Blade Runner 2!?

You mean Gaff giving Deckard orgami that matched Deckard’s dream? It was kind of vague whether Gaff knew about the dream or maybe it was just an unsettling coincidence. And Gaff gave K an orgami horse in the sequel. Maybe it was his thing (or they are trying to retcon). And then we have to compare which version of Bladerunner we are talking about.

The sequel left it vague for their own self-serving reason. A) invalidating one version over another probably means they will lose some audience from one camp or another. B) they can say that this story is about Rachel and her legacy. Whether Deckard is a replicant is tangential to this story and therefore they refuse to address it.

Is there a director’s/producer’s commentary on this?

Dude. Please. You think Ridley Scott put that in there as a last minute red herring? Just a coincidence to throw you off before you leave the theater? Wow, that guy happened to make an origami figure of a thing the other guy dreamed about in a movie where mental images can be manufactured and implanted into people’s heads! What are the odds?!?!??

:)

It’s a reveal, not a coincidence.

Well, that’s what you’ve got to establish up front. As I said, it’s a simple matter of which movie you watched. In one he is, in the other he’s not. And, yes, there’s a director’s commentary, books, interviews, scripts, footage, etc., etc., etc, that all corroborate Ridley Scott’s intent.

-Tom

Now I’m confused. Ridley Scott said he is a replicant, Harrison Ford said he is human, but the script writer Hampton Fancher said he isn’t a replicant.

When I was watching The Final Cut, I (like many others no doubt) looked for conclusive evidence that Deckard is a replicant. You say Gaff’s orgami is a reveal, but it could just as well be interpreted as a coincidence. Orgami is Gaff’s calling card, he is just putting Deckard on notice that he will come after Rachel (and/or him). The Final Cut did not settle the debate one way or another. There is evidence but nothing conclusive.

And we aren’t even talking about David Lynch. It is Ridley Scott! That Ridley Scott who made Alien: Convenent! So I thought he left it vague even in The Final Cut. He can talk outside of the movie, but looking just inside the movie it wasn’t clear.

He is not the Ridley Scott that made Covenant, but the Ridley Scott that made The Duelist and Alien. A different guy, and we’ll capable of subtlety.

We all know the unicorn sequence was not in the initial filming. It was filmed for the movie Legend and only put in for the Director’s Cut. As far as Scott “making a movie in which Deckard was a replicant”, Harrison Ford’s own words dispute that point as far as the original cut goes. He said that Scott was purposely non-committal on that point and we all know that Ford then decided that Deckard was human and acted accordingly. Your statement that it was the studio that declared Deckard to not be a replicant is not quite true. Ford says he is not. The two writers (Fancher and Peoples) say he was not written that way. The guy who wrote the original story (Dick) says he is not. Scott himself was non-committal on this point until his 1992 version. All evidence suggests that Deckard was most certainly not a replicant during initial filming.

For me, the defining characteristic is the actor playing the character played him as human and would have played him differently than if he was a replicant. The performance onscreen that we see is of Deckard as a human and there is no getting around that.

It really can’t. The director is telling you something, Soma.

There’s other evidence in the movie and that reveal is a significant part of how this is noir: the detective investigating something that ends up involving him directly. Here’s the discussion we recently had.

-Tom

Sigh. I really have no desire to get into all this again, but you’re repeating something that’s not true. Unicorn footage was indeed shot specifically for Blade Runner and taken out before the movie was released. You can read specifics in the other thread if you’re really interested.

-Tom

Do you also think Ben Hur didn’t have an homosexual relationship with Messala just because Charlton Heston didn’t play it that way???

The workprint of the film objectively does not have a unicorn scene. It was not taken out because it was never in.

Source?

We went over this in the other thread if you need help with the source. :)

-Tom

The workprint is included on the Final Cut 5-disc collector’s edition. There’s no unicorn. I just checked.

Thank you. I was going to upload the Workprint on a torrent for Tom otherwise.

@tomchick Also the orgami “reveal” would work too much as deus ex machina, because there were hardly any firm evidence that Deckard is a replicant until then. It is not like that was a eureka moment for me, nor do I think it was intended as such.

The story already works intelligently as a sort of The Crying Game about andriod: the ultimate dehumaniser of android, a blade runner, comes around and considers an android a human, by loving her. Without Deckard being an android. (Incidentally this message is what the sequel crudely beats your head with so you can’t miss it, whereas in the original it is all show-not-tell.)

