Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Don’t get too excited: there’s nothing new in this latest reissue of Ridley Scott’s shimmering dystopian masterpiece, no extra unicorns or dubious digital insertions. ‘The Final Cut’ (2007) was always intended to be the director’s last word on his greatest film, and so it remains.

But the fact is, if you’re tired of ‘Blade Runner’, you’re tired of life – and that goes double on the big screen. Forget 3D: Scott’s rainswept, neon-lit vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is the single most immersive and tactile world ever created for the cinema, so crammed with detail – in the costumes, the makeup, the buildings, the billboards – that there’ll always be something you haven’t noticed before.

Which would mean nothing if it weren’t for the flawless, philosophically bottomless and infinitely quotable script – ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…’ – and performances that seem to get richer and more emotionally weighted as the years pass. For better or worse, ‘Blade Runner’ will soon be getting a sequel. But it will never have an equal.