The voiceover narration imposed by the studio for a theatrical version was a mistake - unrewarded by critics and audiences, who were initially cool on the film - but the director’s cut (and later, “The Final Cut”) allows for a stronger focus on Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a grimly determined cop assigned to hunt down a band of replicants gone rogue.
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The opening shots paint 2019 Los Angeles as an unrecognizable place transformed by technology (flying cars!) and omnipresent advertising, and the scene on the ground anticipates the confusion and danger of androids infiltrating society and overwhelming their masters. There’s no overstating the impact Blade Runner had on future visions of science-fiction dystopias, if not more generally the neo-noir sheen that has become the default look of so many genre films about glittering cityscapes of rain and shadow. But Scott gives over so much to McCarthy that it has the feel of a great novel - and a future cult classic. It’s an odd film to say the least, between the talkiness that curbs any narrative momentum and eccentric flourishes, like a car-humping to rival anything in Titane. Scott emphasizes the trappings and temptations of wealth and power as only he can, but as the scheme starts to unravel, McCarthy’s philosophical monologues take over with a beauty and violence of their own. Through the deliberately standard-issue story of an amateur criminal (Michael Fassbender) trying to arrange a $20 million drug shipment from a Ciudad Juárez cartel, McCarthy stares into the abyss of human evil and the abyss stares back, pitilessly. One of the worst-received films of Scott’s career also happens to be one of his best, though the lion’s share of the credit must go to Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the original screenplay and whose voice comes through more dominantly here than in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of his novel No Country for Old Men. And when everything’s going right, his best work has set a standard that other filmmakers have struggled to follow. But even the worst films on this list are worlds worth getting lost in, because he invests so much creative and technical energy on atmosphere and image-making that those elements endure regardless of the parts that don’t work. There’s an argument to be made that Scott peaked too soon or that he squandered his promise as a director of true science-fiction on a studio canvas.
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In the extreme case of Kingdom of Heaven, that’s a full 50 minutes lost and the difference between a Gladiator rehash with a weak center and a much richer treatment of the Crusades and a deep-seated religious conflict that continues to this day.
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The theatrical cut of Blade Runner, which added voiceover narration to help clarify the action, has been largely supplanted by the (slightly shorter) cut without voiceover, but the alternate versions of the others are not as easily found, especially on streaming. One surprising note on the list below: Scott has director’s cuts of several of his films - Blade Runner, Legend, Kingdom of Heaven, and The Counselor - and all of them are improvements on the theatrical versions, often significantly better. His facility with genre films was clear in the astonishing one-two-three punch that opened his career - the absurdist swashbuckler The Duellists, the deep-space horror film Alien, and the sci-fi dystopia of Blade Runner - but the true common denominator is a quest for beauty and a gift for allowing a fully realized backdrop to play a dominant role in the storytelling. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros, Universal Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayerįor over 40 years, director Ridley Scott has been opening the frame to visions of peerless grandeur, from the historical landscapes of Rome, the Middle Ages, and biblical Egypt to the vast emptiness of outer space and open water to the smog-choked cities of Los Angeles and Osaka, Japan.