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Blade Runner 2049 - more human than human [Spoilers!]


Kalbear

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1 hour ago, Фейсал said:

Wallace saying she was engineered for that very purpose? unless you want to believe the amazing convenience that Rachael's life span ends just when she gives birth to a child and not a second before.

I suspect it did end before, hence the emergency ceasarean. Replicants are tough; it doesn't seem that plausible to me that giving birth could kill one that wasn't already dying. Tyrell's plan for developing fertile replicants presumably didn't include his own murder and Rachael running away, so it wasn't happening on whatever timescale he'd intended, and there's no obvious need to give the 7s greater longevity. Roy's lifespan was slightly under four years; if Rachael had the same limit, her incept date would have been around August 2017, with her working for Tyrell for a couple of years before the first movie.

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I saw it yesterday and it's easily the best movie of the year. It actually exceeded my already high expectations and I keep thinking about it. Luv and K were brilliant. The atmosphere, story, music, everything just blew me away. I have to see it again soon since it's gonna be snatched from the theatres sooner than expected, probably. Disappointing but not really surprising it's doing shitty. A few people at work were scared away by the length of it but I urged them to just go and see it.

I also didn't hear what the prostitute said when she picked the toy horse up but the OP quoted it and "the dream" makes perfect sense. 

 

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3 hours ago, Ramsay B. said:

I saw it yesterday and it's easily the best movie of the year. It actually exceeded my already high expectations and I keep thinking about it. Luv and K were brilliant. The atmosphere, story, music, everything just blew me away. I have to see it again soon since it's gonna be snatched from the theatres sooner than expected, probably. Disappointing but not really surprising it's doing shitty. A few people at work were scared away by the length of it but I urged them to just go and see it.

I also didn't hear what the prostitute said when she picked the toy horse up but the OP quoted it and "the dream" makes perfect sense. 

 

It did make 40 million over Friday thru Monday*, supposed to make that Fri to Sun. , so don't know what to think, if it does well in it's second weekend it may do moderately well at the box office , it is a bit of a mystery right at the moment. It's up against Happy Death Day this weekend, I am not interested in that and not going to see it. After that it is Geostorm , that looks like another disaster-yawner, seem to get one of those a year. Only till end of month Thor: Ragnarok , even if that's good , not going, because I have had it up to here with Comic Book movies.

I am going back to see BR2 this weekend.

 

* It is nearing 100 million worldwide have to if that goes over 200 million.

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This movie was pretty. But the story was really poorly constructed, and very loose.

A lot of style over substance here. Like a lot of movies and television -- this turned out to be a lot of bad drama stuffed into a sci-fi jumpsuit.

Also really didn't like the pseudo-spiritualism thrown in, with the talk of souls and being born -- and the strange jesus-ish feel to what was supposed to be the central plot. It was like Blade runner as presented by the Da Vinci Code. Except maybe worse. 

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5 hours ago, snowleper said:

This movie was pretty. But the story was really poorly constructed, and very loose.

A lot of style over substance here. Like a lot of movies and television -- this turned out to be a lot of bad drama stuffed into a sci-fi jumpsuit.

Also really didn't like the pseudo-spiritualism thrown in, with the talk of souls and being born -- and the strange jesus-ish feel to what was supposed to be the central plot. It was like Blade runner as presented by the Da Vinci Code. Except maybe worse. 

The messianic undertones were present in the first movie? biblical imagery is an often present undertone to cyber punk and dystopian sci-fi.

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10 minutes ago, Фейсал said:

The messianic undertones were present in the first movie? biblical imagery is an often present undertone to cyber punk and dystopian sci-fi.

Sometimes, much of the time those kinds of undertones are more in the mind of the beholder.

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6 hours ago, snowleper said:

This movie was pretty. But the story was really poorly constructed, and very loose.

A lot of style over substance here. Like a lot of movies and television -- this turned out to be a lot of bad drama stuffed into a sci-fi jumpsuit.

Also really didn't like the pseudo-spiritualism thrown in, with the talk of souls and being born -- and the strange jesus-ish feel to what was supposed to be the central plot. It was like Blade runner as presented by the Da Vinci Code. Except maybe worse. 

In what way was it poorly constructed. Your analysis.

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14 hours ago, Corvinus said:

What? I didn't know that. Considering how part of the score sounded similarly to Arrival's, I was sure it was Jóhannsson. He and Villeneuve worked together on several movies.

