"Voice" -- your opinion?

Rating: 10/10 (21 October 2004)

First, let me say, without question, I love this movie. It is my favourite scifi experience, ahead of Gattaca and K-pax, and many others which also "moved" me. I saw this movie on late night TV when I was an impressionable adolescent, back in the late 1980's, and so it was the original theatrical version, with the voice-overs. Over a decade later, when I saw the Director's Cut, I thought it was still a great movie, but without already knowing what Deckard had been thinking because the version I had seen before, it became a "potentially deeper" movie. The flipside is that the potential for deepness risked getting lost on some people without the albeit droll voice-over.
Such hype surrounded Scott's re-release of the Director's Cut at the time it came out that the video store I was working in at the time wouldn't even rent the copies of the original that we had, for fear of them going astray -- hell, you can't buy the original anywhere anymore, it seems.
I am fortunate to have my own VHS copy of the original version (no discussing how I came to possess it, considering...), but have forever wondered whether there will ever be a DVD re-release of it sometime? Even the reruns on TV now only show the Director's "silent cut" and I don't know why. I for one, slightly prefer the original, if for no other reason than the little speech Deckard gives as the Batty replicant passes away. Otherwise, that scene kinda feels like it is simply a lucky man sprawled on his ass, staring at a less lucky man, sitting in the rain with his eyes closed.
I know there are many people, not all of them avid movie fans, who like to purport the idea that the Director's Cut of just about any movie is better than the Studio Version, but I dare say the anomaly that is Blade Runner questions that. (BTW, it is also the only movie I have ever seen that I liked more than the novel -- and I am talking about actual novels here, not the movie-tie-in kind).
Love and rockets.