The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

but then it also says they're 'virtually identical to a human' so why wouldn't they have bones?

it's a metaphor

hate2be smashed through a wall by a hulking angry metaphor

No fair point, robots is definitely the wrong word - but they're stronger and more physically endurant than humans - bones would be the first thing to improve I would have thought.

well, some models definitely are, but we see leto's right-hand woman running down the modifications available for mining replicants with a client - presumably a clerical replicant like rachael doesn't need to be capable of punching someone's head off

back to what mark said tho, yeah clearly they are metaphors for what it means to be human - part of what i liked so much about this movie was that it seemed more phildickishly concerned with exploring this from multiple angles than the original

(even managed to slip a reference to what briefly appeared be a dead twin in there, another dick obsession)

guys, I have an embarrassing almost fanfiction-like narrative interpretation of the ending scenes, from K shooting down the escort cars all the way to the end

it's currently saved as a tumblr draft, on account I don't really use. if I get past my shame and hit publish... idk

going to go store my horrible Terminator ruminations in the same way

you’re such a tease dude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4IPBiB7SF4
Some speculate the head of development is a gamergater but it looks impressive.

DOO EET MH

I'll hear it mh

You can count on us not to pull the punches either so brace yourself for the searing heat

now deleting for sure, thanks deems

my terminator ruminations are over on that thread though

publish and be deemed

this is why we can’t have nice things

was thinking about this movie some more over the weekend, have some scattered impressions which may or may not make sense

one thing i don't think we've addressed much is deckard and rachael's daughter ana being a super-talented designer of ‘memories’

both movies (and much of philip k dick’s work) are about the blurred, if not altogether erased, line between the real and the simulated

ana is the first ‘real’ offspring of simulated people – the natural-born daughter of either a human and a replicant or two replicants, depending on your opinion of deckard’s humanity
(incidentally, one of the best choices in the movie imo is leaving deckard’s status unresolved)

ana spends her life in an entirely artificial environment, using her real memories to build simulations which help replicants feel more ‘human’ in order to make them more contented workers

however, it’s heavily implied during the scene where k meets the gang of liberated replicants that he’s not the first of their number who has come to believe in the reality of his memories and act on them – so the fake memories that ana builds are having very real effects on other simulated people too, far beyond their intended purpose

there’s another simulated emotional centre in the movie too, of course – k’s hologram girlfriend joi, who becomes incrementally more ‘real’ twice – when k upgrades her and when she briefly merges with mackenzie davis’ character

k’s push to total dissent is vitally supported by joi, an entirely artificial character who encourages k to think of himself as a ‘real boy’, and who k holds genuinely ‘real’ feelings for

k is devastated to realise that joi’s seemingly real reciprocation of those feelings was in fact what she was programmed to do all along – a simulation designed at least partially to help simulated people feel real

but by then his experience of ‘real’ love and ‘real’ memories (those quote-marks are entirely optional by this point, of course) has led him to take on a suicide mission

k gives up his own life so that the biological father of the first real replicant offspring (who may or may not be real himself) can experience love again after living for decades like a ghost in the shattered ruins of las vegas, in itself a patently, deliberately artificial city right from its inception

sorry this is long and rambling and might be super-obvious but I really love the hall-of-mirrors quality of this movie – like I said upthread I think this is a really effective screen rendering of philip k dick’s obsessions, maybe even more so than the original

That's all good stuff

some minor additional brain-dumps:

almost all the pivotal characters in this (k, joi, sapper and luv) aren't 'real' but provide most of the emotional beats

k feels obvious compassion and love and ends up sacrificing himself

joi seems genuinely terrified of being destroyed and her last action is to tell k she loves him

sapper is moved and awed by witnessing a 'miracle'

luv weeps when wallace guts the newborn replicant and when she kills robin wright's character joshi

deckard is deliberately an edge case of course but wallace's taunting about whether his relationship with rachael was 'real' or not is obviously tremendously painful

of the pivotal 'real' characters (wallace and joshi), wallace is heavily augmented with cybernetics ('more human than human' i guess) and basically considers himself a god

joshi blithely tells k he doesn't have a soul but also later that she sometimes forgets he's not human; she also makes a clumsy pass at him

i think there might be a suggestion that joshi herself could be a replicant - her odd impassiveness when luv crushes a glass into her hand made me think of replicants' high tolerance for pain, and is reminiscent of roy batty's self-administered wound at the climax of the first film

one more musing (last one, promise!)

