Blade Runner - Director’s Cut - Stockholms filmfestival

In a not too distant future many people have emigrated to other planets. There work is done by man-like robots - replicants. After bloody rebellions, the replicants have been forbidden to go back to earth. Four of them have managed to come back anyway. They want the man who created them to prolong their lives. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a kind of police, called a Blade Runner, who has been given the assignment of destroying the four replicants. During his search he meets the beautiful Rachel.

Comment:
''Wake up - it's time to die.'' It is time to go back to the future! After ten years Ridley Scott's sdence fiction classic Blade Runner is back again, with its dark, rain drenched, dystopian and overpopulated world of the future. It is excellent that those who missed Blade Runner, and the younger generation that have only seen it on video, now get
the chance to enjoy this movie on the big screen.
The forceful fascination awakened by
this film has many sources: the overpowering trash-futuristic setting, the many unforgettable lines, the well-balanced exposure of technical gadgets and not least the many remarkable characters of the film. Blade Runner also affords some experiences
of the more peculiar sort; like the scene
in which Rutger Hauer delivers his poetical speech to life and death against a background of a sparkling advertising sign. A death-scene sponsored by TDK? Anything is possible in the amazing world of Blade Runner.
Not much has been added to the new
version, but a few things that used to
cause irritation and that one had to ignore in order to enjoy the film, have now been becommgly removed from the original. We need no longer hear Harrison Ford's slightly pathetic, somewhat patronizing and explaining. speaker voice. The former last sequence of the film which was simplistic and seemed tailed on, has been removed as well. The way the film ends now (the way it was intended from the start) is much
more subtle and symbolically charged.
This second version shows what a thin line it is that divides a masterpiece from a partly successful experiment. Now Blade Runner emerges as a sublime artistic film creation and at last it can rightfuny be considered to be among the most pioneering,
fascinating classics of film history. And unlike many trendsetting films from the early and mid-eighties it hasn't ''aged'' at all. It is just as innovative and creative today as it was when it first appeared.
Goran Linderoth