The Long-Awaited Director's Cut of My Blade Runner Post

>I thought the story was MUCH more profound than that.

The ORIGINAL film's story (in which Deckard is human) was much more profound than that. The revised versions (in which he isn't human) take what was originally a soaringly dystopian parable on the fragile, elusive nature of humanity, and sink it to the level of a hackneyed "hey, we're all robots!" sci-fi flick with retarded film-school pretentions grafted on. You dismiss the question as trivial, but if the Deckard character is not human, that harms the film, fatally. It becomes, as you say, just another science fiction film - with nothing particular to tell us beyond its admittedly smashing yarn.

By the way, when I say "the original" I mean the one that played at theaters near you, in 1982. The film that Scott was happy to take credit for, and have his name up on the posters of - up until he decided he had sufficient clout and stature to abysmally dumb it down into a long-running franchise of hack-job do-overs.

With Deckard as a replicant the film becomes simplistic and one-dimensional. Just look at what it does to Roy's final act of mercy - which you rightly single out as the key moment of the film! But why is it such a powerful moment? There's something ineffably compelling about a robot sparing his human enemy because he has realized something essential about humanity, and has in fact become arguably more human than the human who was hunting him. Roy's mercy teaches human Deckard what it is to be human - or what it should be. It's the gap between them, and the act of mercy which bridges that gap, that makes the gesture so powerful. But there's nothing particularly interesting about one robot sparing the other robot's life because he realizes we're all robots. What's the message there, "we replicants gotta stick together?" PAH!!

With Deckard as a human the film is rich in meaning, in interwoven themes about the nature of humanity. With Deckard as a replicant it sacrifices all of its meaning and richness for the equivalent of an M. Night Shyamalan trick plot twist, becoming an empty exercise in the manipulation of audience expectation. I admit that you could seriously say, "hey, if he's a replicant too, that's kind of neat!" But “kind of neat” is as far as you can take it.

What a comedown from the original.

By the way, I may reference Shyamalan derisively, but at least he will put his twist into the movie - rather than trying to graft it on retroactively via recuts and press conferences.