occupation: fuck you up and get live.
current crush: Joanna Angel.
stats: average joe\\\
heroes: fools.
gets me hot: the chase is better than the catch.
fantasy: LOS ANGELES NOVEMBER, 2019
The film is set in the industrial wasteland of Los Angeles in the year 2019, on an Earth that is in physical and psychological decay - without a trace of nature. In the opening, panoramic long shot, fire belches out of oil refinery towers and factory smokestacks in the industrial overgrowth. There are thousands of city lights flickering in the misty night air. Futuristic vehicles cruise through the darkened, polluted sky where the sun doesn't shine.
Barely visible in the distance are two huge buildings with spotlights shining out of their tops. They are flat-topped pyramidal buildings hundreds of floors high, much higher than any other run-down skyscrapers below them. A huge, disembodied eye stares unblinkingly at the city stretched before it, reflecting back the city and a fiery smokestack in its clear surface.
The camera moves forward and locates one of the two massive skyscraper structures shaped like an Egyptian pyramid (or a mammoth Aztec temple or Babylonian ziggurat) without a top - they are the gigantic Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Their exteriors are similar to the interior of a vast computer with an intricate micro-chip design. High up above the street level, an interrogation is taking place in a smoke-filled room.
A futuristic Voigt-Kampff machine administers an empathy test, a test device similar to a lie detector that measures emotional responses. The device focuses in on the subject's human iris and measures involuntary fluctuations. The nervous, lower-level employee is Leon Kowalski , an "engineer, waste-disposal, file-section, new employees, six days." [The test is useful in spotting replicants - if a replicant, Leon's eyes would faintly glow and his eye fluctuations and reaction times wouldn't be normal.]
Leon reacts antagonistically when hypothetically questioned by a suspicious, hostile and abrasive test administrator, a blade runner named Holden . [He has an uncanny resemblance to another soon-to-be-introduced blade runner named Deckard - implying that they are both assembly-line made, cookie-cutter replicants]:
You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down...and you see a tortoise, Leon, it's crawling toward you...the tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping.
Then the subject changes to a key question that replicants would find impossible to answer: "Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about: your mother." Leon, sarcastically answering the question: "My mother?...Let me tell you about my mother" blasts a smug, seated Holden with his concealed handgun under the table, sending the questioner through an adjoining office's wall. Then, he blasts him a second time.
The scene cuts to an overhead view of the night-time cityscape, composed of smaller skyscrapers left over from the 20th century and a huge media or vid-screen (with the giant, smiling image of a pill-popping geisha girl). [Electrical advertising throughout the film features sponsors, including TDK, Atari, Coca-Cola, Pan-Am, Budweiser, RCA, Kinney Shoes, Bulova, Cuisinart and Schlitz. A supposed 'curse' of the film has been noted, since some of the companies have since gone out of business, faced financial losses, or declared bankruptcy.] A blinking, mammoth overhead blimp cruises above - its loudspeakers advertise and promote the good life elsewhere with neon signs and huge graphics. Life on Earth is very difficult with a shortage of natural resources, so the blimps tout the virtues of the Off-World colonies to the packed hordes of night-crawling humanity below:
A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...New climate, recreational facilities...absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand -- the custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant designed especially for your needs. So come on America, let's put our team up there...
Climactic changes bring an incessant acid rainfall, mist, and fog to the dreary, grimy, congested landscape. The city, a melange of Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, and other metropolitan areas, is in ruins. The neon-lit, dark, downtown streets are populated by the lower class dregs of society, an odd beleaguered assortment of police, Asians, Spanish, street gangs and punks carrying glowing umbrella handles.
In contrast to the film's opening panoramic level, the camera now descends down to the street level. It zooms through the crowd to the title character - a retired, burnt-out Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford, famous for his previous screen appearances in Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)), who is leaning against a store display window, filled with television sets with awful reception. He looks up toward the blimp, flashing graphic catchphrases to highlight upscale life on the galactic Off-World colonies. Deckard is reading a newspaper, headlined: "Farming the Oceans, the Moon and Antarctica."
