Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind.

About your mother?

My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.

When you bring up someone's mom, you know shit's gonna go down, but that was pretty severe, wasn't it, Paul?

It was, and it occurs to me. We have no idea when this episode is gonna drop. Right now, as we record, that is God's private little mystery. But I can only hope that it does not land anywhere near Mother's Day, due to that choice of clip. But if by some chance it does, my apologies.

The lesson is never bring up someone's mom, no matter what. Just don't do it.

It is dangerous territory to tread upon.

Obviously, that was a clip from Blade Runner, one of the greatest films ever made and-

Or at least one version of one of the greatest movies ever made.

Yes. On that note, all I can say is, I'm Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

And I'm Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

And this is...

Multiplex Overthruster! Summer of 82.

 Thank you.

That just gets you going, doesn't it? It just gets you in the mood.

I've been in withdrawal, Javi. We haven't recorded for a little bit. We took a little break, unbeknownst to our listeners who will experience no such break.

No such break.

But yeah, I was really needing a fix. I was really craving that in the worst way, and I am now feel so much calmer and relieved.

I hear it when I'm about to fall asleep. Like, I literally hear that. So that's how pervasive it's become in my life.

It occurs to me. I don't know why it's taken seven episodes for me to realize that I could ask producer Brad to send me that sound file so I can make it an alarm on my iPhone to wake me up every morning.

Every morning.

Why am I not, why have we not done that? I'm kicking myself.

Well, wouldn't that change the meaning? It would be something that's an alert, something terrible, you have to get up.

I think it would have the opposite effect. I think that it would entice me and excite me into my day and could really completely change my outlook on life every morning.

I honestly think we should just make the podcast about this 15 second soundsting, because literally I don't think I could talk enough about it.

It's going to deserve its own special episode at some point in terms of how it has changed our lives and the lives surely of countless listeners.

I think that when we do the episode about it, we should track down the person who composed it and literally pick their brain about this, because they can't not have known, they can't not have known that they were creating greatness.

That their destiny was to become the stuff of legend.

Indeed, indeed. Paul, speaking of the stuff of legend.

Yes.

What a weekend this was. My God, right, producer Brad? We had three major genre masterpieces opening this weekend, didn't we?

Well, we have Blade Runner.

An influential classic of cyberpunk glory.

We have Megaforce.

Two masterpieces open this weekend, two.

And I saved the thing for the last mention.

Yes, a masterpiece of claustrophobic horror. Paul, we need to see all of these movies this weekend. We're gonna actually have to get our parents to give us more allowance and to drive them to multiplex on Friday, Saturday and Sunday now.

The dam has burst wide open. There's no holding us back this weekend. We are all in for a genre feast.

Now, here's the thing, so my allowance in 1982 was actually quite generous. I got $8 a week.

Ooh.

That's actually pretty generous. My parents were very nice about that. The ticket price was $295. So we would actually have to go see two movies and then sneak into the third one because if we want popcorn, we're fucked.

Yeah. I can neither confirm nor deny that I would ever do that, sneaking into additional movies. Then again, surely such statute of limitations is long. Pass. But you know, you got to do what you got to do.

I also think your service to the community is probably more than enough to justify any malfeasance you might have committed.

Well, you're very kind to say so. I think it may depend on who you asked, but I consider that a lifelong and ongoing endeavor.

We might have bought a ticket for Megaforce tonight, however, and snuck into the...

Would we have?

Well, because remember, Blade Runner is rated R. So unless our parents took us to the multiplex and bought us the tickets for Blade Runner and maybe went in with us, we couldn't see that movie.

Yes, yes. I seem to recall that this may have been an instance of gross negligence and oversight on behalf of my parents, who maybe it had escaped their notice, but I'm not entirely sure how I managed to get away with seeing this.

I never saw this in the theater. I experienced Blade Runner for the first time on VHS with my friend Adam Harris, whom I've lost contact with, and I wonder where he went a lot of the time. My memory of this movie is eating cameo cookies, which are a lot like golden Oreos, but they were specifically East Coast and more geared to the Latinx market for some reason, which is weird, because they're kind of very Anglo-Saxon Protestant cookies. But eating those and drinking RC Cola and watching this. Yeah.

You know, I have a theory of where he went to a new life that was awaiting him in the off-world colonies.

So let's talk about Blade Runner. Let me give a summary of the plot of Blade Runner that we may commence discussing the film. Blade Runner is the touching stand-up-and-cheer story of a very, very depressed bounty hunter slash killer who works for the Los Angeles Police Department in 2019. And in 2019, you know, it's a very, very eventful year, the replicants who are artificial human beings manufactured as slave labor by the Tyrell company have reached their apogee with the Nexus 6 series. Those are the most sophisticated ones. Four of them escape from an off-world colony and come to earth. And replicants are banned from earth because they have a tendency to rebel against their human overlords. Who'd have thunk it? You breed genetically superior beings and they might rebel against you. No one read RUR in this world, obviously. And in hunting down these four replicants, Rick Deckard, that's the name of Harrison Ford's character, the bounty hunter. He's a bounty hunter in Philip K. Dick's original. He is an LAPD officer in the movie. Falls in love with Rachel, who is presented to him as one of Dr. Tyrell, the creator of the replicants' family, but who is in fact a replicant herself who has been implanted with false memories to make her believe she's a person, which is a prototype technology that Tyrell Corporation has to try to make replicants more like humans. At the end of the film, Rick Deckard succeeds in actually hunting down the replicants, but he's tasked with hunting down Rachel, who is the fifth replicant, who is not allowed on Earth, and instead they elope together to an uncertain future. Does that sound like a good summation of what we're talking about here?

I mean, Javi, I found that utterly spellbinding.

Well, in that case, let's ring the bell and start talking about Blade Runner. Let's do it. Paul, we have some reputation as being nerds, right? As being geeks.

Slightly, so.

So now we did an episode on Wrath of Khan, which are-

Is it one episode or has it-

We don't know because producer Brad's still editing it. Has it experienced?

Has it experienced? I'm just anticipating it experiencing podcast mitosis and-

Becoming a two-partner.

Becoming two podcast episodes.

But here's the thing. We could talk as long about Blade Runner, obviously, because this is a seminal film of all time. But then again, every movie in 1982 was that. My first question to you would be like, is Rick Deckard a replicant? Ridley Scott, halfway through the making of the movie, read a line in a rewrite that Hampton Fancher turned in where Rick Deckard muses, I wonder what I would do if I ever met my master or who created me or that sort of thing. And halfway through filming, and this is documented in Paul Salmon's book, Future Noir, Ridley Scott decided, oh, would it be cool if he's a replicant? And then suddenly the movie, he began doing shit in the movie to make him a replicant when it was never the intent of the movie. And then he's been re-editing the film since the late 20th century to make that plot point stick. So in viewing the 1982 original, is Rick Deckard a replicant in this film?

Uh, I wasn't expecting for this to be our, to be here with us right off the bat.

You know, I go hard, man. I go for the hard questions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think it's fair. So in this film, and I have to say, I have not seen this version of the film since the period that it came out and then in VHS and stuff. So I had avoided this version in preference of the director's cut and then the final cut, which is now kind of accepted as the definitive revisionist version of it. And in that version, I think that Scott has pretty clearly said that yes, the message of that version is he is also a replicant. One of the things I appreciate about the original theatrical version is I embrace the ambiguity. I do not feel like this film asserts either way. I think that it leaves it open to interpretation, and I am completely fine with that. My reading of it is that you could read it either way. I am leaning towards maybe, but I kind of like the maybe, and I kind of like not necessarily knowing.

That's really interesting. I, for me, you know, I was a big fan of the novel before I saw the movie. And in the novel, Rick Deckard is kind of more like Andy Sipowicz from NYPD Blue. You know, he has like that, like his wife is a heredon who like constantly rails on him for not having a good enough job that they can't afford an electric sheep, which is, you know, would be like a very, like an electronic pet that would give them a lot of status in society because this is a dystopian world.

I yearn for an electric capybara, but that's just me.

I think you're in for a real capybara, but it...

Well, eventually.

Your capybara activism is well known to those of you who know you.

That is my other podcast.

So, I think I cannot watch this movie and think Rick Deckard is a replicant for a second. The voiceover is very clearly from the point of view of a human being who is deeply depressed, and the performance to me is that of a deeply depressed human being. And look, in the novel, and maybe I'm bringing this from the novel, but I think anybody asking themselves the question of is Rick Deckard a replicant is somebody who's seen other versions of the movie and heard all the conversation about it. When I watched this film, as we saw it and I have not seen it, and I saw the final cut when it first came out, I have not seen this movie in about four years. I just don't see it. I genuinely believe that this was originally an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel about a human being whose life sucks and who realizes that though his life sucks, the life of somebody who has a limited lifespan and is destined to die at his hands is worse. And he comes to appreciate life for some reason based on their will to live. That's what I get from this movie. I get it that in other movies Ridley Scott definitely asserts, but I don't see the ambiguity so much.

Yeah, no, and I think speaking of implanted memories, the burden we have is we've had multiple versions of this film implanted in our memories. And to try to step outside of those and, you know, but yeah, thinking back, I don't know that it occurred to me when I first saw the film that that was even really a possibility of him being a replicant. The one tease of that is in the first act after this is jumping ahead a little bit and getting into it. But when after he's having the meeting with Tyrell and meeting Rachel and doing the Voight-Kampff test on her, she asks if he's ever taken the test and he does not answer. And that is a little crack open of the door of like, oh, that's an interesting question. And so but that's about all there is in the theatrical version or the most overt kind of tabling of that possibility that then becomes more central in the later revisions.

Yeah, and there is one very, very thing, but it's in that scene and I want to wait till we get to it. So, Paul, I'm hearing a lot of replicant, not a lot of replicant do, so let's get with it. I had to make that joke, I've been waiting to make that joke for weeks.

It was on my maybe list and I'm kind of glad you took it because I don't know that I could have been quite gone there, but well done.

One of the things I really like about how this movie begins is just that the credit font is sort of like Times. It's not like some zhuzhed up opening, it's literally like Times, it's plain white against black and it's so elegant.

It's like a literary journal or something. Yeah, the immediate series of iconography that rapidly sets the table for us. I want to talk a little bit, kind of big picture about the film. The opening kind of lets us do that. At first, we're here with the Ladd Company, kind of retro future logo, which is kind of cool. Then with the Vangelis music and immediately you're like, oh, this is not like a normal film score. Then those titles, but then we also get the crawl. And immediately it's like, oh, this is a crawl, but it's not like a Star Wars crawl. It's like, oh, this movie has a lot of things that needs to explain. And that's a little bit of a red flag. And it's pretty, for what it is, I think that it's pretty good, but it basically explains what replicants are, what a Blade Runner is. And it has a great tagline, which is that when the Blade Runners have to go take down an escaped replicant, this was not called execution, this was called retirement.

Yes, that's actually, actually, and that line kind of redeems the entire call. Yes. It really does, it's very striking. I have a rule that if a movie has more than two explanatory devices, you're in real trouble. And the theatrical cut of Blade Runner infamously has the voiceover, which we'll talk about. It shocks me how this movie is the complete exception to that rule because it has all of the things that make me think like, oh boy, this movie got really butchered in post and no one understands what it's about. But this movie is such a, I mean, for all of its flaws and they are legion. This is probably the most influential movie after Star Wars of the 20th century in terms of I can't remember a time before the Blade Runner aesthetic wasn't the pervasive science fiction aesthetic of our time.

Yeah, one of the things I wanna talk about, the big picture in terms of where this film lands, I think that in the context of the incredible films of 1982, of which there are many and many yet to come, this stands tallest among all of them as the most towering influential achievement with the most potent and influential legacy. It's a staggering, and I think it's one of the greatest works of world building in film that's ever been done. And it's such a breakthrough and a collision combining sort of noir with the cyberpunk and this kind of neon noir, multi-ethnic, futuristic Los Angeles that at the time felt like a revelation. Right off the title crawl, you get, I think one of the greatest title cards in film history, which is now a T-shirt, but you can buy Los Angeles November 2019.

November 2019, which seems so far out of reach. 1982.

In 1982, just inconceivable, leaps beyond 2001, 2010, and now it's a period piece in our past.