k says to joshi that he's 'never retired something that was born before', and says 'to be born is to have a soul'

he's visibly hurt when joshi tells him 'he's doing fine without one'

it's the crushing blow of joshi's dismissal of his existence, on top of the abject loneliness of his day-to-say life, which causes him to buy the upgrade for joi, accelerating his rush towards the painful, impossible belief he might actually be a real boy

but each of the replicants we see in both movies show unmistakable signs of having a soul of their own - they care for each other, they fight for their own dignity, they are terrified of death, they can grasp the miracle of birth or the terrible beauty of c-beams glittering in the dark near the tannhauser gate

so what's the animating spark, the organising principle, that gives those replicants every appearance of human life as we know it? is it their memories? if it is, why aren't their strings cut by the knowledge that their memories aren't their own?

if they are simulating the appearance of having a soul, if they are 'only apparently real' in the phildickian/sonicyouthian sense, but they feel real to themselves and others then is it a meaningful distinction at all? that's why i'm glad they didn't get specific about whether deckard is a replicant or not

ana, the real offspring of the unreal, works on the psychological interiors of replicants and wallace, the unreal real person, is obsessed with replicants' physical interiors

is that significant? i dunno, i'm gonna shut up now

Memories are more than save points I guess

imo replicant "humanity" or lack of a soul, however you address it is an evolution of self, not some sort of physiological difference between a born human and a manufactured biotech human replica

they feel real to themselves and others is completely right -- the majority of 2049 is K grasping for a soul while feeling unworthy of the attention of anyone more real than a hologram. he's got a facsimile life, including a facsimile wife. he doesn't feel worthy of the attention of a fellow replicant unless she's wearing his holographic companion as a veil so he can lie to himself and somehow make the experience less real

brb got to find a link on my phone

need to edit out the overwrought bits that appear after I have a couple beers and write:
http://supermod3rn.tumblr.com/post/170002056519/blade-runner-2049-the-man-with-two-fathers

yeah 'evolution of self' is a good way to put it - both ana and wallace are trying to make better replicants psychologically and physically but their efforts are kinda misguided and/or unnecessary; replicants seem perfectly capable of bootstrapping their way into a humanity or a soul based on the development of their own experiences and feelings

they've never seen a miracle, wouldn't understand it if they did

ha, yeah

neither of them know that ana is the miracle wallace is searching for, that's for sure

i really liked your tumblr thoughts btw!

I think that's the thing that makes the throwaway "I'm the best one" line from Luv worth something -- she really thinks she's the best replicant, that this Wallace-like disaffectation is the end state of replicant emotion

K's resurgent because he's not the best replicant, he's just a better person

The unspoken thing at the end of the original film is, despite his violence, Roy Batty's the most human character in the story

I really think Wallace was loathsome (and not just for the try-hard Leto acting) because his end goal for replicants really was "like Luv, but can make babies"

as for the home release of this film, I would like the people who put it together to explain why each of the shorts has the Villeneuve intro when he says pretty much the same thing each time

HELLO, DENIS HERE AGAIN. I MADE BLADE RUNNER 2049 AND HERE IS A SHORT INSPIRED BY THAT FILM BY ONE OF MY FRIENDS

yeah, wallace's explicitly-stated goal for producing fertile replicants is so that he can colonise more worlds, more quickly - he has no interest at all in their interior lives beyond using ana's work to make them more docile, productive workers

luv and k at the end are basically polar opposites - you're right, luv wants to be the best servant she can be (but her tears show that she's fighting back her human responses) and k has abandoned the role he was built for in favour of embracing his humanity entirely

The unspoken thing at the end of the original film is, despite his violence, Roy Batty's the most human character in the story

and not just the most human, the most alive - he's crushing the last bitter drops out of his four-year lifespan

'it's a shame she won't live - but then again who does' is a brilliantly double-edged line for that reason

tbh K's facsimile life is a little too human and relatable in its own way

"yeah, wallace's explicitly-stated goal for producing fertile replicants is so that he can colonise more worlds, more quickly "

Well yeah, like all gods

xp sad otm to that one :(

we see k taking a lot of abuse from his neighbours as he trudges home and it did occur to me that their lives are probably even less fulfilling than his - always useful to have someone else to punch down at though

Weird that people are always bringing up replicants' emotional reactions like it's something surprising. It's shown over and over again in both movies that replicants are more emotionally labile than humans.