He narrates in a melancholy voice-over that he once worked in LA as a blade runner [a hunter living on a knife's edge between life and death, humanity and inhumanity], part of an elite squad of killers hired to track down and execute illegal 'replicants.' [Replicants are life-like humanoid models or slaves created on an assembly line by the Tyrell Corporation.] He has become disillusioned with his profession - as a bounty hunter of androids. 'Blade Runner' is only a cleaner, more antiseptic term for a cold-hearted killer. Now withdrawn from his job after quitting, he mixes in with the masses of humanity on the LA streets:
(voice over) They don't advertise for killers in a newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop, ex-blade runner, ex-killer.
Wearing a floppy brown trenchcoat [typical of detectives in classic film noirs], he walks over to order raw fish over noodles at the neon-illuminated, White Dragon Noodle Bar, arguing in Japanese with the manager of the cafe over the amount of food he can eat. He also muses to himself about how impersonal, burned-out, and cold he had become as a killer of replicants:
(voice over) Sushi, that's what my ex-wife called me. Cold fish.
While the free-lance, unemployed ex-cop eats with chopsticks at the crowded, open-air food bar, he is approached from behind by two men: one a bulletproof-vested cop, the other, a dapper, mustached Mexican-Japanese Gaff (Edward James Olmos), an employee of the blade runner unit. Although he is supposedly being arrested, Deckard doesn't want to be recognized: "You got the wrong guy, pal." He is again addressed in thick-accented city-speak lingo: "Lo fa, ne-ko shi-ma, de va-ja blade runner." Deckard pretends he doesn't understand, but the cafe manager interprets: "He say you Blade Runner." [Supposedly, Gaff partially speaks in Hungarian, and the above sentence is translated: 'Bullshit, no way, you are the Blade Runner.']
The ex-blade runner is detained and taken through the drippy, noisy streets with honking horns. He is escorted to the vertically-opening, winged doors of the cockpit of a sleek, vertically-lifting 'Spinner' - a futuristic hovercar that lifts up and flies above the LA streets to police headquarters. The interior of the glass bubble cockpit houses an onboard computer and data screens for sensing traffic patterns. During flight, the crushing outer, urban world slides past the window.
The charmer's name was Gaff. I'd seen him around. Bryant must have upped him to the Blade Runner unit. That gibberish he talked was city-speak, guttertalk, a mismash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I didn't really need a translator. I knew the lingo. Every good cop did. But I wasn't gonna make it easier for him.
After landing at Police Headquarters - a brilliant shot as the police spinner rotates one way while the camera rotates in the opposite direction [a reference to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)], Deckard is directed to ex-boss Inspector M. Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) office for a briefing - a location he knows well. Bryant is a bullish, balding, middle-aged man that Deckard doesn't fully trust - just in case, the former officer selects a proferred glass of whiskey not directly put before him. A reluctant Deckard is called back to duty and told of his mission, to track down a group of murderous cyborg replicants, advanced NEXUS 6 androids. Replicants, according to Deckard's racist, no-nonsense ex-boss Bryant, are the 'niggers' or slave labor of the future who have no rights or value:
Bryant: Hi ya, Deck...You wouldn't have come if I just asked you to. Sit down, pal. Come on, don't be an ass-hole Deckard. I've got four skin jobs walking the streets.
Deckard (voice-over): Skin jobs. That's what Bryant called replicants. In history books, he's the kind of cop that used to call black men niggers.
Bryant: They jumped a shuttle Off-world, killed the crew and passengers. They found the shuttle drifting off the coast two weeks ago so we know they're around.
Deckard: Embarrassing.
Bryant: No sir. Not embarrassing, because no one's ever going to find out they're down here. Because you're going to spot them, and you're gonna air 'em out.
Deckard: I don't work here anymore. Give it to Holden - he's good.
Bryant: I did. He can breathe OK as long as nobody unplugs him. He's not good enough - not as good as you. I need you, Deck. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old blade runner, I need your magic.
During the confrontation, the weird-acting Gaff makes one of his trademark origami paper-folding sculptures - a chicken. Deckard is given "no choice" but to accept his assignment
most humbling moment: that one phonecall.
