I ended up seeing the U.S. Theatrical Cut. Grumpy Ford was mostly unneccessary, as the pre-film explanation text was enough to infer most of what Deckard was thinking. Especially considering the plot was pretty darn predictable - based on the first parts I already guessed that the Replicants would die one by one, with some standoff at the end. But I acknowledge that that's my modern movie-trained eye watching this piece of film history, so it's not an entirely fair point of critique. (In similar vein, is Blade Runner and/or Philip K. Dick the origin for the 'is he a robot or not' trope? Westworld comes to mind...)

The faults that I found pretty noticeable were the film's odd pacing and some of the plot holes. The final scene just drags on without a good reason - you could cut it in half and wouldn't notice a change in the narrative. The snake lady chase had similar issues. On the other hand, I did like how the movie slowed down from when the first bullet hit her to the resulting scene around the crime. If only other parts of the movie lingered in a single space, during a single dramatic moment like that.

I found the aesthetic and the music the most enjoyable aspect of the film. To my untrained eye, the cinematography was often great and retro-futuristic L.A. very impressive considering how old the movie is. The movie was very dark most of the time - maybe my TV isn't phenomenal in rendering blacks, maybe I needed to close more curtains, but I felt like the movie tried to hide flaws in darkness. My dad is a Vangelis nut and he immediately recognized the music, despite never having seen the movie. I wished there was more of it in the film, it's spread quite thinly in my opinion.

Concluding, the narrative itself was not something to write home about and I wasn't very engaged in that senes. But given its combination of music, cinematography and visuals, I can appreciate Blade Runner for the (mostly) cohesive style and outlook that it brought to the table.