What's the best Blade Runner version? (Off-Topic)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 13:08 (2601 days ago) @ Harmanimus

The bored, perpetual recap of the VO in the theatrical cut ruins anything else that it may have done better for me.

That's a totally fair opinion.

For me, while I agree that the VO isn't ideal, though I do really love noir films and the nod to the genre is something I appreciate. More than anything else, I find the pacing of the original to be more even than the director's cuts. It also seems to me that the VO is solving a problem of them having not actually shot footage to support some of the things that need clarity in the film. Ideally, VO is about describing the inner monologue of the speaker, but in Blade Runner it definitely tells what's going on in a few places (instead of showing, which is what a movie should do). It's clumsy, but - again - I'm pretty sure it was because they simply didn't shoot what they needed and VO was their cheap way out.

In general, I find the first film visually stunning, but generally I think it missed the mark. For being as groundbreaking as it was at the time, not living up to modern sci-fi standards is quite acceptable to me and I very quickly excuse the film for any of its attempts to appeal to a wider and less-savvy movie going audience.