It's not just a period piece, but I think it's also really interesting because it's a period piece, but it's so unique in its aesthetic. Blade Runner is everywhere. Blade Runner is in The Matrix. Blade Runner is in Coruscant in the Star Wars prequels. Blade Runner is everywhere. Literally, you cannot escape the influence of this film. So I try to think of a future without Blade Runner, in which our conception of the future was Star Trek. And even Star Wars, Star Wars was kind of revolutionary for being a junkier kind of future, but it's still-

A lived-in-

What I find so interesting is I agree with all of the adjectives you use, towering, potent, all of that. And yet what a unique piece of retrofuturism still to this day, now you watch it as retrofuturism, and it's still so much more beautiful than almost anything in that genre, even things that have been made with modern technology.

I don't know that it's been taught.

Yeah.

And I don't know that it ever will, in terms of what it is and what it's done and the influence and everything. It's so unique. And I'd be remiss if I didn't credit Jordan Cronenwef, the DP, Lawrence Paul's incredible production design with the amazing Sid Meade- doing the concept art of all concept art for this world building.

Sid Meade is the Ralph McCrory of Blade Runner, you know. I think that the Los Angeles 2019 only helps to cement the movie as a period piece, but as something that is such a unique time capsule of how we lived in 1982 that we thought that this was the future that that spawned. You know, it's just- Yes. By the way, for a movie that is as flawed in terms of plot character and a lot of other things, which, you know, I'm sure we'll get into, it is absolutely towering in the way you said in terms of its influence. And it's funny because I bag on Ridley Scott a lot for the whole replicant thing, because it's like, he's obsessive in the same way as George Lucas is going back and like, I gotta fix shit, you know? But my God, it's also the way a movie that they've gone back to quote, fix it unquote. And they've made it, if not better, like, I mean, a better version of what it's supposed to be, you know?

Yeah, and I can't help but wonder and kind of wish that, I mean, I think the big lesson of this film, looking at the version we've now revisited from 82 to the ultimate sort of ultimate full bloom incarnation of the final cut is trust your audience. And this was a film and a studio and producers that did not trust the audience. And you feel that at almost, not every turn, that's not fair, but every time we hear the narration, it is a reminder that they're not trusting the audience. They're having, they feel like they need to spoon feed everything because this is such a radical thing, but it's like, it doesn't need it.

Look, this could have just as easily been a silent movie as far as I'm concerned. And I'll tell you what, I feel that the voiceover, it steps on every emotion. It explains every emotion in the movie. In its weird way though, like I really enjoyed watching this cut of the film, even though the voiceover is so intrusive, it does feel like a relic of that time. But there is something for me about experiencing the movie this way the first time around and watching it a second, watching it, you know, after a couple years without seeing it. But having seen, look, I've seen the director's cut, I've seen the work print cut, I've seen the television cut, and I've seen the final cut. I don't think that's all the cuts. There's two I think I've missed. There's a European cut and whatever. But, you know, I really enjoyed, even with the voiceover, I really enjoyed it. And when you look at it outside of, oh, I must revile this film because it has this voiceover and because I kind of go like, well, I mean, it's still noir. I mean, it's a noir staple, you know? I don't know.

Yeah. No. And I think that in that context of the fact that it is very much rooted in the tradition of pulp noir, of the gumshoe detective, of a Raymond Chandler thing, that yes, you can make the argument. And I get how and why they did for a voiceover narration and getting in the guy's head, who is a man of few words externally, but internally is always processing and analyzing it and kind of grading for the reader, but in this case, the audience. But clearly, and it's been well documented, Harrison Ford did it under duress and kind of intentionally gave a clunky, wooden bad performance, hoping that then it would not be used, but oops.

Watching the movie, I kept wishing the voiceover were better written. In Apocalypse Now, they got this journalist, Michael Hare, who wrote a book called Dispatches from Vietnam to write the voiceover. And the voiceover in Apocalypse Now is so well written, so like many of the famous lines, you know, Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon. You know, every day I sit in this room, you know, I get weaker. And every day Charlie Squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Like it's such an intensely well written monologue that it just immediately integrates into the film. And watching this, what I kept thinking was if this had been written with an eye not toward placating the audience, but toward actually making a better film noir movie, it could have worked.

I definitely agree with that. And if Ford had been invested in it, clearly he had contempt for the material he was given for the narration and just being asked to do it.

I think the narration also winds up pointing out not a flaw in the character, but a kind of schizophrenia in the character, because I feel like the Deckard character is so alone in this world, which is part of I understand like what the movie is saying is that the human beings have become so dehumanized that the artificial humans in their lust for life are better humans than the humans. They're more human than human. And that's actually why I've always resisted the Deckard is a replicant argument.

Yeah.

But it's like, but I keep thinking like the character is so internal. His boss is always saying, oh, Deckard, I need the old magic. I need the old Blade Runner, you know, and you're a slaughter. You're a one man slaughterhouse. But I don't get the sense that he's either that good at his job because the shoe leather beats in the movie are so obvious. It's not a very well constructed mystery or investigation. It's sort of point A to point B quite plainly.

It's pretty straightforward, yes.

And I never got the sense that Deckard was great at this job in any way, you know, because he seems like a pretty hapless detective in this thing, you know. And for most of the movie, he seems to be kind of running behind the eight ball. And I don't know, like for me, the biggest hole in this movie is Rick Deckard's character. And who is he really like? It's one of these movies that begs for, you know, Deckard fought in the Battle of Tannhausen Gate and he killed 500 people. And I needed to see more of him being great at his job rather than being a more sort of noir gumshoe, you know, because I don't see the setup to him having this apotheotic epiphany at the end about the value of life, you know. I don't know.

Yeah, we get hints of why he sort of hung it up. And of course, he's being summoned back onto duty to do this thing he's good at, but he's trying to leave behind and move on from. We don't get a whole lot of detail on that. But yeah, I think also the narration creates this dissonance because it changes his character in terms of the performance we're seeing. It also doesn't align with the dialogue that we're reading. It's almost like it's another character or a very bifurcated character, and that does more harm than good in addition to just the qualitative deficiencies of it. Setting that aside, there's so much that is so amazing and great that nothing can really ruin. And it's also just an interesting window in the time in terms of framing the forecasting of the future that would be at the time, there was a sense that America was in decline, that Japan was ascendant and on the verge of domination culturally. And we see that kind of manifested in the world of Los Angeles 2019 and a lot of the iconography and the visuals and also use of mixtures of language they call street speak. That's sort of a...

Gutter talk.

Yeah, gutter talk. Yeah. A hybrid of Japanese, Spanish and such.

I want to segue us into the movie and to talking about the movie sort of more linearly, but I wanted to point out that William Gibson didn't write Neuromancer until, published Neuromancer until 1984. I don't know where he was in the writing of the novel at the time, but it's very clear that these two works are communicating with each other. To me, it's like, aside from not having an internet in Blade Runner, the influence of it, it really is a proto-cyberpunk document.

Yes.

So many things that were sprung from this and all around the world, like a very iconic anime series that I was obsessed with at the time called Bubblegum Crisis, which is basically a mashup of Streets of Fire and Blade Runner.

When summer of 84 comes and we do Streets of Fire, that episode is going to be the single greatest valediction to a great film ever made. That movie rocks. I have nothing bad to say about that movie.

Can we go back to 1986 for a second?

Yes.

Blade Runner influenced the band Chicago. Their video for 25 or 64, the remake starts with the opening shot from Blade Runner. And I happened to stumble on that last night by mistake. I wasn't seeking it out.

By the way, as does the pilot for Lost, Kubrick did a shot of a massive eyeball in 2001, but the way that Ridley Scott uses it to open this film, it is... I mean, you see the city and then you see the city reflected in this giant eyeball. And it's the thing that I wanted to point out as we move past that. The beginning of this movie is another Blade Runner, a guy named Holden is interrogating a replicant named Leon, and he's giving him the Voight-Kampff test, which we'll learn is the test that you use to spot replicants, which is hilarious because you have to sit them down and ask them about 72 questions about their empathy. So Holden is interrogating Leon, right? Now, the resemblance between Holden and Harrison Ford, the actor who plays Holden and Harrison Ford, is kind of uncanny. They do look quite a bit similar, down to almost the weariness of, like, if you told me the actor who played Holden was Harrison Ford's younger brother, who was just not as attractive, I'd totally buy it. And I think that could fuel the decorative replicant argument, but to me it also says something that, like, these Blade Runners, you know, they're killers, they do this job, and they're all kind of the same. Like, they're all sort of these devalued human beings who are just sort of like, you know, hard-boiled killers. And as great as the beginning is, where Leon winds up shooting Holden, as we heard at the beginning of this, I just really thought the casting of it was phenomenal.

It's a very important scene that kind of sets up the world and the rules and puts things in motion. The other thing I love about it is that we get this luxurious opening miniature shots of the landscape of Los Angeles 2019. Just beautiful. And the reflection in the eyes and everything. And then we get the reveal through a cut of The Office, which is very retro, very noir, with the light coming through the slats of the blinds and the ceiling fan and everything and the way he's dressed. But then pulling out this very strange, exotic, retro-futuristic technology of the Voight Comp Test. And the juxtaposition of these things, like immediately you kind of start getting, oh, okay, this is a cohesive sense of time and place that has a lot of conviction behind it.

One of the things I love about this movie is, you know, look, the more we get into this podcast, the more that I just mourn the loss of grain. And like, once we've moved into digital, everything is so clean. This movie is shot extremely grainy. And also Ridley Scott smoked every set. I mean, like, Emmett Walsh, like, literally threatened to kill him because he was so sick from all the smoke. You read the oral history of this movie.

Smoke and rain, smoke and rain.

And it's a smoke that's made from mineral oil. So it is a thick smoke. And then every character who smokes, and I love the promiscuous smoking in this movie because you just don't see that in movies anymore. And smoking is the coolest thing ever if it didn't make you stink and kill you. They're not cigarettes. They have these spliffs. I mean, these are big, thick cigarettes that put out a lot of smoke. And it so adds to the atmosphere of the film. And it hits you. The other thing I wanted to mention, Paul, is that all of these miniature shots, now, one of the great things about movies in the 80s and 90s, before digital, between 1977 with Star Wars and before like 1991 when CGI started taking over, every VFX house had its own signature look. And the VFX in this movie were done by Douglas Trumbull, who did 2001 A Space Odyssey. You might have heard of that one. It's pretty good. These shots are all incredible. The choreography of the shots is so different from what ILM did. And they're different things and you can see it. And I genuinely believe that when we moved from analog to digital, we lost some of that, not humanity, but uniqueness in how shots are choreographed and how they're put together. This film is just visual effects wise. I don't see a single matte line in this movie. It's incredible.

It's dazzling. There's not a bad shot. I mean, it's all spectacular. The level of craft and attention to detail, both from the construction, but the lighting, the design, and then, yeah, the camera choreography in terms of how we're glide through this world and savor it. It's just delicious. And it's a feast because it keeps going. It's not one of these films where you feel constrained or limited in terms of like, oh, we're just going to get to see this one part and the rest is going to be playing. It is so expansive and it keeps turning new corners. Throughout the film, visually, that maintaining consistency, but also just make it feel bigger and richer and more like a real place that exists. And just thinking from a production standpoint in terms of the scale, the degree of difficulty, knowing the stress and demands that were put on the American crew. And this was the first time Scott had worked with an American crew, I believe. And that did not go entirely well in terms of how demanding he was. But the result, it's just staggering as an achievement.

It is interesting because Ridley Scott, you know, he cut his teeth doing commercials and heavily stylized commercials. I mean, he did a commercial for Sobs. That is first of all, my favorite car. So of course, I saw this. Shortly after he did this, he did a commercial for an organization that was worried about the budget deficit. And it was called the Deficit Trials. And it was a one-minute commercial where these children in a post-apocalyptic dystopian America are holding their elders to task in a trial for the budget deficits having destroyed the economy, which is hilarious knowing what we know now. But it was interesting to see that because it was like suddenly that Blade Runner aesthetic, even Ridley Scott turned his commercial aesthetic into a film, then turned it back into his commercials. Moving out of the hold and scene, we go to the recruitment of Deckard. Obviously, the heroes call on the hero's journey. We find him eating sushi and noodles. No man has ever ordered noodles with the sadness and plaintiveness of Harrison Ford in the scene, by the way. I literally look at them and go, noodles. I'm like, my God, this guy's a good actor. I literally hear the weight of the world of this character in that, right?

