Blade Runner - The Director's Cut

A blend of science fiction and noir detective fiction, Blade Runner (1982) was a box office and critical bust upon its initial exhibition, but its unique postmodern production design became hugely influential within the sci-fi genre, and the film gained a significant cult following that increased its stature. Harrison Ford stars as Rick Deckard, a retired cop in Los Angeles circa 2019. L.A. has become a pan-cultural dystopia of corporate advertising, pollution and flying automobiles, as well as replicants, human-like androids with short life spans built by the Tyrell Corporation for use in dangerous off-world colonization. Deckard's former job in the police department was as a talented blade runner, a euphemism for detectives that hunt down and assassinate rogue replicants. Called before his one-time superior ( M. Emmett Walsh ), Deckard is forced back into active duty. A quartet of replicants led by Roy Batty ( Rutger Hauer ) has escaped and headed to Earth, killing several humans in the process. After meeting with the eccentric Eldon Tyrell ( Joe Turkel ), creator of the replicants, Deckard finds and eliminates Zhora ( Joanna Cassidy ), one of his targets. Attacked by another replicant, Leon ( Brion James ), Deckard is about to be killed when he's saved by Rachael ( Sean Young ), Tyrell's assistant and a replicant who's unaware of her true nature. In the meantime, Batty and his replicant pleasure model lover, Pris ( Darryl Hannah ) use a dying inventor, J.F. Sebastian ( William Sanderson ) to get close to Tyrell and murder him. Deckard tracks the pair to Sebastian's, where a bloody and violent final confrontation between Deckard and Batty takes place on a skyscraper rooftop high above the city. In 1992, Ridley Scott released a popular director's cut that removed Deckard's narration, added a dream sequence, and excised a happy ending imposed by the results of test screenings; these legendary behind-the-scenes battles were chronicled in a 1996 tome, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon . — Karl Williams