The posts and think pieces linked above already hashed this point out, but I think worrying about whether replicants are "real boys" is either a red herring or missing the point. The central question of the movies isn't whether replicants can be as real as humans, it's whether they already are more real than humans (have more personhood, or whatever)

Don't think so tbh

It's an exploration of whether deciding or believing it is the critical factor, or whether you must impose the acceptance of it on the environment

what is 'it'? replicant humanity?

vs de facto replicant supremacy, I mean

imo it's a reasonable reflection of people trying to get bogged down in semantics about what compromises "being human" from a technical definition

I'm not going to delve too deeply into this particular can of worms, but I was reading some social media comments about transgender individuals "not being real women/men" because you can't change chromosomes, and it's basically the same replicant/human purity test of being able to scan someone's eyeball to say definitely "yes this is a replicant and not a human"

Ah that is a very good comparison!

When I said 'supremacy' above, I meant it in the 'better at being a human person' sense rather than the 'squish the homo sapiens fragile little bodies' sense

I dunno if it's worth considering that ALL of these characters are simulacra whose internal states are inferred from their actions and dialogue onscreen - the layering of what's human, what are the criteria and how can we tell applies equally to the artifice of cinema. OK I'll stop there.

I promise I'll catch up on all the other spoiler posts but I finally just watched 2049 tonight and I cannot BELIEVE anybody had a nice thing to say about this movie. It's 130 minutes of storyboards, lovingly rendered in 3-point perspective, with 3 pantone dots next to each shot so everyone knows what shades are permitted besides black. I have never felt more like I was looking at a movie rather than watching it. The score, whenever it decides to show up, is just overwhelming pads - this was a nice quirk of the original, and set it apart, but done as blatant homage it's just lazy and distracting.

There were about 20 minutes where I gave a shit what happened to K and Deckard and then 10 minutes later it was oh well not really and WHY THE FUCK WAS JARED LETO EVEN IN THIS

also the dimbulb police chief (Robin Wright. of course. Why does anyone like this woman? She's terrible in everything) who got killed for no reason in the second act - was she specifically directed to read every line as "you know, that terrible chief of detectives from all bad crime tv ever" - what's the excuse for that?

I was rolling my eyes about once every two or three minutes by the time K laid his head down on the very well-drawn snow-covered stair steps, and then when they cut to the credits I was finally sure - this is a student film. It's exactly like they took a 3rd year undergrad and gave him Gosling and Ford and a shitload of cash and went "let's just do it and be heroes. it's a moving picture, not moving words."

All of this bodes extremely well for Villeneuve's take on Dune. I fully expect him to leave another friendly animal stranded in a wasteland and not explain anything, like the gifted auteur that he is.

Jesus christ fuck this film.

jared leto wants to achieve THIS
one-eyed replicant revolutionary lady wants to achieve THAT
blade runner K wants to discover who he IS

GUESS WHAT? JOEKS it's just about harrison ford meeting a nameless character who has two scenes including the one where harrison ford meets her

I hate this movie a lot

noted, thanks

tombot i luv u but i must challenge u to a duel

Just recently saw this and thought it was surprisingly great. Only skimmed this thread. Picked up that Tombot thinks an abomination. But I’m not a fkn Hard Sci Fi dude and I don’t give a shit about picking apart plot points, just totally succeeded as an aesthetic extension of the original and it was a sequel that seemed to justify itself. If you re-rolled the dice on a Big Budget Blade Runner sequel in this movie climate a few dozen times I don’t think you’d get something more thoughtful or well done than this.

Also outside of the fucking incredible production design, sfx, cinematography, music, look/feel, Hauer monologue, etc. I don’t think og Blade Runner is exactly a rock solid masterpiece of a film so... I’m not precious about it. Surely will invalidate my opinion above but hey.

All movies are just made up characters doing things fyi