Yeah. He's reading a newspaper. An actual physical newspaper. People are walking around with umbrellas with illuminated posts. I have one for that very reason.

Oh, is that right? Yes.

It took me years to find one. But yeah, but then just the texture of street vendors and street food and this multi-ethnic world and this downtrodden detective who...

And a blimp and a blimp flying overhead saying, hey, a better life awaits you in the off-world colonies. Let's put it out there. And he realized, this guy's stuck here. It's funny because this is where we find out that there's an off-world colony and that's where the replicants are. You hear it in a voiceover because there's a blimp with a video screen showing a commercial for it.

Which we never see, like we never go off-world. We don't need to. We just need to know that it's out there, that it exists. It is an unreachable, unattainable goal and aspiration for the elites. But leered out in the ground, in the grime, with these working class steps that are having to deal with just the dreck and the mess of the world that's been left behind.

I also want to say, I love that now is the point in this movie when we introduce Edward James Olmos as Gaff, a lesser Blade Runner to Rick Deckard. I'm not entirely sure why. The trade craft for a Blade Runner is very opaque in this movie. I would love to hear what he says to Rick Deckard and how he says it. Hey, producer Brad, may we hear that clip? So, that's basically Edward James Olmos saying, Captain Brian wants to talk to you, right? And the Japanese man who's serving him the sushi is translating. And later the voiceover explains that lingo he was talking was gutter talk, street lingo. All the good cops knew it, but I didn't want to make it easier on him, which is hilarious. But I love that Edward James Olmos is sort of presented as a villain, but he's kind of not, you know. He's sort of a morally neutral character. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I really appreciated seeing a Latino character in this role as a 53-year-old. When I was 12 watching this movie, I immediately coded him as a villain. And seeing it later, I'm like, he's just sort of present and part of the bureaucracy, you know? What are your thoughts?

Well, I worship Edward James Olmos, boundlessly. And in this era of this, and then Miami Vice, and just this iconic Latino actor, and he has such a decisively unique presence in every shot that he's in in this film. I love this character and he's such a man of mystery. He sort of exudes a little air of mysticism to him, of that he's got his own story, his own past, he knows things, he's got skills and hobbies, origami being notable among them. He has this multi-ethnic, potentially biracial dimension to him that also is just very intriguing and very intentional in terms of portraying what this world and culture is like.

In a weird way, I think his character is coded as more Asian than Latino because of the origami, but also because of how he wears his clothes very neatly. There was a stereotype of the Japanese businessman and that culture being very buttoned up and all that. You're seeing that kind of techno-orientalism, to be sure, but you see it all through the movie. I know that a lot of Asians have come to really dislike the use of that techno-orientalism to denote culture. This movie is so new. Gaff's sort of appearing in this multi-ethnic, but sort of very Asian kind of... It's a really interesting thing they did with him.

I read it as sort of a multi-ethnic, biracial, and so I'm happy to give it a pass because also he's one of the few, if not only, people of color in the film. But I do think it is an oversight, clearly in retrospect and should have been clearly even at the time, that a film that has so much Asian influence on the aesthetic and the coding, there are no significant speaking parts or roles for Asians except for the vendor here and the eye maker. And the eye maker, yeah. The great James Hong, who does have one amazing scene, which is not to be discounted. Other than that, there isn't someone who we follow and travels through the full narrative.

So Deckard gets lifted off here and we have a great shot of the car they call the Spinner, the flying police car, which is gorgeous design and beautifully rendered. And like I said, I believe that a car actually flies from seeing this movie in a way that I don't know that I would from a CGI effect. In a weird way, the analogness of this movie puts me so in that world that I'm never taken out by the VFX shots and it's phenomenal.

And it's raining in part to camouflage the cables that are lifting the actual full scale spinner.

Yeah, but that's the ingenuity. I mean, that's the ingenuity of analog filmmaking, you know, and it's something that I adore about having that kind of problem solving.

But it's also a beautiful example and device of connecting us from the street level, tactile art direction of this fully fleshed out world and then seamlessly moving us up into these overhead model shots, miniatures of the cityscape. And you feel like that is all seamless.

It's all of a piece.

And it's just it's so beautifully done. And that is a hard thing to do and pull off well. And this film just does it with such confidence.

The other thing about the rain is that because it's set in Los Angeles, everybody equates Los Angeles with sun, you know, and you look at a movie, not a period, but never raining.

Yeah.

And the rain actually makes LA seem apocalyptic because it never rains in LA. So what the fuck happened to the world that LA is like this now? It's a brilliant device for a lot of reasons. So, they go to what is clearly Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, which is disguised as a police station. And I love it because two of the three greatest buildings in Los Angeles are prominently featured in this film.

And we are both lovers of vintage LA.

Yeah, because it's a lot of Art Deco, a lot of like that Frank Lloyd Wright, Mayan sort of influence design and all that in this movie, it's phenomenal. And the voiceover, it's cringeworthy. We go to see Captain Bryant, who was played by Emmett Walsh, who was a fat, racist police captain who calls the replicants skin jobs, right? And by the way, if you ever want to see how badly Harrison Ford didn't want to do this voiceover, the next line in the voiceover, she says, Bryant was the kind of cop who in the history books would have called black people. And then he says the N word and his cadence in saying the N word is so dubious that you can just see Harrison Ford, the actor sitting in a thing going, do I really got to say the N word here, guys?

I have to say, I had forgotten that that was in the narration and that was a big wow in rewatching it that that was in there.

Yeah. So, here's where we get all the exposition in the movie and it's actually kind of clumsily handled and you can actually see the scenes in the places where they put the voiceover to explain shit and all that.

Yes. And I just have to say compare and contrast this scene, the end of it while the Bryant doing the briefing to Harrison Ford with the Raiders of the Lost Ark briefing.

Oh my God.

Right. From the government people to there. It is night and day. I mean, Harrison Ford is in both, but this is a little, it's a lot, but it has a lot to do. It introduces all the replicants by their files. It also reveals Gaff's penchant for origami, which is foreshadowing.

Well, I mean, look, absolutely. And I think one of the things that's sort of interesting about the scene is that it's a shoe leather scene that every detective movie has to have at some point, you know, where they show you the dossier, they give you the briefing, whatever the fuck it is, you know. But yeah, it's sort of very clumsily handled. And it does, however, introduce something that I really like in this movie, which is the futuristic Dewar's Scotch bottle, because it's a sort of rectangular kind of, and they actually sold it for a while as a collector's item, which is wonderful. But seeing Union Station shot this way is just gorgeous. I mean, it really is. And one of the things that I think is so interesting about this movie is that it's a movie about the future where the world still works like in 1940s. Everything is analog, everything is mechanical. There's TV screens, but they're sort of weird. The cops, it's literally like a fat old sort of coded a southern guy who's like, I need the old Blade Runner. I need some magic, Deck.

Yes. Well, and also it's this interesting, it's interesting in terms of how it forecasts something so well, so clearly, and has such huge blind spots at the same time in terms of forecasting. So it's a movie that cannot imagine the internet or a lot of things related to that or the full digital world, but it has a lot to say about artificial intelligence that's now manifesting now in many ways.

The film's failure to forecast the future though, and I say failure in quotes, because the film became the future for a lot of other things, is actually one of the reasons why it stands so well now, because you don't have, you know, now, I mean, once it's been 41 years, it sort of stands on its own. You think of another movie in like the early 90s, like The Net, you know, the Sandra Bullock movie about the evils of the internet, right? That movie is cringe worthy, and it never won't be for a lot of reasons. I mean, it's obviously, but because this movie doesn't have some sort of flawed portrayal of a thing that then flowered into something so pervasive, it sort of stands on its own. And it literally, for me, this is more than anything, a movie from the 1940s kind of disguised as a futuristic film. And I have another point to make about that later. But it's very much a movie about the technology and the world of the 1940s.

Yeah. And it's not so much about the future, but about an alternate reality. It's set in this sort of parallel universe that now we've diverged even more from, thankfully, in many ways. Yeah, but the boldness and clarity of the vision and how much it got right and things that it missed that, of course, how could it not have? It's so fascinating now to look at it compared to when it came out. The other thing, too, I just want to touch on in this scene that I think is the most critical piece of narrative fulcrum is the clock, is the revelation that these replicants have a built-in fail safe, which is a four-year lifespan to protect against them potentially becoming fully emotionally developed and then acting out due to that and then posing a danger and a risk.

So the entire motivation of the replicants is set up in the scene, which is they are artificial human beings who have been created with a four-year lifespan so that they're not a threat. And to find out what the replicants are here to do is obviously going to be to try to get adapted to have more life.

Yes. And that Tyrell has been implanting them with false memories as a protection.

Not until the Voight-Kauf scene later on. That is the next scene. Deckard goes to the Tyrell Corporation where Dr. Eldon Tyrell, who was played by Joe Turkle, also famously, his other huge role that every geek knows is... Come on, Paul. Give it to me.

Just me and I'm drawing a blank.

He's the bartender at the Overlook Hotel in...

Of course. Yes. One of two connections to The Shining.

Yeah. There's another one.

Innotably.

What's the other one?

Well, the end of the film is constructed out of unused footage.

Oh, yes. I knew that.

That Ridley Scott pleaded for Stanley Kubrick to give him to create the happy ending and all those exterior helicopter shots and scenes of the beautiful countryside are from hours of footage that Kubrick had sent over to Ridley Scott.

For that initial shot of The Shining where you see the car. Yes. Gotcha.

Wow.

I knew that back in the Stone Age. You're literally taking you back to reading Starlog magazine in my bedroom flashlight.

But then one of the great scenes of the film that is Deckard arriving and meeting Rachel. played by Sean Young.

Sean Young is, I mean, look, Sean Young's career has had a lot of ups and downs and it kind of never found its full flower. And I think she was quite misogynistically blamed for some of her own behavior and blah blah and all this stuff, whatever. But in this scene, she's not only beautiful, her character is so smart, so on it. And also she gives the greatest smile in movie history.

Her performance, and it is augmented by extraordinary cinematography, hair and makeup and costuming, staging and all the rest. But what strikes me about her performance is the laser precision of her expressions, her movement, her intonations, her phrasings. It is so, I just, it's really impressive in terms of the specificity of it and the consistency of it and then the arc of her character as she is confronted with revelations and stuff later. But in this scene, holy crap, she is, I would rank her up with the great Hitchcock femme fatales of just being a, you cannot take her eyes off of her. She's mesmerizing and captivating and utterly fascinating.

And when you look at this performance, it's almost like in the original novel, the word replicant doesn't appear. Neither does the word Blade Runner, which they actually, there was a screenplay that was written by William Burroughs that they bought in order to use the name only, which I don't know, because they never use, call replicants blades or.

Yeah, no, it makes no sense. It's totally random.

But, you know, in the book, replicants are called androids. And what I think is really interesting about her performance, and it just, it just occurred to me that, you know, it really is her arc from being very robotic and very self-confident in a way that registers as kind of constructed, you know, to kind of breaking down into sort of realizing she's not who she thinks she is. And I think this is something that happens with all the replicants in the movie is you see them every once in a while, their performance becomes very childlike. As Tyrell explains in the scene after Deckard gives Rachel the Void Conf test is that they give the replicants these memories, these fake memories, to give them some emotional maturity so that they are able to not have nervous breakdowns and rebel and do all of this shit, right? So for me, the performance seems very calculatingly, I'm an android now, then something breaks that reality and I'm no longer a robot and I become a person, I know how to be a person. And I think that's what I read from it and I think it's beautifully rendered.

Yeah, because at this moment in this scene, she does not know she's a replicant. So she is a replicant who thinks she's a human and she is acting and behaving at her most robotic, at her most calculating and cold and distant and artificial.

But also very confident.

Absolutely, and that kind of duel of wits and intellects, which she clearly outclasses him, is just so delicious. But then, yeah, over the course of the film, once she decides or realizes that she may be a replicant than accepts that she is, she becomes and behaves more like a human than she did when she thought she was a human. Again, it's just a very effective arc.