 

Villeneuve has an interview on YouTube where he praises Vangelis to the extreme.

It was  Villeneuve who said he scrapped Jóhannsson for something more 'Vangelis-like', so why not just ask Vangelis?

Actually Vangelis did comment on involvement with Blade Runner 2049:

http://www.npr.org/2016/10/17/497797809/from-composer-vangelis-a-true-story-set-in-outer-space

Took a little looking to find that, I wonder if Villeneuve spoke to Vangelis at all?

 

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2 hours ago, boojam said:

In what way was it poorly constructed. Your analysis.

 

It lost sight of itself in trying to be an homage to the first movie. The fact that this was a sci-fi movie is indisputable. Noir though? I'd say that isn't really a fit. Mostly because the love interest in this movie very much does not meet this mold. Going home and making out with your cell-phone companion as opposed to some work based fem-fatale was a mistake on the part of the screenwriter/director. It produced little to no tension and the stakes that they piled onto it at the end with the loss of the AI was really tacked on and inorganic. Even if the love interest had been K/(Joe?)'s boss - that would have helped increase the dramatic tension and cohesion of the script (by at the very least parsing the movie down so it didn't sprawl as much as it did).

Plus there were way too many implausibility's and assumptions occurring in the movie. We are essentially told -- not shown that this child is special for some reason. It somehow matters, even though the only concrete detail we get here is that people want it dead due to some sort of pseudo-miscegenistic replicant racism. The script assumes that Deckard and Rachel had some sort of grandiose love -- which really didn't seem like the case in the first movie (their 'love' scene actually felt kinda rapey if we are going to be honest), and it is assumed/ presented that Deckard knows and cares that he has a child. Which was a very lazy plot device. And it was really weird how old fat Deckard did such a decent job of kicking Kay-Joe's ass, since he wasn't really much of a bad ass in the original movie. Just a cold blooded killer with a gun and somewhat of a conscience. 

The first movie was really about oppression and slavery and nature of humanity/inhumanity. Deckard flat out murders escaped slaves and the audience is supposed to feel unsettled by this. His fight/experience with Roy Batty at the end turns this around --- and with this sequel it almost seems as if they wanted to recapture the dramatic arc of Roy Batty in the character of Kay -- just without any of the impact or substance -- but with a lot more pointless sprawl distilled into a character that I found really hard to care about and his cell-phone girlfriend, who ultimately didn't matter very much at all. 

We also had Kay-Joe's existential journey which didn't make a lot of sense. We are told that he can't disobey any order -- yet he inevitably ends up doing just that without any explanation, and it seemed very clear that he couldn't have been the kid in question, since there should be multiple models of Kay-Joe probably working in the same department -- because replicants are mass produced.

Why vegas is irradiated also didn't make much sense. Particularly since Deckard, his dog, and Kay-Joe had no problem going/living there. (And as an aside, I thought the giant vegas sex mannequins were really fucking strange).

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1 hour ago, snowleper said:

It lost sight of itself in trying to be an homage to the first movie. The fact that this was a sci-fi movie is indisputable. Noir though? I'd say that isn't really a fit. Mostly because the love interest in this movie very much does not meet this mold. Going home and making out with your cell-phone companion as opposed to some work based fem-fatale was a mistake on the part of the screenwriter/director. It produced little to no tension and the stakes that they piled onto it at the end with the loss of the AI was really tacked on and inorganic. Even if the love interest had been K/(Joe?)'s boss - that would have helped increase the dramatic tension and cohesion of the script (by at the very least parsing the movie down so it didn't sprawl as much as it did).

These are contradictory. It can't be trying to be an homage whilst also intentionally avoid its noir sensibilities. It's a different film set in the same universe, whose story is influenced by events in the first film.

An opinion, not necessarily a bad one but I don't see how this improves the movie. Joi has her function in the themes of the film and I don't think the themes would have been served so well by a relationship between K and Joshi.

1 hour ago, snowleper said:

Plus there were way too many implausibility's and assumptions occurring in the movie. We are essentially told -- not shown that this child is special for some reason. It somehow matters, even though the only concrete detail we get here is that people want it dead due to some sort of pseudo-miscegenistic replicant racism. The script assumes that Deckard and Rachel had some sort of grandiose love -- which really didn't seem like the case in the first movie (their 'love' scene actually felt kinda rapey if we are going to be honest), and it is assumed/ presented that Deckard knows and cares that he has a child. Which was a very lazy plot device. And it was really weird how old fat Deckard did such a decent job of kicking Kay-Joe's ass, since he wasn't really much of a bad ass in the original movie. Just a cold blooded killer with a gun and somewhat of a conscience. 

