Elite Rep Detector
Posts: 416
Joined: Tue Jul 10, 2007 6:49 pm
Location: Paranoia City, Valley Sector, LA County
Report from West LA Sector, Los Angeles, 2019 (BR:FC Review)
There were no changes in the opening title sequence. Still very minimalist, still the same crawl from everything but the Workprint. But when that first shot of the infernal landscape near Tyrell Industries cut loose...WOW!!! E-Ticket flight...you could almost feel the heat.
The color balance issue that people have been writing about...I have to say that every choice, every tweak, is the correct one when watching the movie in a theatre. It might look different on a TV, LCD, Plasma, Home Projector etc. but it is dead solid perfect straight through.
I could swear there was a lot of ADR work done on the movie. Some of the additional audio information perhaps could be credited to a better mix. But it seems to me that there was more cityspeak audible, mostly in the back and side channels. The sweetening sort of stopped with the subwoofer track...no real added sub-audio pyrotechnics. There were places where it would have helped...gunshots, particularly Leon's Black Hole Gun, could have used a little subwoofer rumble behind it.
At once, it is fitting to see Joanna Cassidy's face on the dying Zhora, and sad too. This way, Zhora's death scene is more realistic, and I can't help but think about how nice Cassidy was at Comic-Con and how it sucked to see her get it in the back. Wonder if "Darling" is still among the living. He's probably huge if he is...Burmese Pythons get pretty damn colossal.
More life, father....yeah, I can live with that. However, you don't see Sebastian's jacket in Batty's hands when he's in the elevator on the way down. The way the scene is framed this time it doesn't show on the big screen.
Yes, you see that unearthly shine in Deckard's eyes, giving away that he is, indeed, a Replicant. In fact, I could swear you see that glint in Gaff's eyes as well once, as well as that odd dead fish look from the blue contacts which was already present. Deck-a-rep, meet Gaff-a-rep.
I was crying during some of this, because it was so vivid, so amazing, so freaking overwhelming. No, I never saw this on the big screen, as I have mentioned before. Now I have. You have not seen it until you've seen it on the big screen. Period. End of story.
Charles, you have done a man's job with this. If they gave Oscars for restoration jobs, this would be a shoo-in.
Back in the day, there was such a thing as "road show" showings of movies. A big blockbuster picture would play the biggest movie palace in a given town for a day or two. Blade Runner: The Final Cut deserves this kind of treatment. In this day and age of digital projection and satellite distribution, this can be done. I strongly urge Warner Bros. to consider giving more people in more cities the opportunity to see this on the big screen. I suspect that even the 1 Megapixel version on HD-DVD and BluRay will be only an hors d'oevre for those wanting to have the ultimate BR:FC experience.
I need to grow some more arms so I can give this more than two thumbs up.