So the fulcrum for her transformation is the scene because Tyrell comes in and he's Joe Turkle and he's dressed all in white always and he's very, very sort of…

With the best glasses.

Giant, giant glasses that have three, they're like trifocals. Eyes are a huge metaphor in this movie. So obviously the godlike creator of the replicants can't really see very well, which is amazing. He needs this huge instrument in front of his face because he is short-sighted and he has created life that he can't control and all this shit. So he gives Rachel the Voight-Kampff test and Deckard figures out that she's a replicant, but it takes him a lot longer because of the memory implants have changed her empathy and Voight-Kampff is testing for empathy. Paul, I know you know about this and I know you've seen this movie a million times, but while Harrison Ford is giving the Voight-Kampff test to Rachel and asking all these embarrassing questions that are supposed to provoke a blush response, he tells her a story. One of the questions is a story that later is repeated as one of her memory implants.

Yeah.

And that is the thing about this movie that I have never figured out, because later in the film, Harrison Ford and Rachel have a confrontation where he tells her her own memories because Tyrell told them to him so that he can prove to her that she's a replicant, right?

Yeah, with considerable cruelty.

Yeah, he's pretty fucking mean in that scene, right? But then in this scene, he's actually telling that same story as the Voight-Kampff question, and it is one of those moments where I can't imagine it is a realistic moment in the film. I think it's sort of an impressionistic moment in the film. How do you read that, Paul?

I think that is an oversight, plain and simple. I have to think that that was, I don't know. Because if you try to rationalize it as her reading it as thinking, you would think that that would clue her in.

And she would have reacted during the Voight-Kampff test, right?

Yes, and she would have reacted because it's like, wait a minute, that's just too wild a coincidence. I mean, there's some shadings about where maybe could be like, okay, maybe it's a little, you know, not exactly the same or a little different or something. But it's so close that it would and should set off an alarm unless she's just gone through so much and she's that far along into the hundred plus questions or whatever it takes them. But still, it does feel like maybe that is a little continuity hiccup.

The reason I bring it up is because this movie has been re-edited majorly and re-released twice. So for them to have basically gone, oh, we need some Harrison Ford dialogue to stick in here. Let's get some outtakes from this other scene and put them in here. But have it be so clearly? I don't know. I'm flummoxed.

Yeah. I mean, now you're making me want to go excavate various commentaries and see if it's been acknowledged or explained or anything because that is a little sort of narrative anomaly.

So anyway, so this is the scene where Deckard is confused because he doesn't understand how Rachel doesn't know she's a replicant. Tyrell, since you're out of the room, explains everything about the memories and the implants and all this stuff. And Harrison Ford, basically, we start getting a sense that Deckard's humanity is tied to his memories of the past. You know, we see a lot of photographs that he's got, a lot of the mystery has to do with photographs because the replicants have photographs and he's got photographs. So it's really interesting how this movie basically equates humanity with the capacity for memory.

Yeah. And also how untrustworthy memory can be.

Right. But that capacity to tell yourself a story about who you are and what you are seems to be very much at the crux of what the film sees as a huge part of being human, you know, which is just fascinating to me. I really like how it's just one of the things about this movie that really stuck with me is that, you know, I always think that when I get older, once I lose my memories, I genuinely wonder who I will be, you know? And it's a question you start asking yourself after 50 because then your parents start forgetting things. You know, I found that very poignant when I first saw it and now I find it like really food for incredible, incredible thought.

Yeah.

Now, after this scene, we see the replicants for the first time, right? This is the first time we see the quote, villain unquote of the piece and that's Roy Batty, right?

Yes.

This is where Roy Batty and Leon go to see the eye maker who's played by James Hong, the great actor James Hong, who was 50 years old from 1949 all the way into 1998. And then he started aging around the time he did the Seinfeld episode. But I mean, he was literally the same age forever. It's the greatest gift a character actor can get and he has been in every film ever made, right?

Yeah.

I mean, he was the butler in Chinatown. He was Lopan in Big Trouble in Little China. He's the grandfather in everything everywhere all at once. This man literally is a one man record of Asians in film in the United States. And it's just great to see him.

A living legend and seeing him get the love and adulation after everything everywhere. Just one of the best things in the world and seeing especially if you saw the SAG Awards and this is on YouTube, their acceptance speech for the cast where they basically just gave him the floor and took it as a moment to honor him and his incredible influence and legacy, particularly for that community. It is just incredibly moving and meaningful. He is unwaveringly, whenever he appears in any movie, he is such a delight.

Absolutely.

He's just so fantastic. And here has a great scene. I mean, what an amazing, juicy scene because off of him and his reactions and interplay, we really register how dangerous and threatening and ruthless, particularly Roy Batty, the great Rutger Hauer.

The great Rutger Hauer, by the way.

Oh my God.

And I just want to say one thing, and this is pivoting, I apologize. Rutger Hauer is a vastly underrated actor who did a lot of cheesy shit to make money and to make his living because he was not the American leading man type. He was the leading man type in Holland, where he played the lead in a bunch of Verhoeven movies. Soldier of Orange. Right? This guy's great.

Yeah.

He made a movie maybe five, six years before his death called Hobo with a Shotgun.

Yes, we showed it at Fantastic Fest.

Okay, that movie is as stupid and grisly and garish and, I mean, just bug shit crazy as a movie can be. His performance in that movie is fucking towering. And I watched that film and they go like, who could have pulled this off to make a movie called Hobo with a Shotgun, make you care this much and love this character so much and understand him so much and empathize with him so much. It's a fucking triumph. And it's so weird to even have these words coming out of my mouth.

As you know, and I'm always happy to have an excuse to say, I am half Dutch and I'm very, very proud of the great Rutger Hauer. And yeah, I do think he's an actor, particularly coming off of this film that was worthy and deserved greater opportunities than he was afforded. He is incredible in this film. I mean, just from the moment he's on screen and every moment he's on screen, he exudes such a range. It's so gratifying to see somebody of his skill and talent and also coming in from the Netherlands into a film like this to make the most of the role from menace, thoughtfulness, melancholy. The complexity, I think it's one of the great villains in, if not in all film history, certainly in genre and sci-fi.

I don't see him as a villain necessarily, and I think that's kind of the magic of the performance. Yes. And he's got this towering shock of white hair that is, I mean, just his look is so iconic along with that. There's something about this scene that kind of is what cemented my idea in this, that this is a movie more about the 1940s and even about the 1980s. So you've got replicants, you've got a huge corporation that designs artificial people. And they're the most powerful corporation on earth. And they have like some dude in a shack making the ice for the replicants.

Subcontractors.

Yeah. And the subcontractors are all these little cottage industries, like later we meet a genetic designer and he literally works out of the Bradbury and it's like, you know, and it's like, you get the sense that it's more like a world that is weirdly small for how big it is, you know?

Yeah. It also, I think, is a very incisive commentary about labor exploitation. It's a really interesting dimension and kind of wrinkle in the plot that we're given this literal tower of corporate dominance of the Tyrell Corporation, and yet they're reliant on... Like these poor little, these poor shamps who are literally sitting in these buildings, like, I'm making ice, you know, these little freelancers in these hovels who are doing things that are crucial to their supply chain. Tim Cook would never stand for this. Like it's just corporate malpractice.

Whether intentional or not, this movie became a commentary on the gig economy. That's all we can say.

I guess so. But there's a wonderful exchange between Hong and Batty that I love because it does multiple things at the same time. And it starts with something that is so simple that it expresses that, oh, this guy is one cog in this bigger machine. He's a craftsperson who just does one thing. And then the response speaks to the greater philosophical issues of the film.

Morphology, longevity, insect dates.

I don't know.

I don't know such stuff.

I just do eyes, genetic design.

Well, just so for context, they're interrogating the eye maker to find their way to Dr. Tyrell. So their shoe leather starts with getting one of these chimps who's got a cottage industry who makes eyes and trying to get the location of Eldon Tyrell from them, right?

Well, they don't know that yet. I don't think they're even that far along yet. They're looking to find out who can fix their genetic program. They don't necessarily know who that is yet. They're trying to find out who that is.

What I love about Roy Batty as a villain, first of all, his name is Batty, which already tells you he's like this, you know, there's a sort of split personality to the character. Brian tells us that him and Zora and Leon are basically soldiers bred for an off-world murder kick squad. Like, they're literally, they were literally built to assassinate precedents, heads of states and whoever needs to be murdered, right? And they're looking for more life. You know, by the end of this movie, that these guys have done some really shitty things, and that they are struggling to overcome that. It's not just life. It's like value. They're trying to become human by valuing their memories, by valuing each other, and they do kill the eye maker. I mean, it's cruel. They take his coat off and he freezes to death in the middle of the scene. But you can see even within that cruelty that there is a growing humanity to these characters, that they're at war with their own programming. Is that reading too much into it, Paul?

Yeah, no. And I think we need to hear how Batty responds to Hong's plaintive plea that he only does eyes, which is just haunting. But then Batty rejoins after a long, suspenseful pause with this. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.

Sure. If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.

I mean, A, a great line. Yes. That's again, layers. It's like, oh, it's.

Yeah. It gives you the entire plight of the replicant right there. Like everything in their bodies is secondhand, gifted to them, but they have to go and do the dirty work and it sucks.

And his reading, I mean, all of his readings is just the choices he makes in it are just elegant and perfect. I just, you couldn't improve on them.

Now then we go to one of the most tedious stretches of the movie, though, though it does show us a really fun kind of world, but it's like Deckard goes to the house where Leon was shacked up. He finds some weird scales. He goes to the animal market. Yeah. He goes to the animal. He also finds the pictures the replicants have and he's working with Gaff right now. He finds the snapshots that the replicants have because they've been gifted with memories also and they have their own like little sort of memory tropes of photographs, which again, really interesting because they're physical photographs unlike how we would do any of that now. Deckard goes to the snake market, no, the animal market, which is sort of a leftover from the novel because in the novel, the whole status is if you can buy a robot animal to be your pet, you are rich. And the scene with the owl at the beginning of the movie with Rachel and Deckard talking about Tyrell's owl, which is a real owl, shows that Tyrell is on the league of his own. So he goes to the animal market, finds out that it's a snake scale.

So there's something in between those scenes, which is we see Deckard's apartment. I don't want to skip over the reveal of Deckard's apartment on the 97th floor of a building. It is one of my favorite set designs. I just love what they built for his world to get a peek into his inner life. Yeah. And Rachel is waiting for him and gives him a jump scare in the elevator on the way up.

Because he knows Holden was shot by a replicant. He's now very paranoid about it.

Yeah. Yeah. As he should be on edge around a replicant. She wants answers because she now has questions after the Boykamp test. And he finally lets her in. Yeah, then we have the thing we alluded to earlier where he quite cruelly bursts her fake memory bubble by telling her memories that only she knows that she's never told anybody that were actually Tyrell's niece's memories.

She's there basically telling him, I'm not a replicant. I don't know why Tyrell is fucking around with you. I'm not a replicant. And he like says, oh yeah, then remember this memory, remember that memory and it's about playing doctor. And then it's the story of the spider. They're pretty intimate memories. And then there's a turn. You know, it's funny. So I've seen this movie in the theater. And so Deckard goes, sorry, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You're not a replicant. Go home. Right. His delivery is so hard and so resigned to just the world sucking. You know, but I've also seen an audience laugh at that, at that line and finding the turn just fake. Well, what's your read on him in that scene? Because he has a real asshole to her.

So, my read on that scene is as soon as he knows she's a replicant, he does not think of her as a person. He's thinking of her as a replicant, but he's just going to have to…

How can it not know what it is?

Yeah, he refers to her as an it at that point, at that revelation. And so, he's freaked out by replicants. He clearly has plenty of replicant PTSD from all his encounters that are violent and in death and risk of his own life. So, he is notably freaked out when this replicant has stalked him to his home and tucked somehow in the shadows of the elevator, and he doesn't notice her for 90 floors.

In her massive fur coat.

