the movie to Philip K. Dick’s original source novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? say that the movie is nothing like the book. Well... yes and no. Although the “mission brief” is virtually identical, as is at least one scene, the movie goes its own way and lots of stuff is changed. Deckard is no longer living with his wife, and his motivation for hunting down the andies (short for androids) in the book is because he needs the money to be able to afford to replace his electric sheep with a real, live sheep. Animals are scarce in the future and expensive. It’s a social embarrassment not to be owning a real one though... that would be bad. But most people can’t afford to own a real animal so there’s a thriving trade in fake electric animals which look like the real thing. This is what Deckard desires and it is this kinda stuff which drives humanity. That and their bizarre “religious coupling” with a shared vision of a figure called Mercer, who is about to be debunked on the Buster Friendly vid show any day now. This is the background milieu of the novel... and it’s very potent (if a little hard to grasp, first read around, when it comes to the concept of Mercer) and you can’t fail to be moved by the novel... like a lot of Dick’s writing. The bit where Deckard has finally earned enough money to buy/save a sheep only to have it thrown off the rooftop of his building by one of the androids is absolutely soul crushing and brilliant.

For the movie, Scott loses all the references to Mercerism (which are pretty important in the book) and most of the stuff about the animals. What he retains, however, is the empathy and moral values of the novel... and the importance of the animals The animals are all over the film in the form of references to artificial animals... and I’ve had so many people ask me why all these animal references are in the film. There’s no context to this stuff if you’re an audience unfamiliar with the original novel, you see. You have no way of knowing just how important these things are to the main characters... and so it kinda gets lost in translation... but it’s still there, etched into the celluloid in a way that would be very difficult to eradicate, even if one chose to do so.

The book also has a sequence where Deckard is forced to confront the issue of whether he is an android or not. This is a plot by the androids themselves and, it turns out, Deckard definitely isn’t... as he wasn’t in the original cut of the movie. I believe that the idea that Deckard is a replicant in the movie was never supposed to have been in the final version of the film (contrary to what Scott says about it now) and here’s why:

a. If Deckard was a much earlier model of replicant, he wouldn’t have fake memories and, although he wouldn’t be a match for a Nexus 6, he certainly would be a stronger character against the other humans (none of whom are in any way as human as the artificial replicants in the movie... who are pretty much morally superior when compared against all the “real” people in this movie). And you wouldn’t send out an inferior model of replicant to hunt down Nexus 6 models anyway, would you? Logically.

b. Getting back to the “Rachel is an experimental version” notion, the origami unicorn that gaff leaves at the end of the movie makes perfect sense. He’s basically telling Deckard that he should enjoy his time together with Rachel, because she’s a mythical creature, a soulless machine with the overt appearance of a warm-blooded human. If Deckard believes he can have a life with her, then he’s living a fairy tale... and so he’s welcome to it. That’s Gaff’s take on it anyway and hence, the origami symbolism of the unicorn. A mythical, fairytale creature.

When Ridley Scott adds the “memory” of an actual unicorn to Deckard’s dreams in the later cuts, then this kinda makes those elements I’ve mentioned above look ridiculous, flawed and, basically, as poorly thought out as anything in Scott’s Prometheus. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ridley Scott’s artistic sensibilities and Blade Runner is my favourite movie, but I think the notion that this frail, human being who even, in my favourite moment, drops his apartment key card because Rachel accidentally frightened him in the elevator, is actually a replicant is... more flawed in concept than a poor, genetically hobbled Nexus 6 model’s lifespan. If this is Scott’s choice now, well, all I can say is... Morphology? Longevity? Incept Dates? He don’t know such stuff!*

And then, for the movies 25th year anniversary, five years ago, we have the big box set in variant versions with five cuts in it, including a new, 2007 Final Cut, which is (or was, apparently) his last word on it.

There’s some extra footage in it but, to be honest, not a heck of a lot. The good things about the new cut are that he’s finally fixed the interrogation dialogue with the snake manufacturer and he’s also got Joanne Cassidy back for reshoots which he somehow manages to blend in seamlessly to replace the dodgy wigged stunt girl of all the previous versions. However, as far as the bad stuff goes, all the other complaints I had about the 1991 directors cut asides from these two fixes, still stands. This may be Ridley’s latest Blade Runner... but it’s not mine.

