More Human Than Human: Blade Runner, The Final Cut

Before Minority Report, before A Scanner Darkly, came by far the awesomest flick ever to be made out of a Philip K. Dick novel (sorry, Linklater). It's noir, it's scifi, it's scary, it's mind-bending: Blade Runner, which was released in 1982 and directed by Ridley Scott (immediately post-Alien), visualizes a fictional future Los Angeles where the natural world has been completely obliterated, leaving humans to live in a polluted, overdeveloped megacity, and wonder whether the replicant humans they've genetically engineered to serve them will eventually develop consciousness and rebel against their lot. (Guess what? They do.)

Harrison Ford is a policeman who's charged with eliminating rebel replicants; Sean Young (where'd she go?) is a beautiful replicant searching for answers; and Rutger Hauer is Roy Batty, leader of the rebels (says an articulate Hauer of the movie, "Blade Runner needs no explanation. It just is. All of the best. There is nothing like it. To be part of a real masterpiece which changed the world's thinking. It's awesome").

The movie has been released in several different versions, none of which, Scott says, has ever been the Definitive Cut. The Blade Runner about to play at the Paramount is the one Scott would have entered into posterity. So be it.