In her massive fur coat. He's just so out of it and grizzled and worn down. And then I think, yeah, he just has no sympathy for her. We only in this scene start getting the very beginnings of him looking at her with anything remotely resembling empathy when she has her emotional reaction and heartbreak of realizing that her whole life and all her memories could be a lie. And I think he's taken off guard by her reaction to it. But the only comp he has for this is Leon's interrogation and see how that went. And so this is different. So I think that he's still cold. He's still not seeing her as a person yet, but he's incrementally feeling like, okay, kid, like, or whatever you are, like, yeah, it's just a joke, whatever. Just to kind of disengage and get her out of there. Because it's a step towards him then developing empathy and connecting with her as a person.

He doesn't pull out his gun and shoot him, which is what he would have done, which is what a Blade Runner was supposed to do. The thing I wish, honestly, dramaturgically, if I were, you know, if you ask me, if I could make one fix to this movie, one of the things that where I feel this movie falls short is that and why the scene, I think sometimes people laugh at it or find the performance weird or whatever, is that I don't think the movie, even with the death of Holden, I don't think the movie does a good enough job of establishing why ordinary people are so afraid of replicants, you know?

I think it does, but it doesn't too late in the film. I think it would benefit from establishing that earlier.

I think if you look at something like Children of Men and how well they did the job of, on an ambient level, letting you know that Britain had become incredibly racist. There are ads about turning in your illegal servant and stuff like that. You know, it's like, yes, he's supposed to hunt down these replicants. We hear they're from a murder kick squad, that they killed a bunch of people in the shuttle lab. But you just don't get the sense of Harrison Ford's performance is showing it. For me, the scene plays like the context of it is not entirely understandable to me, especially the first like 10 times I saw the movie. And then, you know, you know what's happening, obviously, but it's like you have to stop and think about it. And that makes the movie flow less well, you know? Yeah.

No, I think there's a missing kind of step or kind of beat narratively to kind of be like, okay, we're getting him from here to there in terms of his perception and feelings and relationship and how much his guard is up around replicants on the interactions. So, yeah, I mean, but another note that I have, and I have this note down many times, is then she leaves what now is clearly a fake photo of her as a girl with her mom on a front porch. And then there's more narration that, again, kind of ruins the scene.

It explains everything, yeah. It would have been nice if the narration had said something like, you know, since the narration is there and it hamfists, it explains anything. Maybe it should have said, you know, I killed three replicants, but my wife was killed by the fourth one. And I mean, anything like when Kirk in Star Trek 6 says, I've always hated Klingons and I always will. You know, like, yeah, why doesn't the voiceover give us that one thing so we can, you know, anyway?

Yes, what is his overriding thematic kind of personal mission statement? Then we reveal Chris.

Well, hang on, because there's one thing I want to say before that. And it is this. The cue used in this part of the movie when Rachel is listening to Rick Deckard tell her her memories and a single tear drops from her eye as he begins to just destroy her sense of self is a cue called Memories of Green. If you can find a sadder piece of music than that, please don't send it to me because I don't need that in my life. Oh my God, it's such a beautiful piece of scoring.

Are we talking about the saxophone part?

No, that's Blade Runner Blues. I know this album very well. The one that goes, that one, that's Blade Runner Blues. Memories of Green is sort of a piano and synth. It's sort of analog and digital and it's a little bit more, it calls attention to it a little bit more as a piece of music. And it wasn't made for this movie, it's from a different album actually that Vangelis did before. By the way, Paul, we're going to be in the Vangelis-Jif versus Gif argument later on, you and I. And I think that's Pistols of Dawn.

I'm confident in my arsenal.

OK, so then we meet Pris.

Yes, who, and just picking up on something you mentioned earlier, in contrast to the other kind of Hunter warrior replicants, is your basic pleasure model, we are told.

Oh, so sad.

Played by the amazing Daryl Hannah, who also just goes to town. And again, we have not waited a long time to meet her in the film, but when she's on camera, she is great. And she is sort of lying in wait for Sebastian. So when interrogating James Hong's character, that's the knowledge information that Batty and Leon got out of him was a name. That's who they need to go find, who can potentially help them. So she basically is posing as this kind of street urchin lost girl who waiting outside of what we'll discover is the Bradbury Building where William Sanderson's character, Sebastian, lives. And I got to say just the great William Sanderson, who's just this wonderful character actor who is so distinct and nuanced and weird in a wonderful way and probably most famous from Newhart for many seasons. Hi, I'm Larry.

This is my brother, Daryl. This is my other brother, Daryl.

Yes. But so many great genre credits. And he's one of these great character actors that's great to see. And he's perfectly perfect in this film.

William Sanderson is kind of like the anti-Brad Durif, you know?

Very understated.

All of the nice versions of a role that Brad Durif might have played, except Brad Durif is so fucking creepy and evil. If you had the yin and yang of that kind of character actor, Sanderson is the yin and Durif is the yang.

Yeah, and he plays like not being all there, like not quite having a full deck, like being a little off, but with sympathy and an earnestness that's really good.

And this character, this character isn't a fucked up weirdo because he's a genetic designer, and he literally has like little dwarf, artificial little people that he's created. Yeah, I don't want to say little people because these are like, I mean, first, because they'd be an insult to little people. Yeah, they're sort of dwarven creatures, you know? And one of them is dressed like a sort of Prussian field marshal, but he has an S&M like thing in front of his mouth, like a weird wire gag in front of his mouth.

And a very phallic nose.

Yes.

There's stuff going on that maybe we're better off not knowing. Yeah, he introduces them. They're my friends. I made them. Which says everything is that the only friends he has are ones that he had to make himself.

And yet somehow he is the genetic subcontractor for the entire Tyrell company. And it has access to Eldon Tyrell, and he lives in like a dump and like he has no security and whatever. Okay.

And then we're almost back at the street market and tracking down, you know, the snake Azora. But I cannot believe you skipped over one of the most gloriously geeky scenes. Go on. In all of sci-fi. Which I will just describe with one word. Enhance.

Oh, oh, yes, yes. This is very important because this is not only one of the greatest scenes in sci-fi. It is the birth of a cliche.

Yes.

You know, it's the first time that I personally, I don't know if it's happened before, but that you see a cop have a picture, a snapshot, and he goes, Enhance, roll it, go in, go further. You know, like, obviously, if you don't think about grain or pixels, you know that it doesn't work that way.

You know.

But one of the things I love about that, and that's what sets them to go find the snake, the snake seller and all of that, one of the things I love about that scene specifically is as digital, as much as they can do that on CSI or NCIS, they enhance it and they see the face of the bad guy reflected on the mirror of the car. The way the technology is set up here, like, it's funny that they thought that they would be able to have that kind of detailed ability but for me, what's most funny about it is that the voice control of the machine works flawlessly.

Oh, my God.

Obviously, Alexa doesn't exist in this world and, like, this machine follows his every command and has this analog sort of kind of way it does it. But the fact that the voice commands work, I was, like, stunned. I'm like, wow. It's like I asked Alexa to play, like, a song by They Might Be Giants and, I mean, you don't want to know what it said back to me.

There are searchable tweets of mine that articulate this. The depth of my contempt for Ciri really is boundless. I feel like it exists to torment me. Every time I stupidly think that I can try to...

That it could actually do the thing you want.

Useful. It's, anyway, that's the whole thing. But yeah, it's one of the marvels, like a little bonus in this scene that, oh, we've conquered voice navigation in 2019, if only. But yeah, it's this wonderful scene, very analog of him first at the piano with all these photos. And here's where we get the jazz sax kind of riff in the score. Looking at these photos that he's taken from Leon's apartment previously, and he finds one, he loads it in. I'll also note, this is the moment where he originally dozes off at the piano, and in the later cuts, there is the infamous Unicorn Dream.

Infamous Unicorn Dream, yes.

Which is cut from this version, but is a big missing piece of the puzzle in terms of making the case, implicitly, cinematically, that Deckard may be a replicant. But we don't have that in this version. It does not exist in this version.

So let's not talk about it.

We don't know of it.

Let's treat it like Bruno. We don't talk about Bruno.

Exactly. But I'm a geek about UI and UX design and everything, and just the way this was thought through and built, this machine that he feeds this photo into, it creates a grid on a CRT monitor, and he's telling it, and he seems to know, like, the numbers on the grid and say exactly which frames or areas on the grid to enhance and zoom in. Not only does it excavate layers of detail from a printed photograph that are just not possible.

Impossible to get, yeah.

It also is able to ascertain stereoscopic depth in this 2D printed from this 2D printed photo and peek around what I think is like a door frame in the photo. And at the one hand, it's so absurd, but on the other hand, I'm just like, oh, this is delicious. I just love that they're like, you know what? While we're at it, let's just say it can do this. And then that's how he gets a little peek in a reflection of Zora. And now he has something to go on to be like, have you seen this woman?

Zora, who was designed for an off-work kick-murder squad, talk about beating the beast, she's both.

Who we will soon meet, played by the great Joanna Cassidy.

Now we get to this tedious scene where he's doing the shoe leather. And it's sort of like very 1940s shoe leather. He goes to one guy's shop and he pulls on his tie and says, listen, buddy, I'm a cop. Tell me what I want to know. And then he winds up at the nightclub where Zora works as basically a stripper who uses a snake in her act. Right?

Yes.

And this is one of my favorite scenes in the movie because this is where Harrison Ford uses what I call his Kermit the Frog voice. He pretends to be a union rep to come in to talk to Zora, who's working as a stripper, about whether she's been exploited in the job.

It's so wonderfully out of left field.

Producer Brad, could you please give us a taste of that? Because wow.

Excuse me, Miss Salome. Can I talk to you for a minute? I'm from the American Federation of Variety Artists. I'm not here to make you join. No, ma'am. That's not my department. Actually, I'm from the Confidential Committee on Moral Abuses. Committee of Moral Abuses? Yes, ma'am. There's been some reports at the management in taking liberties with the artists in this place.

This leads Rick Decker to...

You do it...

.to appreciate this. First of all, it is a rare delight to see Harrison Ford venture into comedy.

Yes.

I don't think we get enough of that or have gotten enough of that, but it is a special delight when he does it in a film that is not a comedy. What I love about that little moment is it's just fun. You know that Harrison Ford is loving getting to do this.

Right.

But the other thing is that it conveys to us not just suggestion, but the reality that Deckard has the capacity to be comedic and assume this kind of voice. And this is part of what he does in his job, is he assumes these different personas to weasel his way in and get people to talk to him in something. And it's such an unexpected texture and revelation of the character. And it reminds me, and I know if I recall correctly, that you are not the biggest fan of Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade.

I am not.

But there is a scene in that film that I hope even you have to love, which is when they show...

When he pretends to be the Scottish guy?

Yes! When he shows up at the castle with Ilsa, and they're like, how are we going to get in and talk? And this clip is on YouTube. It is one of my favorite things Harrison Ford has ever done, because out of the blue, he takes her beret, and they walk in, and there's this hilarious scene where he plays a sneezing Scottish connoisseur, who's, I'm here to proceed to tapestry. And it's just, and it's insane. It is so completely out of left field, but it's hilarious. It's one of my favorite things. So I feel like there need to be more movies where we get little comedic digressions of Harrison Ford doing funny voices.

In a movie, this is doer and downbeat of Blade Runner. And again, like I don't say that, like as a criticism, that's the tone of the movie. It's kind of a really odd detour also, but it also doesn't make him... Like the movie is stylized and it's heightened, and I buy that as something that the character might do, but it's also so heightened that obviously Zora doesn't buy it.

Oh, yeah, completely.

And she's doing it for real. So he's doing the subterfuge. She's clearly not buying it. He keeps doing it, and he only breaks character when she takes her clothes off to take a shower in front of him. And then you can hear him. It's really cool kind of the way he sort of slips out.

Yeah, he kind of loses his composure slightly.

I think what's really amazing about this is you've got this comedic moment where Harrison Ford is doing this, and then Zora fucking attacks him, and it is hard.

She comes at him to murder him. She is in the process of murdering him ruthlessly, violently. He is getting the crap beaten out of him. He is a dead man. But then other showgirls happen to intrude and interrupt, and then we get the chase out into the streets, where we are finally really seeing him in his Blade Runner mode, that is, as this hunter of replicants.

