Some Thoughts After Viewing the Final Cut

Rating: 10/10 (2 September 2009)

Blade Runner in any version is an excellent movie, and I've now seen 4 versions - the original theatrical release, the little-seen "compromise cut", the Director's Cut, and now the Final Cut. If you've seen the DC, there's not much in the FC which makes it essential, other than a few digital tweaks and some polishing of continuity.
One reason I'd feared the Final Cut for two years is that I'd heard that Ridley Scott definitively resolved the question of Deckard's own nature (making the movie conform to statements he's made in public), but I prefer to leave the issue ambiguous. I needn't have worried, it seems.
Anyone who has seen the movie and still thinks of Replicants as "machines" is repeating Deckard's own mistake from early in the movie. "More Human Than Human" is an apt description. They have been engineered, while we in "real life" have been assembled haphazardly over millions of years, but they rely on the same physical, biological processes we do. If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you wrong them, do they not revenge? The Tyrell Corp. does not manufacture robots, it creates human life. But instead of our own three-score-and-ten, Replicants are "born" and die in only four years.
I've never taken Bryant's explanation of the 4-year lifespan, as he explains it to Deckard, as truth. From Tyrell's meeting with Roy, I believe that HE speaks truth - "You were made as well as we could make you." The nature of Homo fabricans, though, is such that it CAN'T live longer than 48 months. So Tyrell took what had been an unavoidable limitation in his creation, and sold it as a Special Design Feature - the fail-safe.
So in the end, it really doesn't matter whether Deckard is or is not a Replicant. Either way, he and Roy are the same, and the end comes when both of them realize that.
If my theory is true, of course, then the happy ending tacked onto the studio release "Rachael is a special case - no termination date" is unsupportable. As the couple flee, there's no hope for "happily ever after", but there remains the prospect of being together for as long as they both shall live, and of course EITHER of them could get hit by a truck next time they cross the street... "It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"