There seem to be four different versions of Blade Runner that you can watch today. I ended up with the “Final Cut,” with no help at all from the dude at my local video rental store, who, incredibly, did not take the opportunity to mansplain the history of Blade Runner to me that I just handed him. Anyhow, from what I’ve gathered, this edition does not include Harrison Ford’s resentful VO narration (I can’t imagine anyone really wants that), or the “happy ending,” which is also just fine with me, as what I saw was the best ending I can imagine for this movie.

I am unsure what the consensus is on the picture quality, but the Blade Runner I watched was very, very beautiful. The very first shots are the lights of the city making a galaxy in the iris of someone’s eye, ringed in industrial flame. And then when we dip inside one of the buildings, the starry lens flare casts glimmers across our own eyes, just like the ones we saw. I could not have picked a more perfect follow-up to Metropolis if I tried, because in both theme and form, what Ridley Scott made is absolutely the visually striking, philosophically disquieting successor to what Lang started. I like that movies about humanity intersecting with technology are so concerned with being startlingly well-designed things in themselves.

Our main man here is Deckard, coming right out of whatever it was in the late 1970s / early ‘80s that was producing so many loner-cool cops. Because Harrison Ford is in many ways playing a sort of cyberpunk Max Rockatansky, a guy who’s going to take his noodles with him into the hover police-car because whatever, cop in the goldenrod waistcoat, whatya gonna do about it. Deckard is a Blade Runner, meaning he hunts down replicants gone rogue. Replicants are robots built to be nearly indistinguishable from humans, which does not sound like a smart idea, but clearly whatever got us into this terrible future was not a boon of Smart Ideas. Los Angeles is now forever dark and rainy — truly this is a dystopia. There’s not a speck of plant life to be seen, just endless warrens of gritty streets and gritty people, disorienting cluttered interiors and blue tendrils of cigarette smoke curling everywhere, a giant screen of a smiling woman holding a little red capsule floating over the city like their unspeaking god. The soundtrack is strange and silvery and occasionally seems like it might be half-diegetic. There are search lights casting about everywhere, though no one seems to be able to find what they’re looking for.

But Deckard is looking, looking for the dangerous replicants his shoddy police force believe to be on a havoc mission after breaking free from whatever off-world planet they had been working on. Enslaved on, rather, because god forbid we start with the good ideas now. So he quickly becomes the grim PI in our futuristic film noir, meets his mysterious femme fatale, and gets detecting. And we, in turn, begin to get to know his quarry: the replicants with the crystalline blue eyes. Unfortunately, they’re charming in their creepiness, so cold toward humans but so warm to each other. I’m sure we won’t end up with any conflicting feelings at all, watching this go down! No, we absolutely will.

And that’s the magic of Blade Runner: the way you can never quite tell what you want to happen, just like you can never quite tell where you are in this city. Personally, I may have flipped the most when I discovered that LA’s famous Bradbury building was playing itself, and was actually the Bradbury. Fantastic, the way all the pieces of what you think you know — space and robots, detective stories, post-apocalyptic wastelands, Prodigal Sons — all combine to make something you never actually expected. And when it comes to Roy’s final, haunting monologue…. well, legend goes that not even the screenwriters knew to expect that.

Rather an easy lay-up for the first entry of a movie blog, you might say, and I would say yes, exactly: the plan. Have there been entire dissertations on Metropolis? Surely.

I lightly studied Fritz Lang’s M once in a 20th-century German history class, and was delighted with it in much the way I’m delighted with this. There is such a keen interest in the craft of film in Lang’s work — probably in a lot of German work, for that matter. Innovation and Design. This is a movie that credits a sculptor right after the composer, that sort of thing. Metropolis was artistically daring in what it was trying to achieve, and it shows, and I love that. Unusual as they are, I also really love the gaps of missing material. There’s something so special about watching something that has been rescued. I got very sappy and sentimental about this. Also sentimental about the typeface game filmmakers used to bring to their inter-titles — pour one out for the lost art of triple-dashes used like ellipses.

What we have not lost, however, are Metropolis’s themes, for when haven’t we been telling stories about the downtrodden rising up against the system that holds them down? Robots though, that’s newer. Workers literally fed to the piston jaws of the Machine and a beautiful girl built of metal who can tear apart society — wow Weimar Republic, wow.

But for all the cold grinding gears, this movie is just stuffed with emotion. Our hero, Freder, who resembles a gentle mascara-wearing Leonardo DiCaprio, is forever showing distress by curling his hands in fists against his chest, like he needs to pull his ribs open to create space for all his feelings. And his father, our villainous greedy overlord, has these incongruously sympathetic sad eyebrows, something like a cross between Mark Rylance and Mark Strong. But that’s probably a good sign, as much of the narrative will hinge on accessing his stores of empathy.

There’s also an exceedingly tall vampire-looking henchmen just called The Thin Man, who stalks around having a wonderful time threatening people, and a mad worshipful inventor living in a medieval barn somehow still wedged between the art deco skyscrapers. It of course has secret access to the catacombs beneath the city, where the workers meet after their long shifts to listen to the beautiful starry-eyed Maria, a saint in the underground, their prophetess with the wisdom of the hearth and heart. Maria believes in reconciliation between the Haves and the Have Nots, and her faith in mediation lends hope and strength to the weary.

But of course, Saint is not all Maria is. Metropolis might be the best example I know of the problem of having just one female character in your movie, who ends up having to be everything, all at once. Because Maria is also the Beloved of Freder, as well as the Mother to the workers’ children. And it is also her form that is copied for the malicious robot that the inventor has built — whom you can always tell from the original because Fembot Maria wears more eyeliner and her left eye has a rakish squint. And now we see “Maria” become yet more: Temptress, Witch, Whore of Babylon. She even bears a resemblance to Freder’s own dead mother, for whom the crazed inventor harbored a hopeless love.

Although there is a separate male character for each of the archetypes they are portraying, they don’t exactly rise above tropes either. But they don’t need to, because Metropolis is an allegory — what you remember are images. And they’re stunning: the Machina shining under the electric rings, the business Tower of Bable rising above the glittering glassy city, a swarm of leering eyes, crowds rushing like waves. What I adore about watching movies like these, the big ticket Influential ones, is how you can glimpse so many later movies flickering over the frames. It gives their oldness this odd magic power of seeming to tell the future.