The latest in an army of anniversary enhanced reissues with new or never-before-seen featurettes and sundry perks, Blade Runner: The Final Cut débuts at the 2007 New York Film Festival prior to a “showcase theatrical run” to rev up sales of several distinct scaled DVD boxes set for Xmas.

Sir Ridley Scott’s film shows natural creaks after twenty-five years and isn’t all that different from memory’s picture. If the total cinema package does not hit one over the head, it nevertheless provides more food for thought this time around. Following initial lackluster performance, over a few years the film built up enough clout for the director to regain control and, in the first of several updated reincarnations, undo studio tampering by getting rid of an imposed optimistic ending and flat voiceover by Harrison Ford and reinserting a unicorn dream sequence just vaguely hinting that that actor’s Rick Deckard character is possibly of the species he is enlisted to hunt down.

A difficult person and “poor man’s Pynchon,” Philip K. Dick died of a stroke months before the June 1982 theatrical release, and the at-first chilly reception seemed to sound a cinematic death knell, as well, for the science-fiction works of the author who has since become a movie gold mine. Flawed in technique -- Scott could not read through the book -- but striking in concept and thought, those works anticipated moral-technological dilemmas wrestled with today. The visuals in the film’s loose adaptation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? overpowered concerns of the 1968 novel -- “distracted by the environment,” as Scott has it -- that are discernible now at distance and time.

First, visceral response is to sets, art, production values. Through a bluish glass darkly, Autumn 2019 Los Angeles is a soulless mix of Star-Wars-mothership headquarters, dismal exterior architecture, neon, pivoting searchlights, fast-food stalls, huddled masses of an Asian-ized population and Huxleyan soma, where, from the Hammond-Hazlewood pop song metaphor, it never rains but, man, it pours, in spades.

Second, one fixes on straight plot, played out in retro-‘40s tailoring and styles and which is itself none other than detective-noir of that era and appropriately filled with oddball characters who are color against dark blind-slatted interiors and the darker antihero and his woman. A liability in Ford’s low-key deadness, Deckard is dragged from retirement as the best “blade runner,” a cop whose specialty is removing from circulation any androids who escape back to Mother Earth from unpleasant drone work at Off-World colonies. Six have fled, four certainly landed in California, and are particularly dangerous Nexus 6 models, Tyrell Corp.’s most advanced genetic engineering, stronger than, and distinguishable from real people in their lack of any emotions; more to their point, dates of death, or life expectancy, are built in like obsolescence, are therefore knowable and, they hope, subject to alteration.

Himself tailed by mysterious dandified origami-making cop Gaff (Edward James Olmos), the blade runner is bloodily manhandled (or robothandled) but nails two of the replicants, one on his own (Joanna Cassidy) and the other (Brion James) by Rachel (Sean Young), his shadowed love interest who works for Tyrell (Joe Tuckel) and is, the latter intones, herself in turn a manufactured non-human.

Two escapees are still at large, leggy clown-faced waif Pris (Daryl Hannah) and leader Roy Blatty (Rutger Hauer), to be found at the home of genetic genius J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), whose own premature-ageing disease and therefore early death are parallels to that of the replicants.

Notwithstanding old-fashioned family photos on his piano, their maybe not flesh-and-blood pursuer is bloodless in comparison. Amidst echoes of Metropolis, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Mary Shelley’s scientist/God-as-failed-father Promethean novel, the unnatural humanoids join Milton’s Satan in being more expressively human than their creators-hunter adversaries.

Oozing the ice-blond menace that became his later career stock-in-trade, Hauer is as implacable as the police, but his “it’s not an easy thing to meet your maker, [from whom] I want more life, Father,” points to his stigmata pain and very human awe at the cosmos. Possibly taking it from the 1974 Baldwin-Berg Santana’s Greatest Hits cover, the Dutchman reportedly suggested his own final symbolic dove, a man-made creature’s soul returning to that cosmos from this bleak man-made hell of a world. 

(Released by Warner Bros. Not rated  by MPAA.)