Popular director Christopher Nolan recently made headlines for claiming that the theatrical cut of Blade Runner is the best version of the film. This opinion was notable because it cuts against the grain of the general consensus among critics and science fiction fans that Ridley Scott's director's cut is the definitive version of Blade Runner. Nolan is wrong about the theatrical cut of Blade Runner being the best version, but his comments do say something interesting about both the legacy of Blade Runner and the differences between Nolan and Scott as directors.

First released in 1982, Blade Runner stars Harrison Ford as Decker, a man hired to track down renegade android replicants in a near-future Los Angeles. While the initial theatrical release received mixed reactions, the movie has since become regarded as a classic and a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre of sci-fi. Even star Harrison Ford changed his mind about how good Blade Runner was. A large part of this critical re-evaluation was due to the release of director Ridley Scott's personal cut of the movie on home video, which undid the several changes made by studio Warner Brothers.

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However, Christopher Nolan, the director of similarly influential movies such as The Dark Knight and Inception, evidently disagrees with this consensus. In a recent interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Nolan expressed his admiration for the Theatrical Cut:

It is the best version of the film. It's imperfect – and it seems presumptuous and I'm a huge fan of Ridley Scott, so I don't want to go up against his view in a sense – but the reality is, that tension between the marketplace, between the studios, between the fights, the creative stuff that happens when a film goes out, unless they literally pull the film out of the director's hands and recut it, and bastardize it in some way, I think really the authoritative version of the film tends to be the one that goes out there in theaters.

Nolan is evidently an admirer of Scott movies like Alien and Blade Runner, but differs from the influential director philosophically. Nolan sees the true movie as the result of many collaborators, whereas Scott sees it as the director's original vision. However, Blade Runner is one of the worst examples Nolan could have picked, as the director's cut is clearly superior to the theatrical version.

Blade Runner's 7 Different Cuts Explained: Why It Has So Many Versions

The Esper Machine from Blade Runner

Blade Runner is one of the most re-released and re-edited films of all time, with seven different versions in existence. Two early versions, the workprint version and a sneak preview shown in San Diego in 1982, were screened before test audiences. Due to negative responses from these audiences, Warner Bros made several edits to Blade Runner. This included shooting new scenes, including a more conventional happy ending, and having Harrison Ford record a voice-over to make the plot clearer.

There were also slightly different versions of the theatrical release cut for international theaters and for television broadcast, with different levels of violence. In 1990, theaters began screening an unfinished workprint of Scott's original virgin of the film. This created interest that lead to the release of an official theatrical cut in 1992. This version included a more ambiguous ending and a dream sequence in which Deckard sees a unicorn. Police officer Gaff, played by Edward James Olmos, leaves an origami unicorn in Deckard's apartment at the end of the movie, raising the possibility that Deckard is himself a replicant and his dream was planted to help keep him in line. The new version caused a critical re-appraisal of Blade Runner and made Scott's original vision for the film clearer.

There was also a Blade Runner "Final Cut" released in 2017, which incorporated the more violent scenes from the international release and expanded the unicorn dream scene. Five of the seven different cuts are available in the Ultimate and 30th Anniversary Collectors' Editions of Blade Runner. However, the most crucial changes are between the versions based on Scott's original print, including the Director's Cut and Final Cut, and those based on the Warner Bros theatrical release, including the international cut.

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The Problems With Blade Runner's Theatrical Cut

The theatrical cut preserves much of what is great about Blade Runner, including Scott's gloomy depiction of a future LA and tremendous performances by actors like Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah. However, it weakens the dark and morally ambiguous vision which Scott took from influential sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, who also provided the material for other classics like Total Recall. The biggest offender is the studio-added ending, a cliche scene of Deckard and Rachael riding into the sunset, which doesn't fit with the cynical tone of the preceding movie at all.

The worst part of the theatrical cut is Harrison Ford's added narration, which sounds bored and over-explains the story's plot. The voice-over ruins the moody silences which are crucial to the pacing of Scott's film. The theatrical version of Blade Runner isn't a bad movie by any means, but Warner Bros' attempts to make a cynical film noir into a saleable action movie make it less than it could be.

What The Best Version Of Blade Runner Really Is

Replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner

The best way to watch Blade Runner now is through either the Director's Cut or Final Cut. The Final Cut of the Ridley Scott sci-fi movie has an edge because of its somewhat more visceral action, but the two versions are similar enough that they can easily substitute for each other. However, the gap between these two versions and the theatrical release is larger, and the changes made for the theatrical version make Blade Runner a worse and more muddled movie.

The most crucial Director's and Final Cut addition is the "unicorn dream" scene, which challenges the nature of reality in the movie by suggesting Deckard himself could be a replicant. This suggestion makes the movie much more ambiguous and true to Dick's original themes. Ironically, the unicorn dream is the same type of plot twist that Christopher Nolan would become famous for using in his sci-fi movies like Inception and Interstellar.

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Nolan's argument that the theatrical version is better is charmingly unorthodox, but thus hard to justify. It does make sense, however, that Nolan might prefer the version of Blade Runner that provides more of a handhold for unwary audiences. Nolan is always concerned with creating an accessible experience for the audience, to the point that he has sometimes be criticized for an abundance of exposition in movies like Inception and Tenet. Ridley Scott, while a less consistent filmmaker than Nolan, generally prefers to immerse the viewer in the world and let them figure things out, which is what makes Ford's voice-over narration in the theatrical cut so poorly fitting.

The more general philosophical approach that Christopher Nolan lays out, that a movie is better when it is the collective work of a group of people, is somewhat ironic given the extent to which all of his movies since The Dark Knight have been marketed as his personal vision. Nolan has become such a marketable name that he has never had such a public struggle with a studio over the content of his films as Scott did with Blade Runner, allowing him to take a rosier view of the relationship between studio and director. In part, the greater freedom afforded to filmmakers like Nolan is a result of the backlash to heavy-handed edits like the one Blade Runner suffered. So, while Nolan may genuinely think the theatrical version of Blade Runner is better, he is wrong to downplay the damage that studio edits did to Ridley Scott's original film.

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