But you know what I like about the way this fight is choreographed? If this movie had been made today, this fight would be a five-minute affair with wire work, and he would be able to do some sort of quack-foo. And what I like about this is, even if you're like a guy with military training or whatever, somebody comes at you like she does to him, it's not like you're going to get up and start doing quack-foo. It's not going to happen. You're going to get the shit beat out of you. And it's almost like when we talked about Firefox and the fight in the bathroom, I was just kind of two dudes bare-knuckling it. The lack of choreography and the lack of it being now a fight scene is so refreshing to me.

It also is another example of one of the things Harrison Ford is great at is playing somebody who is outmatched and is in over his head and really doesn't stand a chance against a replicant.

No one will ever affect pain with a single finger as well as Harrison Ford does. Like literally you have a shot of just his hand and you're like, wow, that guy can act.

Yeah, but it's in this scene and sequence that, again, we got that with Roy Batty's introduction with James Hong. Now we're getting, you know, we're establishing the threat that Zora is and really what all of them are. But we also fully now see through this chase scene how ruthless Deckard is.

See the hero of the movie, Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones, Han Solo, right? I mean, a matinee idol literally chases a woman out onto the streets and shoots her in the back. And that keeps shooting her in the back and causes her to crash through like this display window, this very poetic sort of series of shots of her crashing through glass and bleeding and all that. But it's amazing because like this is, you know, and I have a friend who in college was very obsessed with this film and he kept saying, it's the first time I ever saw a movie hero shoot a woman in the back. It's shocking that he does that, you know, and it kind of makes him kind of a villain. I mean, I don't know, what was your read on him with that?

Yeah, well, and again, I'm circling back to when I described Roy Batty as a villain. He's really, he's the antagonist, and he's sort of an anti-hero. Once we get his full story and perspective, which is what makes the character and kind of all of them interesting, is that they're fighting for their lives, fighting for survival. And Deckard's moral code is such that he can only do his job if he does not regard them as people, but he regards them as things, as machines that have gone wrong, that he just has to deactivate. He is not shooting a woman in the back. He is deactivating a machine that is now functioning, except they are people.

Except this being the middle of the film, and he's had an encounter with Rachel. It's sort of like his reaction to it is that he's genuinely feeling like he shot a woman in the back. And then the voiceover tells us exactly that, that he didn't like shooting a woman in the back, which I kind of got from the performance that he was ambivalent.

But yeah, it is part of the journey that this character is on, this awakening, and then witnessing this ruthless, vicious act of violence is Leon. And we've been presented, now we've met all of the replicants, all four of the off-world replicants, but also five with Rachel. We've now established them all, we've met them all, and now one of them has fallen at Deckard's hands. And he's after the rest, but now Leon is not happy. Gaff and Bryant then arrive.

At the crime scene, yeah. Once you're in the crime scene, kind of tape sort of part of the scene, yeah.

Yeah, very efficiently and maybe conveniently, but it's presumed some time has passed.

They've got flying cars, what are you going to do?

They have flying cars, they could be everywhere. And then we get the thing that we kind of know is coming at this point, but is explicitly said, which is Deckard is told, I think he says like, oh, there are three left. He's like, no, there are four. Meaning that he has to also retire Rachel, because she has escaped or she has led Tyrell.

The turning point in the movie here is now Rachel is without a doubt one of his targets.

Then Gaff and Bryant leave, Deckard is now shouldered with this burden and Leon has been lying in wait and attacks. And we get one of the iconic lines of the film.

Wake up. Time to die.

And the gunshot we hear there is Rachel shooting him in the head, having caught Deckard's gun, because even though she told him she didn't want to have a drink with him, she showed up.

Yes. And again, it's a moment where Deckard without outside interference, is a dead man, just as he was with Zora. Leon is going to kill him, is in the process of killing him, but it is actually thanks to the intervention of a woman, just as it was with other women in the Zora fight scene, that he's saved. And yeah, it's Rachel who shows up and has remarkably good marksmanship.

The other thing is like, you know, it's funny because like Leon has this massive exit wound, but there's no blood on Deckard. You know, Leon literally has an exit wound in the front of his head that is like the size of a tennis ball, but there's no gore. It's sort of a, I'm glad I didn't need to see Deckard smeared in blood, but I'm just saying it's kind of amusing.

I'm choosing to read that as a feature, not a bug.

The famous Blade Runner revolver.

Well, no, and also of the series of replicants that Leon belongs to. That may have been built in just out of consideration for avoiding mess. And then they go back to Deckard's apartment.

Now, this seems weird and confounding. I don't get it because Deckard, as far as I can tell, is raping her. But she sort of consents, but she kind of doesn't. I mean, I have a lot of trouble with the next sequence because he basically kind of pushes her against the wall and tells her to tell him that she wants him and she says it. This was the scene I've never understood in this film, what the chemistry here is.

It is a very problematic choice. Before we get to that, though, their conversation...

Yes, this is the scene where she says, have you taken the test? It's the button of a scene that begins with, are you going to come after me? And he says, I'm not because I owe you one.

Yeah, I mean, well, first, though, there's a line that she says that I think is really interesting in terms of framing her realization of her place in this world and a sort of an expression of identity. And it's a pretty good tagline.

I'm not in the business. I am in the business.

Forgive us for that long pause. There are a lot of long pauses in this movie during dialogue, but very effectively done. And it makes that more of a twist of the punchline of that line. But I like that line.

It's a realization and acceptance that she is a replicant, you know?

Yes, absolutely. Then we have the very interesting question that she poses to Deckard.

You know that Voight-Kamp test of yours?

Did you ever take that test yourself?

Which he doesn't answer, arguably the film kind of answers because then the saxophone starts playing soon. So take that as you will. But Deckard is wiped out. He's had kind of a rough day.

Oh, he's been almost killed by two by two genetically engineered warriors. You know, decided to assassinate.

Exactly. So he kind of crashes on the couch. Rachel then goes to the piano and starts playing the piano and looking at Deckard's pictures that are arrayed on the piano and then also lets her hair down. And so up until this point and everything, this is, I think, a really interesting and considered and good scene. But then she tries to leave, but then he blocks her from leaving.

Yeah, and he kind of comes after her romantically and it's like...

Yeah, and kind of forces himself on her to a degree and then makes demands of her. And then there is, as I read it, a pivot on her part to then, I think, maybe this is a this is a generous read of the scene, but I would hope that this is the intention of it, that then she pivots to choose to then participate, even though she initially is not given that choice. And that is clearly problematic.

I understand that Harrison Ford's character is under duress, that he needs human connection, but it really just plays like a rape and it's really hard to stomach for me.

It's also complicated by, at this point, to what degree is he still seeing her as an it, as a thing, and as a person. And it feels like he's not quite made it fully across that threshold from one to the other. And so I think that that may be part of what this scene is and that choice is intended to convey. Again, maybe this is an overly generous or forgiving reading of the scene on my part. But as I agree with you, I think absent of that, it is too difficult to stomach.

I also don't understand the reason why the scene was written that way when it is very... Look, they've done all the cliches now of bonding. She shoots the person who's going to kill him. They go to his apartment. He takes his shirt off. You see he's wounded. She tends to him a little bit. You know in an action movie when the hero takes his shirt off and you see his wounds that he's probably going to get laid. Like that's just a thing in action movies, you know? Usually the doting female character patches up his wound and then they start kissing and blah, blah, blah, right? Could you please just have done the most cliched version of this? Because that would have been a lot better than what you did here. And I don't understand your choices. Dramaturgically, I look at the scene and I'm like, this makes me not love Rick Deckard. It makes me not understand him. And I don't get why he's gone this way. It's weird. What do I know? I didn't write the movie. I'm not the most influential film of 1982.

Yes.

I want to be on the record that I dislike that choice enormously and do not understand it as a dramatic choice.

I agree. Then, and this is a long scene, like we've been in this apartment with the two of them for a long time with lots of long pauses and stretches and whatever. We come out of it and Pris, who has taken shelter with Sebastian, is donning her iconic makeup and wig look.

She's airbrushing a black line across her eyes so that she looks good. She has that kind of raccoon mask look to her.

In a way, can be read as almost preparing herself for battle.

It looks like Martin's in Apocalypse Now.

Yeah. It's this really cool thing. She's talking to Sebastian, playing him like a fiddle as Batty arrives. Then they do this dance with him to persuade him to help them get to Tyrell because Sebastian makes it clear that he can't solve their problems any more than James Hong's character can. He's the specialist, but it's the genius Tyrell who ultimately has the keys to their code. There's really no other choice. Then they have to go for Tyrell.

You learn here that Sebastian has a chess game with Tyrell. They're playing remote games. That's how he's going to get in to see him. What I really love about how William Sanderson plays the scene is his fear of Riker Hauer. If I were home with a woman that I thought kind of like me, I kind of like helped her out and she kind of like me and she looks like Daryl Hannah. You know that's a fantasy that will never happen to you. That will never work out. The arrival of Roy Batty is kind of like, first of all, this is a Nexus Six combat replicant. Sebastian knows it and he is scared shitless. The whole scene is played as if she's trying to sweet talk him into doing this. But his fear of Roy Batty is such that, I mean, he plays it wonderfully because you know he's smitten with her, but here comes her boyfriend and he realizes, holy shit, she's totally out of my league, I'm being played, but I'm so afraid of it and I still kind of want her. I mean, it's a lot of layers to what he's doing.

He's playing like three things at the same time, which is, yeah, that fear of Batty. He knows exactly what the potential is there. The affection for Pris and the longing he has for connection and just validation, he's clearly very lonely. And so there's that longing and hope that like, oh, that's just being right there in front of him. But then on top of that is his loyalty to Tyrell and that he's conflicted about like, how does he navigate this triangle that he's trapped in between these three people, all of whom he wants to try to serve, but there's no way to really do that. And he gives in to the two that are there in front of him and kind of rationalizes it. But you can feel that tension and that anguish. And it's, yeah, it's beautifully played. And all of them, everyone in that scene, it's...

And there's that wonderful, when he's finally convinced and Darahanna gives him a kiss and she smiles. Again, it's like the smile Rachel gives in the Voight Kamp scene. It's like there's something about the way that Ridley Scott had the makeup artist smear a lot of smear, but like really apply a very thick coat of lipstick on these women. And when they do a sort of grin, it's just amazing.

What's being said and unsaid and what's being communicated by the looks between Pris and Batty.

This scene ends on a, like, I think it's six couplets of shots between Batty and Pris where they're looking at each other. And the way that that is communicated, we're friends.

I love you.

We're doing this. We're really evil. We can do bad things. What we're trying to make do for, I mean, it's like, it conveys a universe. It's such a great, like-

This scene's a masterclass. I mean, in terms of how well it is written, how well it is shot and directed and the performances from all three of them. I just, it's, and it's so crucial in terms of moving us to that next step and getting Sebastian to play along. And they go to the Tyrell Corporation.

Ultimately, I'm sorry to interrupt. Ultimately, it's one of those movies where, you know, everybody talks about in Raiders, how like, well, if Indiana Jones hadn't done that. There's actually a movie where the hero's actions don't actually amount to much other than that he kills Zora, because honestly, it's because the replicants go to Tyrell that he finds them. So it's really the replicants' actions that kind of crack the case for him.

Yeah, it is because of Deckard that now two of the replicants are dead because of him going after them. But yeah, one note that I have here, and we get this great intercutting between Tyrell in his opulent bedroom, cloistered far away from the masses in luxury.

Clearly having no private security to speak of.

I was gonna say, a glaring flaw for me, far more than the echo or foreshadowing or whatever of the question of the Voight Comp test to Rachel's memory is, how? How does Tyrell have no security?

Right.

Or there's not even a moment where we see Sebastian kind of bypass anything, but there are like no guards, there's no nothing. Or even just monitoring the elevator that there are people in there, much less the most dangerous entities known to man.

This movie clearly did not foresee the surveillance state at all.

That to me is the biggest plot hole hiccup.

If they called me in and said, hey, can you do a pass on this? I would say, why can't we show Tyrell's arrogance by having his guards show up with guns and him waving them away? Or why don't we show Roy Batty's combat ability by having him take somebody out? But you don't see that. And it's like, you could make any number of actual character points by having an action sequence there, but they don't do it, so.

Or some kind of subterfuge hacker kind of thing. I don't know, but again, it's not that big of a deal, but it is sort of glaring.

