Good Guy Deckard:

[MCP]

To start off, I really, really enjoy this edit. It's the first time I've watched this movie and actually enjoyed it start to finish. Pretty much all of my issues with the original film are removed but there are just a couple tiny things that I don't necessarily agree with but are solely opinion based. The entire narrative is tightened, and it never feels like your time is being wasted. This makes the film much more enjoyable when you can focus on just the story itself instead of strange side scenes that serve no greater purpose than to perhaps "establish tone". As for the removing of the Rachel scene: This scene always sat weird with me, not because it makes me uncomfortable (it still does anyways), but because it feels entirely out of place with no narrative relevance. It makes his character more inconsistent and pushes him from ambiguous into just plain weird and creepy. By letting the story play out without it, he's kept more ambiguous and allowed to "develop" more than he otherwise would. Deckard already doesn't get developed much at all, so by keeping it out of direct attention, he blurs the line between being decent and bad, allowing you to have actual sympathy for him. The major thing that stood out to me was the removal of Gaff stating "It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?" after the tears in rain speech. As an iconic line from the original movie, I can't really see why this was removed. Maybe I'm missing something, or perhaps it was meant to leave Rachel's lifespan more ambiguous, but I think the rest of the film leaves it more ambiguous in that regard. If that line is kept in, it directly gives Deckard and the viewer more to consider, both about the possibility of her death in a few years (or less), or that he'll be the one going after her, given the calling card at the end of the film. In addition to the re-characterization of Deckard, this cut also seeks to make the replicants more sympathetic, and it does succeed in doing so. My concern is that it may do this at the expense of the original intent of the film and serves to take away some of the moral nuance of a group of individuals struggling to survive in a society that doesn't want them there. I think that the removal of certain scenes make sense, if we want to sympathize with this group we don't want to make them wholly look like psychopaths/sociopaths who revel in killing, which the original sometimes does. However removing things like the mentioning of them killing a crew almost minimizes their struggle. It's possible that this group should and would have to kill to survive and if we were to keep mention of them killing a crew it would be left up to the viewer to interpret what that might have meant in context of the rest of the film. If the rest of the film depicts them as more sympathetic, then we're led to believe that they would have done what they had to in order to survive. Overall though, my gripes are absolutely not a reason to watch this version. This is the first time I've legitimately enjoyed Bladerunner beginning to end and I really appreciate this edit for that.

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