And... nope.  Too easy. 

I'm reading a book, 'The Strange Death of Europe'.
 
A comedy, it ain't.
 
...and there's no mention of 'The Final Countdown' at all.

bitflipper
There are no less than seven versions of the original movie floating around, so it's quite likely the version you rented was not the theatrical release.
 

Yeah, the original theatrical release is apparently very hard to find. (Maybe on a moldy VHS tape at a garage sale somewhere?) The other thing I had forgotten until I watched some YouTube video with some deleted scenes was the version I saw had a voice-over, from Deckard, much like the "noir" films of the fifties. I didn't mind losing that on the rental, although in some ways it did help clarify the story-line a bit.
 
I was pleasantly surprised at how well the special effects held up. There were a couple spots that showed their age, but given that there was zero CGI in it, overall it still is amazing.

IMS, the original voice over was the first thing to go from the first re-release. It was good to have for the theatrical release but unneeded after having seen the movie.
 
I guess it depends on interpretation but I never got the idea Deckard was a replicant. Him helping Rachel escape would have made him a fugitive or "little people". I was thinking that was why he was hiding out.

DrLumen
... 
I guess it depends on interpretation but I never got the idea Deckard was a replicant. Him helping Rachel escape would have made him a fugitive or "little people". I was thinking that was why he was hiding out.

I have my doubts about many of these re-writes, but the DVD I had years ago, one of the first I thought it was, said that it had 2 copies ... the original released and a director's cut.
 
From a writing perspective, Deckard getting saved makes sense to a point, and him kinda "retiring" from the scene is fine, but his taking Rachel away with him, would not have been a good thing, and would have been a serious problem for him and her. Being a replicant, I am not sure that she would have understood the emotional impact of that as a character in the story. 2049, kinda suggests that there were problems ... but never gets into them much, and it only brings up the past in bits and pieces, and this has a tendency to keep us unawares of the real effect and reason for doing so, and in my case, it shows how faulty and unread the writing staff were when they decided on this or that for 2049 ... which I think was not so much about the writing anymore as it was about the effects and the movie appearing to be bigger and better than it really is.
 
To me, Roy knows something about Deckard that he doesn't ... and that maybe the replicant thing ... but that's a suggestion and thought, and not necessarily written anywhere ... but it is a good one, that in the end does not really have a whole lot to say about anything in the story ... I'm not sure it makes a difference ... in the end, it all came off as senseless megalomania ... for the sake of "progress" and "corporate" and "money" ... and we don't even see that in our own lives!
 
What difference would it make to be a replicant or not, then?

Some years ago, my wife bought me the 2007 "Five Disk Ultimate Collector's Edition" of Blade Runner. It's got the so-called "Final Cut" (as of 2007, anyway) as well as the original U.S. and International theatrical cuts and the 1992 director's cut. In addition, it has three discs worth of commentary, behind the scenes features, etc.
 
A lot has been written about whether we're supposed to think Deckard was a replicant. Apparently, that was Ridley Scott's own interpretation and he made it more explicit in later cuts of the movie. On one of the extra discs, however, the screenwriter (I can't remember if it was Fancher or Peoples) argues passionately and, I think, persuasively that making Decker a replicant undermines one of the major themes of the movie. The famous scene near the end when Roy could kill Deckard, but doesn't, shows us Roy's struggle to achieve some measure of "humanity" and perhaps some redemption by sparing Deckard's life. Roy's eloquent soliloquy and his final act of mercy contrast with the brutal determination with which Deckard has carried out his mission to "retire" the replicants and invites us to wonder what that says about Deckard's own humanity. That scene takes on a whole different meaning if Deckard is a replicant.
 
It's interesting that the writer and the director could have disagreed about such a central element of the movie. Maybe it was better that they never resolved their disagreement. That ambiguity has helped keep people talking and writing about the movie for years.

When Deckard picks up the unicorn origami, he knows that he's a replicant.
 
Wired: It was never on paper that Deckard is a replicant.
 
Scott: It was, actually. That’s the whole point of Gaff, the guy who makes origami and leaves little matchstick figures around. He doesn’t like Deckard, and we don’t really know why. If you take for granted for a moment that, let’s say, Deckard is a Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human. Gaff, at the very end, leaves an origami, which is a piece of silver paper you might find in a cigarette packet, and it’s a unicorn. Now, the unicorn in Deckard’s daydream tells me that Deckard wouldn’t normally talk about such a thing to anyone. If Gaff knew about that, it’s Gaff’s message to say, “I’ve read your file, mate.” That relates to Deckard’s first speech to Rachael when he says, “That’s not your imagination, that’s Tyrell’s niece’s daydream.” And he describes a little spider on a bush outside the window. The spider is an implanted piece of imagination. And therefore Deckard, too, has imagination and even history implanted in his head.
 
http://theycutthepower.com/t-shirts/gaffs-origami-unicorn
 

Another argument against Deckard being a replicant is that if they wanted to manufacture a purpose-built replicant-killer they would surely have made him at least as tough and capable as their most dangerous model. But he is easily duped, outrun and out-fought by multiple replicants. Was he a re-purposed office assistant model?
 
The original author wanted the question to be ambiguous. The main theme of the story is: what makes you human? And the obvious corollary: how do you know you are one?
 
It's been a recurring theme in science fiction since the 50's. How would you know if you're living in The Matrix or not? How can you distinguish your own thoughts from implanted ones (e.g. Inception)? When does AI get sophisticated enough that it deserves human rights, or can be convicted of a crime? Will machines someday no longer need us, or worse, consider us a threat? Have we reached a point where we cannot survive as a species without our machines, when we no longer understand how they work? Are we designing our own replacements?
 
These are the kinds of Big Ideas that make good sci-fi good. Not narrative, plot, characters or style, but whether it makes you keep thinking after the book is done.
 

bitflipper
Was he a re-purposed office assistant model?

 

bitflipper
Another argument against Deckard being a replicant is that if they wanted to manufacture a purpose-built replicant-killer they would surely have made him at least as tough and capable as their most dangerous model. But he is easily duped, outrun and out-fought by multiple replicants. Was he a re-purposed office assistant model?

It's a good point. But if Deckard was able to continually pummel or at least stand up to the most dangerous models in a fight, he would probably start to consider more strongly the possibility that he is, in fact, a replicant. And if he does that (the reasoning might have gone at the Tyrell Corporation), it may be a matter of time before he starts to consider defending replicants (or at least, letting them live) rather than eliminating them.