Saturday, October 06, 2007

Ridley Scott's Final Cut of Blade Runner coming soon!

Was browsing Amazon's list of upcoming DVD releases - and what caught my eye was the Blade Runner boxed set that contains the different releases so far, plus the new Final Cut by Ridley Scott. (Amazon says the release date is 18 Dec 07)

Which had me going back to memories of the film. The Noir look. The crowded street market. The mix of high tech (biotech) with what seemed like messy, low-end, chaotic back alley hawker stalls and seedy shops from a Hong Kong, Singapore or Taiwan in the 70's, updated for cyberpunk. The Vangelis score. The architecture. The huge animated displays. Rachel at the piano looking positively beautiful in her misery. The humanity of the replicants.

Damn. What a brilliant film.

And the best part has to be the rooftop scene, where Roy Batty, super soldier replicant, changes his mind about Rick Deckard, (who features the quintissential Harrison Ford grimaces of pain) and pulls him up from a certain death fall.

Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, gives a small speech before going all out to fight his impending end:
I've seen things...
(long pause)
seen things you little people wouldn't
believe...
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as
magnesium...
I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched c-beams
glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate.
(pause)
all those moments...
they'll be gone.
There's something epic conjured up by Batty's speech. Something that reminds me of the climatic battles in the Ring of Nibeuleng, re-framed in high-tech deep space warfare. There's something of the end of Morpheus, up in the peaks with sister Death, and the furies seething nearby. There's something that makes you think about the value of a limited lifespan, of the meaning of humanity, of the way we are making moves towards playing God. The value of our memories. The REALNESS of our perceptions and memories. Too Much!



Easy to guess what Martin Luther King (see recent posting) would have thought about if he'd survived to see this film.

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