So onto the film itself then... if you really have never seen it and you’ve made it this far into this review, well you need to see it quick. It’s astonishing. The world Scott and his crew of artists and effects teams create is absolutely beautiful. It’s a real, lived in city of the future which, although harkening back to the Fritz Lang classic Metropolis, along with the comic-book art of Meobius, is itself a dazzling achievement and there’s no way that films like The Fifth Element and a whole plethora of science fiction movies right up to the present day would have happened in quite the same way without the influence of this amazing film.

The lighting and design of the shots and the placement of both people and elements within those shots are amazing. The vulnerability of Deckard, the very man sent to take out these super-human beings called replicants, is absolutely an untypical, of the time, character and did a lot, I believe, to relax Hollywood ideas about how emotionally and physically imperfect the main protagonist of your movie is allowed to be.

Vangelis’ score, shamefully unreleased in a proper version (and there have been numerous attempts, believe me), is absolutely sublime and weaves in and out of your mind like an earworm 20 plus years before the term was even invented. The grime and sleaze of the streets and the dregs of humanity who are still living on earth and not in one of the “off world colonies” are all given a poetic and somewhat epic feel by the mise-en-scene in general and it’s lifted to a point where it often feels like you are watching a moving version of a precious painting which should be hung in an art gallery. The poetry of the images matched note by note by the beauty of the scoring and sound design. It’s the film where the term “designer grime” originated.

There are things you’ll notice, too, if you are a fan of movie history. The “Environ Purge” screen that Ridley included in the destruction of “Mother” in Alien is recycled here, as is the Sydney Greenstreet character of The Fat Man from The Maltese Falcon, in the toys in the character, J. F. Sebastian’s apartment (Ridley loves recycling stuff... he even recycles future moments of dialogue from later on in the movie and puts it in as a sound sample in Deckard and Rachel’s Voight-Kampff scene). Loads of little details, some intentional, some not expecting to be caught years later by obsessive watchers of the movie... all of it forms a potent cocktail that will have you reaching to the back of your mouth to rid yourself of the little maggot that was lurking at the bottom of the grimy, cinematic bottle. There aren't many movies since this one which have had all their elements, perfect and imperfect, come together to create such a brilliant and awe inspiring artistic blend as this one.

The new Blu Ray edition has a replica spinner which is a lot different from the version which was released with the American briefcase edition from 5 years ago, but the digital content of the Blu Ray seems to me to be exactly the same. You have the five most important cuts: the Final Cut, the Original Theatrical Cut (which is the one which was regularly shown on its UK midnight movie revival), The International Cut (which is the old Criterion version and the one I believe I actually saw at the cinema in 1982), the Director’s Cut from 1991 (now rendered redundant for so many reasons, as far as I’m concerned) and the original preview Work Print, which is the one that caused all the fuss when it was shown by accident and which is, to say the least, a very valuable edition, featuring longer and alternate versions of some of the scenes and some of the original musical temp tracks, most of which seem to come from Jerry Goldsmith scores such as Planet Of The Apes and Alien. You also have some quite exhaustive documentaries, still galleries, trailers and deleted scenes (which one day make the cut in a “beyond final cut” I would guess). All this stuff is valuable to fans of the film and, even though it’s just a duplicate set, by and large, to what we had five years ago, it’s still something which should be applauded and rewarded with high sales. At least when Ridley Scott revises his films, some may say for the worse, he makes available all his previous stabs so you can experience the version of the film that you want to be seeing at any given time... something that a certain Mr. George Lucas might learn from, is my opinion on that one.

There’s so much stuff I could say about this movie that I could literally go on forever. How about I break the film down into 5 minute sections and write a chapter or two on each? This review is already way too long though so if there’s anything you want to know further to what I’ve written here, please leave a comment/question and I’ll try to get back to you.

One thing I will say, though, is that if you’ve never experienced this movie at a cinema, or even a massive screen, and especially if you’ve never experienced it at all... then I urge you to do so. It’s one of the greatest artistic achievements of 20th Century film art. That comes with the caveat, of course, that you try and see one of the original 1982 cuts first... my understanding of people who have just seen the "director’s cut" blind without having seen the original version are that their experience is far less rewarding without those “dreaded” (to some) voice-over narratives. Whatever you do though... go see it. Every sequence is a learning experience on the art of film.

*With thanks to Chew, as played by James Hong in the movie.