No, the replicants believe the child is special and yes, it does matter to them that a replicant gave birth. Quite obviously it would. Don't know what your point is here. I think it's pretty interesting that the child herself seems to be the one character who shows no signs of succumbing to any kind of messiah-complex, as Wallace, K and Luv do.

This is the story. Assumptions have got nothing to do with it. Deckard is in many ways an asshole, but a grey character, not without his virtues. Deckard does know and care about the child. He helped orchestrate the blackout in 2022 to protect Rachael and the child. His decision to stay away was also to protect them.

At that point K thought he was Deckard's child. He didn't want to attack Deckard.

1 hour ago, snowleper said:

We also had Kay-Joe's existential journey which didn't make a lot of sense. We are told that he can't disobey any order -- yet he inevitably ends up doing just that without any explanation, and it seemed very clear that he couldn't have been the kid in question, since there should be multiple models of Kay-Joe probably working in the same department -- because replicants are mass produced.

Multiple models of K in the same department? That's what an assumption is.

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2 hours ago, snowleper said:

 

It lost sight of itself in trying to be an homage to the first movie. The fact that this was a sci-fi movie is indisputable. Noir though? I'd say that isn't really a fit. Mostly because the love interest in this movie very much does not meet this mold. Going home and making out with your cell-phone companion as opposed to some work based fem-fatale was a mistake on the part of the screenwriter/director. It produced little to no tension and the stakes that they piled onto it at the end with the loss of the AI was really tacked on and inorganic. Even if the love interest had been K/(Joe?)'s boss - that would have helped increase the dramatic tension and cohesion of the script (by at the very least parsing the movie down so it didn't sprawl as much as it did).

Plus there were way too many implausibility's and assumptions occurring in the movie. We are essentially told -- not shown that this child is special for some reason. It somehow matters, even though the only concrete detail we get here is that people want it dead due to some sort of pseudo-miscegenistic replicant racism. The script assumes that Deckard and Rachel had some sort of grandiose love -- which really didn't seem like the case in the first movie (their 'love' scene actually felt kinda rapey if we are going to be honest), and it is assumed/ presented that Deckard knows and cares that he has a child. Which was a very lazy plot device. And it was really weird how old fat Deckard did such a decent job of kicking Kay-Joe's ass, since he wasn't really much of a bad ass in the original movie. Just a cold blooded killer with a gun and somewhat of a conscience. 

The first movie was really about oppression and slavery and nature of humanity/inhumanity. Deckard flat out murders escaped slaves and the audience is supposed to feel unsettled by this. His fight/experience with Roy Batty at the end turns this around --- and with this sequel it almost seems as if they wanted to recapture the dramatic arc of Roy Batty in the character of Kay -- just without any of the impact or substance -- but with a lot more pointless sprawl distilled into a character that I found really hard to care about and his cell-phone girlfriend, who ultimately didn't matter very much at all. 

We also had Kay-Joe's existential journey which didn't make a lot of sense. We are told that he can't disobey any order -- yet he inevitably ends up doing just that without any explanation, and it seemed very clear that he couldn't have been the kid in question, since there should be multiple models of Kay-Joe probably working in the same department -- because replicants are mass produced.

Why vegas is irradiated also didn't make much sense. Particularly since Deckard, his dog, and Kay-Joe had no problem going/living there. (And as an aside, I thought the giant vegas sex mannequins were really fucking strange).

 

It's interesting that the knock against Blade Runner in 1982 was it's neo-noir felt like a 'self congratulation'  for being hip. Also the story seemed slim to critics. (Roger Ebert liked only what he called 'the special effects' when he meant production design. Ebert changed his mind about the film 2 more times , finally coming around 180 degrees and hailing the film as a classic.)

In BR1 it seemed that only Roy and Leon were a danger to society, and they actually were, while Pris and Zhora were capable they were harming no one, what would of happened to a Replicant if they just surrendered? In fact in BR2 was Sapper given the option of doing that? His motivation to go down swinging was to protect the secret.