What it shows you is that this movie is not concerned with the cohesion of the shoe leather, of the detective beats, of like, you know, all of that. This movie is a mood piece, and it's about loneliness, and it's about being alone in a really confusing world and trying to make sense of it. All the speaking characters are basically lonely people living lonely lives and of almost drudgery by and large. And it's really just about that. And like the movie is, they don't care. They just don't, it's not what the movie's about.

Yeah, no, it's not what it's about. And we're in the home stretch. We're in act three. And again, one of the great scenes and scene work between two actors that this has been building towards that has all this depth to it in terms of what it represents. And I just want to bask in some of the dialogue of that exchange because it is so rich. And I think it is not the quotes that people most echo or repeat or point to from this film. But to me, this is the centerpiece of the movie. So this is when Sebastian, he's welcomed in by Tyrell to continue the chess game. And unbeknownst to him, he is brought to guests with him, Batty and Pris. I'm surprised you didn't come here sooner.

It's not an easy thing to meet your maker. And what could he do for you?

Chilling. And then the whole conversation that follows, delicious. The whole conversation, which is worth watching the film for, this one scene, or jumping to the whole film to see it and see the interaction between these actors. But the setup of this journey that Batty is on to meet his literal maker. And then what is the conversation you would have if you could talk to God? And that is the conversation that he has. And it's this yearning of what he wants, what he's come for, what he's after. And he's trying to have a civilized conversation. But Tyrell has all these excuses and shares very openly about, well, we tried this and all this, whatever, but not taking account for the fact of his willful choice of their four-year lifespan of that fail-safe.

You're saying that Tyrell has excuses. I don't see it that way. So Roy Batty clearly has done his research. He knows he wants to try an RNA thing or this thing or whatever. They have a scene that's full of stupid techno babble that I don't think makes any sense. But the actors deliver it with the intent that one of them, Roy Batty, is asking, can you prolong my life this way? Can you prolong my life that way? Can you prolong my life this way? I know about this stuff. I'm an intelligent being. I've done my research. Joe Turkle does such a great job of going through the sort of techno-babble of it in a very, not dismissive, but like, oh, you dewy-eyed moon calf. Of course we tried the RNA regression. Of course we tried this. But then you get this and you get that and you die. Then you get this and you get that and you die. Then you get this and you get that and you die. And he's so matter of fact and almost like, there's condescension to it, but also he's basically telling him, you're fucked, you're gonna die. Why can't you just enjoy what I gave you? And it's so awful.

Yeah, it is. Because it's this disconnect between Baddie, who is pleading for his life on rational grounds, but also deeply personal, but it's falling on deaf ears for Tyrell because Tyrell does not regard him as a person. So Tyrell is giving what is essentially an academic lecture, kind of recounting all the details of his product development and of different things they've tried, but then he is recognizing the, he's taking pride in his achievement that's represented by Baddie and thinking that like, yeah, he has the line about the brightest flame burns the shortest and oh, you've burned oh so bright. You've burned oh so bright. So there's, but also the sense that, oh, Baddie should be grateful that he was given life at all, no matter how short.

See, here's the thing, and I think where you and I differ a little bit on what the scene is about, because to me, it's less that Tyrell doesn't see Baddie as a person, right? I actually think he does, and he sees him as his creation, and he sees him as his child. But I think it's more that, for me, what this scene is saying is that Tyrell has his head so far up his scientific ass and so far up his own arrogance that he is less human than human, and that he can't recognize a plea for life the way that a human being, instead he gives him all of the lectures and says all that, and he's very matter of fact and very sort of tosses it off in a really interesting way as an actor. But for me, the sum quality is like, all the humans are less than human, and all of the replicants are striving to be what the humans have discarded, which doesn't contradict anything you've said.

Yeah, no, no. And I completely agree. And it circles back to, I mean, the opening scene where we first meet him and Rachel, where we're given the tagline, essentially your slogan for Tyrell, which is that the replicants are, their goal is more human than human, in terms of creating something that exceeds convincingly. And that it is about a technical achievement. It's about this ambition that he has. But yes, it's clear in this moment, in this scene, and so much of what this comes down to is that the humans, yeah, as you said, are inhuman monsters. They have become these cold, indifferent corporate machines, crushing the value of labor that have generated this enormous wealth for them, and not regarding or recognizing their full human value as people.

That is a great Marxist reading of this film, and I approve.

Whereas, yeah, whereas Batty is just asking for something very simple, and once he has exhausted every rational argument, it comes down to something very simple, which is this.

What seems to be the problem?

Death.

Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction.

Now, famously, that has been dubbed over to I want more life father in other versions of this film. Yeah, which I find really interesting because I actually prefer fucker. This is a choice in this cut that I actually think is better because I later on in Prometheus, like fucking Ridley Scott pulls the same thing where like Charlize Theron's character calls what's-his-name's character a father. You know, it's like at the very end of the film and you realize, oh God, Charles Bishop Whelan has been her dad all along. I hate that shit. You're already meeting your creator. They are calling him father just complicates it in a way that doesn't work for me. So I really like that he calls him a fucker.

I agree because also this is speaking blasphemy to God's face. Yes. And that's a very different thing. And I don't think that Thaddeus is going to afford Tyrell the reverence of addressing him as father.

Agreed. Thank you.

He is going to blaspheme him to his face for denying him his right to live.

If Paul were to shout, can I get an amen now? I would stand up and give him an amen.

Don't tell me.

When I watched this film on VHS, I vividly remember, and I think this is just my head conflating all the different versions, because everybody proceeds to squeeze Tyrell's head until he dies, and stick jamming his thumb into his eye sockets. And in some versions of the film, you see this with great gore and blood.

Oh, yeah.

But in this version, you don't.

No, it is very sanitized. It cuts away to the owl watching. Yes. And then Batty's face as he proceeds to press Tyrell's eyes in and crush his skull.

What I love is, I actually like this version better, because Batty's face is full of so much fear and regret and hatred and anger, but it's an anger that is tempered by disappointment and by knowing that God couldn't help him. And now he's killing his own creator and he doesn't like it, but he's doing it because he's so fucking angry at the guy. Just the face alone is so good, you know?

Well, also because at this moment, he knows his fate is sealed.

Yep.

And this was his last hope, his whole journey to try to make a plea for his life to be extended. And he has failed.

Yes.

And there's no other higher god he can appeal to. So he kills his god, knowing that, yeah, if he's going to die, he's going to take him with him. It's operatic in the drama of the scene and the staging of it is great. And that owl, the bookend of, and we kind of flew by the owl in the first scene. Yes.

Tyrell's prized possessions. This living owl witnesses the death of a living being in a way that is horrifying at the hands of synthetic beings. It's great. The symbolism is awesome. I verbalize it. But it's just something that gives you a huge burst of emotion. It's a huge chill. You know, it's great.

It's great. Yeah. And at this point, in a similar way to how we empathize with Khan, we have a full rich sense.

I thought the exact same thing. Yep.

Of Batty as a person and as a protagonist of his own story instead of merely the antagonist of Deckard's story.

And frankly, his story is kind of more interesting.

It's way more compelling and complex. And then Sebastian also witnesses this and flees for his life and they let him go, presumably, as far as I know.

No, he dies. In the police chatter, when Harrison and Deckard is going back to the Bradbury...

Yeah, that's mentioned. That was my wish fulfillment.

I think it's a good one, though, because it was a nice fulfillment.

I was hoping that they'd let him live.

I wish there had been a scene where Pris either has to kill him and she hates herself for it, or she has empathy about it or it bothers her, or where they let him live. And that's part of that ascent toward what the end of the movie is about. I mean, I don't know why that was skipped over, what happens to him, and it's sort of treated in a voiceover.

Yeah, I'm very curious about that choice because given it's like, oh, it's a VO line, it could have easily been lost. But then we get to the grand finale showdown as Deckard is tracked down Sebastian's apartment and now we get more glorious shots of the Bradbury building as Deckard goes through and it's just, oh my God, it's so great. And Pris is awaiting him.

So Pris and Batty are there, they know that they're done for.

Well, Pris is there, Batty's not there yet.

That's right, he shows up later. This whole fight scene is really wonderfully shot and really wonderfully made. It's Deckard versus Pris.

Yeah.

And we've seen Pris do kind of a handstand before and now she's deploying this kangaroo-fu tumbling style that's kind of amazing fighting style.

And again, he gets the shit beaten out of him. Yeah.

And then he finally shoots her and when she dies, it's fine because she's like, she's literally spasming and screaming and on the floor and all that. And it's like, it's funny that, you know, you see Deckard kill a lot of women in this movie.

And it's increasingly disturbing. I have it in my notes as the freaky death flail. That is one of these things that you just can never unsee. It is very disturbing. And it plays into the fact that it's an artificial being. I mean, the closest comparisons are some of the android deaths and alien and aliens. But yeah, it's really disturbing. And then Batty arrives and finds Chris is dead. And so he is the last one standing of the four. And now we get this kind of cat and mouse showdown in the Bradbury building.

Which aside from the architectural porn, I find kind of tedious the end of the movie, to be honest with you.

A little bit.

Oh, I'm glad I'm not the only one. Okay. No, and it's beautifully shot, but it's, you know, it's basically Batty playing cat and mouse with Deckard, because Deckard could not possibly fight Roy Batty. And also Roy Batty has been given this sort of weird dent for poetry. So he's like sort of reciting nursery rhymes at Deckard as he goes after him. And, you know, at one point he grabs Deckard through a wall and he's going like, that's not very sportsman like, you know, and he gets very arch in a way that's kind of, I don't know, it's weird.

This fight gets pretty freaky. So on the one hand, we know that he knows, and there's a scene of it where like his fist or hand is clenching up and he's like, not yet, not yet. He knows he's running out of time, that his expiration date has hit.

Today.

Yeah, which is a little on the nose convenient plot wise, but okay, we'll give it that. It's opera. And he's got nothing to lose at this point. He knows he's going to die. And he sensibly wants to take revenge on Deckard for killing his three friends, and particularly Pris. But yeah, the scene where he grabs Deckard's arm through the wall, then breaks two of his fingers, one each for Zora and Pris. He seems to not need to break a finger for Leon, but I guess because technically Rachel shot Leon.

Maybe.

I don't know that he knows that. But yeah, it's a weird, it kind of gets weird in terms of the chasing and such. Deckard then tries to escape by climbing up out of a ceiling.

Go down when you're trying to escape, not up.

Yeah, I don't know what he's thinking. Of course, he drops his gun because the plot necessitates that. He will not be armed. At this point, it does beg the question, having seen the encounters that Deckard has had or attempted solo with replicants, what is the policy of the Blade Runners that they send them solo without backup? That just seems like a really, is that a budget issue? Is that, but how, why is that?

Where's his little shoulder mounted microphone, he goes like, I need backup.

Yeah, like that would be a really good idea at this point, but you know, it's whatever. We know that he's dying and then we get just as if it weren't clear enough, the stigmata moment of him driving a nail through his own hand, basically-

In order to let the pain keep him alive.

Yes, yes. We sort of read in that there's a reason for that. He's dying.

And then he finds the only clean dove in all of Los Angeles, literally a city that is under a constant rain of soot and filth, but he finds this bird that is pristine white.

And I have to wonder if this is the moment where John Woo thought doves.

Birth of another cliche, right?

But yeah, but then Ford, or Deckard having inexplicably tried to escape upward instead of going down, is now out on a ledge, not a place you want to be, but great shots and matte painting composite plates of everything. It's just great dramatic escalation here. Batty is taunting him, Deckard makes it to the roof, and then is trying to flee by jumping across an alley, I presume, as opposed to a street to the next building, doesn't make it fully, grabs onto this pylon, is holding on for dear life. And then Batty makes the jump with the dove in hand, with plenty of room to spare, like it's not an issue for him, as Deckard is clinging by his fingers from falling to his death. And I didn't remember exactly how this scene was going to play, and I was like, oh, how does this play again? Because you're set up to think, oh, this is the moment where Batty is going to torment him. He's going to step on his fingers. He's going to pry them off one by one. How is Deckard going to get out of this? Deckard's grip slips, and Batty saves him and vaults him up onto the roof.

And proceeds to deliver the monologue everybody knows from this film.

I've seen. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched sea-beams glitter in the dark near the ten-house again.

