So the Final Cut of Blade Runner has smoked me out of my blogging shell for the time being. I’m sure I won’t be saying anything that hasn’t already been said. The film is brilliant, huge, and so quintessentially L.A.

My relationship with this film is one that I don’t think I’ve ever shared. At the age of nine, my father took me to see the Director’s Cut of the film. The film profoundly scared me. I was affected by Blade Runner in a way no other film had ever done so. My mother, of course, was likely pissed off at my dad for even thinking of taking me to see the film at such an impressionable age – being a little kid, I was truly frightened by the film. It’s imagery, humanistic themes, and miasmic blend of language was lost on me. I saw violent killings, that creepy origami guy, and the insanely scary blond haired acrobatic duo. I distinctly remember the Vangelis score enthralling and terrifying in its scope. By default, Blade Runner was also the first noir film I ever really paid attention to at the time.

Nine years later and I was writing an academic essay on Blade Runner for a class on Interracial Dynamics. It was the second quarter of my freshman year at UCLA, and at the class screening of the film, I’m shocked to find I’m one of only a small throng of students that has actually seen the film before. The film is every bit as epic I’d remembered it when I was nine and the handful of times I had watched it since then (having grown a little braver with age).

The film’s current (and final?) form is a marked improvement. The film breathes slowly, deliberately. It allows its themes to unfold more humanely than before. It hurts to watch the replicants “retire,” to question and resist mortality, to persevere in the face of hatred. Is Blade Runner our modern Frankenstein (and by default our “Modern Prometheus”)? I’d posit an answer if I wasn’t so worried that it would be a cross-referenced indicator in your voight-kampff test.