The story becomes quite a different beast if Deckard is a replicant. And a mundane one IMO. It would be about one android breaking programming, which is a routine occurrence to require a blade runner.

Now I’m not saying Ridley Scott couldn’t have done the more mundane story, and intended it as sort of a clever twist. But that would be trading cleverness over intelligence.

He has that dream in the original as he falls asleep at the piano, doesn’t he? I don’t remember any other dreams in the movie so the addition/subtraction of that single shot changes whether you are supposed to think he is a replicant or not. Olmos could still give him the unicorn at the end and it wouldn’t have any particular significance without that shot. I think that was the exact intention of that shot, to change your view on him, and it only took one shot.

The other thing they did was add/remove all the overdubbed narration. With the narration Ford is explaining the whole movie to you in a rather pedantic way, without it the movie gains so much atmosphere, like the silent scene set to Vangelis where he walks around his empty dim apartment and goes out on his balcony with a drink and looks at the city while it’s raining and dripping, one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

Well, sure. At what stage of production was the workprint? The footage wasn’t used because of changes mandated by the studio. According to multiple sources, unused unicorn footage shot during the production of Blade Runner, contrary to Granath’s comment:

Bolding mine. We don’t all know that. And I’m still waiting for a source for his comment. I’ve shown my sources. And really, how is it even relevant? It’s a stupid argument to have. Because what if guys like Andy Bates (and I presume Soma and Granath) are right and Ridley Scott is lying. Let’s say there was no studio interference and the hundreds of people involved in the production are complicit in the lie. Let’s say Ridley Scott just thought up the director’s cut years later and it’s the product of a retconning conspiracy.

So what? It doesn’t change the fact that the later director’s cut is a movie about a guy who’s a replicant.

-Tom

I saw and liked this movie, and thought it was at minumum a worthy sequel to the colossus that is Blade Runner, which is an accomplishment in itself!

However, I had serious problems getting past the main conceit of the movie, that replicants can give birth. This really really bothered me. If replicants needed to reproduce, they certainly wouldn’t bother with sex, gestation, and birth to get there – it’s freaking ridiculous. I dunno, that one thing made the whole proceedings feel completely ridiculous to me. Like a damn clown nose on the whole package that I couldn’t stop seeing. 🤡

Oh one final aside that didn’t even occur to me when watching the original Blade Runner multiple times: why would you send a single human out to kill androids when androids are far more powerful than humans? Bit of a death wish, innit? It’s the first thing I thought of in 2049 and then the rest of it made sense: you wouldn’t! So if Deckard was / is a replicant in the original movie, maybe that’s why. No sane human would want to go out and hunt androids, and certainly not alone.

Incorrect per @desslock

Well, you’ve hit on one of the main points of the original idea that Deckard was a replicant. As they say in the Fast and Furious movies, it takes a wolf to hunt a wolf! It also explains why Gaff is sort of hovering around him the whole time. Gaff is keeping an eye on him because Gaff knows he’s a replicant.

That said, the idea of a lone detective working a case fits pretty well with noir, so I don’t have any problem with that in the theatrical release where he’s human. I think the title card also sets up this idea that he’s a special type of cop known as a blade runner. You might also figure guys like him and Holden need some sort of special training to administer Voight-Kompf tests. But, yeah, he does manage to get his ass kicked well and truly. Good thing Roy Batty had learned a bit of empathy.

-Tom

Or you could argue the earlier model Replicants weren’t as dangerous, and they got more powerful and dangerous as new models were released. So back then it was less crazytown to send out one lone human to chase androids?

Still, we can easily build a (very bad) robot today that could trivially pound a human into mush – brute power isn’t the problem, intelligence is.

(incidentally the above is why the Black Mirror episode “metalhead” is one of the best in that season, the tech is no more than 30 years out to do what you see there.)

We have to go deeper. Harrison Ford was never told he was playing a replicant in a movie where the character doesn’t know he’s a replicant. Only Ridley Scott knows the truth!

Anyway, I’m sympathetic to the replicant angle, but I always thought it was silly the director could just declare that. He’s not the sole owner of that. There are other stakeholders in the project that think differently.

Watching the sequel tonight!