Thank you All right, now, are you ready to find out that I'm a horrible human being?

No.

I don't like this monologue.

I know this about you.

I wish this had played in silence. I mean, it's like, it's not enough that he's got a dove in a stigmata. We gotta hear him like, Baddie's character turn doesn't really work for me. I understand why it happens dramatically at this point in the movie, but I don't quite get it. It doesn't seem motivated by what's happening. Do you feel that it's all there for Baddie to make this turn?

I think that it imposes a certain burden of work on the audience part to get there. And so the way I opt to process this is that Baddie, it's done. He has defeated Deckard. Deckard's life is in his hands, literally. What he went to his god to plead for and was denied, he has now ascended to be god to Deckard and can extend his life purely at his will and his will alone.

I love that.

And then he has someone to bear witness to his last will and testament.

I wish it had played in silence. Here's the thing for me, we talk about the voice now, and allegedly, Riker Hauer came up with this whole thing on the day, which is awesome if he did. Producer Brad, if we may, I'd like to hear the voiceover that the studio made Ridley Scott put on after Riker Hauer's monologue and after his death.

I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments, he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.

Okay, so.

Yeah, I like my interpretation better.

In case you didn't get it, I honestly wish that it had just played silently, that they hadn't explained anything, that Baddie hadn't even said anything, and leave me to figure out what happened. I genuinely would have preferred that. I think that especially as the movie gets more and more edited over time, you know, like they remove the voiceover, they remove a lot of things like that. It's not that I don't find Baddie's words objectively beautiful in any way. It's just, I just wish they'd let me make up my own goddamn mind about it, you know?

I am taking maybe too much pleasure in the image in my head of listeners to this episode, raising their pitchforks and lighting their torches and coming for you. At the blasphemous suggestion you have made that this iconic, beautiful monologue of Baddie's should be excised. I have nothing but admiration and somewhat confounded wonderment at your perspective and suggestion.

When you see what Ridley Scott accomplishes with that exchange of glances between Pris and Baddie at Sebastian's house, I think that this could have been accomplished similarly here. The thing is the monologue for me, he talks about the 10-Houser Gate and C-beams and attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and all that. And it's like, first of all, as an audience member, I'm like, wait, do we now have interstellar travel in this world than we fought at the shoulder of Orion? Because that's several light years away. That's a problem for me. So you're talking about shit that has nothing to do with the movie, that distracts me from the movie. And just, I mean, he's holding a fucking dove. I don't need any more than that. I got it. You know, in that final moment, he becomes a Christ-like figure that gives life back to a human being.

Yeah, with a stigmataed hand. Yes, yes, I love this so much. I think you're so hilariously wrong, but I love it. I love it. I will grant you, sure, I think that the scene could work and work elegantly and beautifully well in silence without that monologue. Would it work better? I don't know. I actually am curious to see that. I would challenge maybe the more ambitious members of our audience who have time on their hands to maybe upload that to video or something. Take a whack at it. Take a pass. Take a pass. The thought never occurred to me. I honestly wonder whether anyone in the span of human history since 1982 has made such a suggestion. It's a startlingly innovative one, but I choose to grant that moment and that character poetic license in expressing what he's expressing in a way that I don't necessarily take literally. I presume that Tannhäuser Gate is maybe named after the actual Tannhäuser Gate and is actually some structure off world. I think you're being a little too literal given the fact that this film has gotten so operatic at this point.

If this were a video podcast, the sheer confusion and bewilderment in Paul's eyes is phenomenal. It's like you just found out that I have a nuclear weapon in my chest.

I genuinely feel blessed in the journey of my human experience that I may be among the first people to ever hear such a radical creative suggestion.

You might be one of the first people to see somebody killed for making such a radical suggestion.

I would just hope and trust that our audience respects that people like what they like and that everyone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how seemingly deranged. And that's fine. And you're so holding back.

Regardless of how stupid it might be, how could you be vastly anti-artistic?

I harbor no hostility to your idea of this utter dismay, but I am genuinely curious to see this scene cut in that way. I'm very curious to see how that would play. And the Blade Runner clearly is pliable enough as a work of art that I think could certainly tolerate that, given the other changes that have been afforded on it. And yeah, you know, why not? Ridley Scott's still kicking.

Don't do it.

I'm fine.

Don't do it. I don't want that on me, Ricky Bobby.

Let's do an alternate final Bizarro world cut.

Let me tell you something. Producer Brad and I, in 1991, when we were civilians, went to a test screening of a movie called Evil Dead 3, Army of Darkness. We love Evil Dead. We used to watch Evil Dead 1 and 2 on VHS constantly, then on the DVD. We loved it. And we watched it and it had the original ending where Ash sleeps too long and wakes up in a nuclear dystopia. And during the Q&A, and it wasn't Q&A like the director was there, it was like the person doing research. It was a test screening. I said, this ending sucks because the character has been through all of this hardship only to wind up in an even worse situation than he began. I know that Ash is kind of a fucking asshole, but I've seen three of these fucking movies already, and I don't want him to end up in this nihilistic, awful manner. And then the movie came out and they had the new ending, and I can't take credit. I can't say it was my fault, but I know that there's a lot of people who don't like the S-Mart ending, and I don't want to be that guy for Blade Runner, too.

Javi, admit you were disappointed the poster didn't say ending credited to Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

I can assure you, on good authority, you were not the only one to make that suggestion.

Paul, don't take this away from him.

Bless you and thank you for seizing the opportunity to do so, because you might have been the straw that broke that camel's back. The one additional voice that tipped the balance in the favor of that change, and you should take nothing but pride in your towering contribution to civilization.

I'm sure somebody walked into Sam Raimi's office and said, dude, we got to do it. How come some asshole in Burbank didn't like it?

There's this Puerto Rican. You have very strong opinions. And I don't know if we want to risk it.

All of which is to say, please don't change the end of Blade Runner in my account. Nobody. But you don't even do the edit.

I'll do the edit.

I'll get a final cut for it and figure it out. But please don't do it. I don't need this.

I appreciate and am tantalized by the thought exercise.

In all seriousness, I honestly think that this movie, if you could take out the vast majority of the dialogue and play it strictly as close to a silent film as possible, would be a much better movie. I think the biggest liability in this movie is actually the dialogue and the plotting. As you're saying, it's an opera at the end and Roy Batty is having this big finale. And I think, look, you may need the monologue just to justify what he's done. I'll certainly give you that. I don't know. I just feel like every time a character opens their mouth in this movie, I have questions and I don't want to have questions. I want to feel. That's it. Yes.

I would also enjoy an art installation version of this movie.

Oh, my God.

Just with the visuals and the Vangelis score in a giant room that just surrounds you or whatever that you could just live in. So now, he, Batty, not only releases this iconic monologue, he releases the dove as he dies and which takes his spirit with him. Deckard's narration ruins it. Then Gaff arrives. Could have maybe shown up sooner to help, but Gaff is too cool for that. Clearly, who knows what else Gaff has going on?

Also, Gaff was brown-nosing for a promotion, as the voiceover tells us. So maybe not having Rick Deckard around is good for Gaff.

Maybe. He did have the courtesy to retrieve and now return Deckard's gun and then almost gives what I think is one of the just great, what should be final lines in a film noir. It is such a perfect, tidy bow of a line that he imparts on Deckard at the end of the scene when it is clear that there's one replicant left.

It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?

I mean.

Come on. I would not say take that line away. That line is, that's the opera right there for me.

That's, it's perfect. And I do think the rest of this movie could basically be played out in silence. And I think essentially does in the final cut without narration and then with the more abbreviated ending. Deckard goes back to the apartment, looks for Rachel, finds her under a sheet, is worried she might be dead, have already expired or has been already taken out because maybe they think he won't. He asks if she trusts him. She does. And they leave. And as they leave and she's in the elevator and he's following, he finds on the ground the origami unicorn that Gaff has left indicating that Gaff has been there and has chosen not to retire Rachel.

Right. Because Gaff, while this movie was going on, had his own epiphany awakening to the value of human life.

Perhaps, perhaps. And then we get unused B-roll from The Shining.

So, the original ending in the director's cut of the film is that he takes the origami unicorn, realizes that Gaff was there, didn't kill her. That Gaff has kind of given him a boon. And he goes into the elevator with Rachel and the door's closed and we cut to black and we go to Vangelis. That propulsive music.

Perfection. I mean, that ending is great. The other thing in the final cut is in that cut, the origami unicorn also serves as a payoff to the setup of Deckard's unicorn dream, which then also indicates that, oh, how would Gaff know about a unicorn if he's dreaming of unicorns unless those are implanted memories and that Deckard is also potentially a replicant. But even still, that is a little ambiguous other than Scott just explicitly telling us it's not. But yeah, in terms of a noir ending, just having them leave, elevator door closes, cut. Perfect ending. This ending, again, cannot trust its audience. And the studio decrees that we need a happy ending of showing them leaving the city. We've been teased that they go north, out into the country, into the mountains, the woods. And we bask in all this unused footage from The Shining, intercut with them driving, Deckard driving them, and then his VO letting us know that everything is okay.

The thing I hate most about this ending, honestly, is that if there is a verdant countryside outside of this hell, why aren't people in it? We are led to believe in both in the novel and to some degree in the movie that the rest of the world is a fucking bombed out nuclear wasteland and shit sucks. And you want to leave Earth. It's a privilege to leave Earth. If 10 miles from LA, there's all that wonderful greenery, I'm going, I'm getting a cottage.

So here is my headcanon. As much as I also, I just hate this ending. I can only surmise that they have been driving a long time and have somehow crossed the border through subterfuge into Canada and that Canada has at some point, there's been some war or conflict between Canada and the US and they have closed their borders and preserved their environment against the corporatization, exploitation of the United States and that somehow they have gotten to. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense.

It makes no goddamn sense.

At all. There's no way. It makes more sense if they fled off world.

Producer Brad, how did this movie do at the box office, please? Can you run the numbers for us?

Sure, it opened at number two with 9.5 million behind ET, which was at 25. By the end of the year, it was only number 29 for the year. And the films that did better than it were Victor Victoria, Tootsie, Sharky's Machine, Reds, Time Bandits. For being such an important film, the money doesn't show up.

That's interesting, because Time Bandits, this was probably the re-release of Time Bandits, because Time Bandits came out in, I believe, 1981. So it was re-released and it still did better than, that's amazing.

And then in terms of comparison to the films we've already discussed, it overall, it ranks number 2,741 all-time box office. Rocky is 564, Rocky III is 564, Poltergeist is 1,149, and Firefox is still ahead of this movie at 2004. So Firefox made more money than Blade Runner.

But here's the thing about Firefox, and you know, we did a whole podcast, but Firefox is like a dad movie. Firefox is like the Ford v Ferrari of its time. You know, like my dad spent my entire childhood with his nose buried in a Robert Ludlum book. Of course, all the dads went to see Firefox.

Yeah, and it didn't have awful voiceover.

Firefox would have been much improved. You could have just used this voiceover in Firefox and it would be a better movie.

You know, it does boggle the mind as a thought experiment. How much more successful would Blade Runner have been had they trusted the audience and not had the voiceover? I really wonder how much more it could have and would have done. But yeah, and similarly, oh my God, Firefox with a voiceover.

Firefox with Harrison Ford breaking in doing the voiceover from Blade Runner at specific points in the movie. I think the ironic, contrapuntal juxtaposition alone would be phenomenal.

You are way more of an anarchist than I will ever be, Javi. I love you dearly, but that is... That may be a bridge of chaos too far even for me on my most adventurous day.

You know what? Let's release the audience from this hostage crisis we've created.

Well, next week, we're going to stay in this weekend in 1982. It's June 25th.

We have a choice.

We still have a choice. We have two less. We have Megaforce and we have The Thing.

I mean, I got to tell you, Paul, Blade Runner is a pretty heavy movie and The Thing is not exactly known for its lightness of heart and love of humanity.

Yes.

Perhaps we should watch Megaforce just so we're looking to get a little palate cleanser so that we don't wind up eating our guns at the end of the next podcast.

I could not agree more and I have to say I welcome you back to the land of making sane suggestions.

OK. And on that note, dear listeners or dear hostages, we will see you at the multiplex.