Then again, these are the critics that probably got "Driving Miss Daisy" an Oscar for best picture...

So if you didn't remember or still need an idea for a last minute stocking stuffer, Blade Runner: The Final Cut came out on DVD this week. As I've already posted about before, I think this is the definitive version of a great film, but I guess many out there don't share the view that this movie was all that good. According to this article from Slate, which follows how this sci-fi classic went from being considered laughable kitsch to true film art, the initial reaction to Blade Runner when it first came out in theaters back in 1982 wasn't that flattering:

Reviews, however, were overwhelmingly negative ("A film that has neither strong characters nor a strong story," wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times; "It forces passivity on you," Pauline Kael tsked in The New Yorker), and audiences were baffled, sometimes even hostile.

Even some modern audiences that never saw any version of the film before this newest release didn't like it:

My wife had never seen Blade Runner, and it held her rapt until the penultimate scene. Here, the most godly of replicants, played by über-Nord Rutger Hauer, bays primitively at the moon before subjecting Harrison Ford to a poetic oration about mortality. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe," says Hauer, clutching a white dove to his naked breast. "Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." At which point, Hauer releases the bird, and it flies in slow motion toward the sky. At which point, my wife laughed uncontrollably

I thought that scene was pretty nice. Oh well. What do I know?