Harrison Ford in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
Now, fans of the film (and many of them border on fetishism) insist the "Final Cut" is better because it implies Deckard is a Replicant. Film critic James Berardinelli concurs:
While the director's cut removes the unfortunate voice-over from the original and eliminates the sappy happy ending, it also raises a question that has divided fans: Is Deckard a replicant? The answer appears to be yes, and Scott has subsequently confirmed this. The evidence is brief but seemingly conclusive. Deckard dreams of a unicorn. Later, he finds an origami image of the animal created by Gaff. This is viewed as proof that someone knows about Deckard's dreams and memories, meaning they are implanted, not real. Only special replicants have implanted memories. It makes sense, but there are those who don't buy it, including Harrison Ford. Ultimately, the determination of who and what Deckard is must be left to the individual viewer.
This is a wan interpretation, as it is unsupported by what is found even in the final version. Yet, it has been uncritically accepted in many cribbings of the film and expounded as fact. Never mind that the unicorn sequence is rather superfluous — and it is just a dream. The fact that Gaff knows about it can be explained as something he recalled from conversations with Deckard that the latter simply forgot, as the film implies this is an important recurring symbol to the man and it is something he may likely have expounded upon to others — a very "human" thing to do, especially since he is not a particularly reticent guy when in the company of his peers, with whom he seems to be quite collegial.
In the original, the origami unicorn has no extra significance because it is merely one of a number of bizarre figures Gaff leaves as calling cards. Aside from that, how and why a dream of a unicorn — and Gaff's knowledge of it — still does not explain why a unicorn dream would in any way imply Deckard's synthetic reality. Are unicorns somehow a symbol of artificial life that the film lets us not know?
Also, even if the original version makes it rather clear he is not a Replicant, who really cares? Deckard is listless to the point that whether or not he is an android or just a malaise-ridden human seems of no great import. The more important question about Blade Runner is, Why is it so dull despite such a rich and complex potential to mine?
I should add that besides the unicorn dream, numerous minor moments in Blade Runner are taken to be symbolically significant despite the lack of any evidence. In the DVD edition of "The Final Cut," on his own commentary track, Ridley Scott himself ridicules all the nonsense that has been read into the film, including the idea put forth by some critics that Blade Runner was somehow commenting on South African apartheid. While it's true that any work of science-fiction will draw parallels to contemporary issues, this alone does not mean that everything in a sci-fi story is symbolic.
For instance, the very notion that Blade Runner is some sort of profound meditation on existence, on what it means to be human, and on human and non-human bondage is simply not supported by what is on screen. That may have been the filmmakers' intent, but not the result; instead, that notion is a critical mix up that has plagued film criticism for far too long.
Additionally, rebel leader Roy Batty is taken to be a full-fledged antihero, but in any version of the film he is clearly a psychopathic killer despite his subjugation and pains. In a sense, he is a cyber John Brown or, more accurately, a cyber Nat Turner — and Turner was still a murderous psychopath despite having been brutalized in antebellum bondage.
When Blade Runner tries to probe into the "depths" of Batty's soul by way of his dying soliloquy, all we get are vapidity and pseudopoetry. Neither Batty nor Deckard (even if one accepts the exceedingly thin case for his non-humanity) penetrate deeper issues. Contrast Batty's "striving for depth and empathy" soliloquy with a similar moment in a far superior — and far simpler — film, Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, which follows the peregrinations of a rural donkey over a decade or so of its life till death.
Midway through that film there is a silent scene of sublime transcendence that says infinitely more about the human condition vis-à-vis the suffering it imparts to its subjugated non-human laborers (the stated reason for the Replicant rebellion). In Bresson's film, the donkey has been bought by a traveling circus and is led into a stable with a host of other animals. The camera then intercuts shots of the eyes of the donkey with a handful of the circus' other beasts — a tiger, a monkey, and an elephant, among them; the result is a wordless, non-human conversation through which the other animals tell the donkey that they've seen worse than it has.