Okay, I’ve seen this movie. You’ve seen this movie. Literally everyone has seen this movie. And I haven’t been rewatching things as I’ve gone through this list, right.

But… back in the Blu-ray era, I bought a 5-disc Blade Runner set that had like a zillion different versions of the movie on it, one of which was the brand-new “Final Cut” that apparently is the real director’s cut and has misc. improvements to it. Then I never watched it, but I did keep it when I got rid of 99% of my legacy DVDs and Blu-rays. And so I figured, hey, this is maybe the best chance I’ll ever have to watch that, let’s get ‘er done.

So, verdict is: It’s an excellent movie, just visual style up to here, and you really have to wonder how the heck a guy who made movies like this and Alien could end up making crap like Exodus: Gods and Kings and Kingdom of Heaven. As far as this particular edition of it compared to the others… uh, I’ll be honest, I don’t remember enough to have any intuitive sense of what the differences are. There are tons of sites that will give you the shot-by-shot breakdown, and based on those, I’ll say that I think the creative choices in this version are better than in some of the other ones. So I guess if you’re going to see it, you should see this version. But I don’t think it’s revelatory or anything; at the end of the day, it’s still Blade Runner.

ALSO: Blade Runner is a movie that I first heard of, as a kid, from watching Siskel and Ebert, where they had a sequence about the importance of letterboxing (which was then rare) vs. pan and scan (which was ubiquitous), and they cut back and forth from the VHS pan-and-scan version of the movie to the laserdisc letterboxed version. I would have seen this segment when I was 12, apparently; I had no idea that was even a thing, and finding out what it really meant that “this movie has been altered to fit your television” outraged me. That segment instantly turned me into an anti-pan-and-scan crusader (probably to nobody’s surprise), and when that crusade achieved almost total victory in the DVD era, I was thrilled.