Not sure it was racism , Replicants were considered non-human, no more status than a bug.

One thing neither film has done, is follow Philip K Dick's main concern , the question of what is it to be human? Especially irritating is Ridley Scott's insistence that Deckard be an Android. Screenwriters Hampton Francher and David Peoples , actor Harrison Ford all sided with Phil Dick on Deckard being human so that question had more import. I actually didn't like K being a replicant for this story.

I thought this film had a better story , even with the plot seams showing. In fact if Deckard was human and Rachel replicant and they have a child , man, that is very interesting! I wondered how to put more import into Deckard -Rachel post-story , I don't find interesting that they just get away and K comes looking for them.  When I thought about the story I felt it would have been more interesting if Rachel was still alive and that it was she and Deckard who give up Stelline together to protect the secret. This would have taken a little more imagination in the writing.

Actually the stand-alone features filling in the 30 years help with the story. I fell some of that could have been elaborated in 10 min. of dialog with the visual beats in the background. I found the whole back story to Blade Runner 2049 really made the story more poignant , could make a stand alone movie just out of that!

I buy that Stelline's secret is hidden, but it seems one of those small probability things, she appears to be be an individual of some prominence and even a subcontractor for Wallace and they don't have a clue who she is and where she is? I suppose that is her cover, but that seems way out in the tail of the distribution.

Well I like this film for one reason, I grew up reading great prose science fiction, intelligent, sophisticated stories and over the years I have only seen a handful of movies made in the spirit and elegance of the prose form, 2001 and Blade Runner were very unusual in that regard , tho there has been more good visual narrative SF in recent times, BR2 is very good science fiction as visual drama.

 

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5 hours ago, snowleper said:

 

It lost sight of itself in trying to be an homage to the first movie. The fact that this was a sci-fi movie is indisputable. Noir though? I'd say that isn't really a fit. Mostly because the love interest in this movie very much does not meet this mold. Going home and making out with your cell-phone companion as opposed to some work based fem-fatale was a mistake on the part of the screenwriter/director. It produced little to no tension and the stakes that they piled onto it at the end with the loss of the AI was really tacked on and inorganic. Even if the love interest had been K/(Joe?)'s boss - that would have helped increase the dramatic tension and cohesion of the script (by at the very least parsing the movie down so it didn't sprawl as much as it did).

Plus there were way too many implausibility's and assumptions occurring in the movie. We are essentially told -- not shown that this child is special for some reason. It somehow matters, even though the only concrete detail we get here is that people want it dead due to some sort of pseudo-miscegenistic replicant racism. The script assumes that Deckard and Rachel had some sort of grandiose love -- which really didn't seem like the case in the first movie (their 'love' scene actually felt kinda rapey if we are going to be honest), and it is assumed/ presented that Deckard knows and cares that he has a child. Which was a very lazy plot device. And it was really weird how old fat Deckard did such a decent job of kicking Kay-Joe's ass, since he wasn't really much of a bad ass in the original movie. Just a cold blooded killer with a gun and somewhat of a conscience. 

The first movie was really about oppression and slavery and nature of humanity/inhumanity. Deckard flat out murders escaped slaves and the audience is supposed to feel unsettled by this. His fight/experience with Roy Batty at the end turns this around --- and with this sequel it almost seems as if they wanted to recapture the dramatic arc of Roy Batty in the character of Kay -- just without any of the impact or substance -- but with a lot more pointless sprawl distilled into a character that I found really hard to care about and his cell-phone girlfriend, who ultimately didn't matter very much at all. 

We also had Kay-Joe's existential journey which didn't make a lot of sense. We are told that he can't disobey any order -- yet he inevitably ends up doing just that without any explanation, and it seemed very clear that he couldn't have been the kid in question, since there should be multiple models of Kay-Joe probably working in the same department -- because replicants are mass produced.

Why vegas is irradiated also didn't make much sense. Particularly since Deckard, his dog, and Kay-Joe had no problem going/living there. (And as an aside, I thought the giant vegas sex mannequins were really fucking strange).

Are genre movies stuck to their trappings and cliche conventions with no way of innovating or giving them a unique twist? Blade Runner is a cyber punk sci fi and also a noir. It gives its noir elements a sci fi twist - the love interest being a digital AI in this case. It's also interesting that you knock on this movie for having low stakes when the first movie had literally none. Nothing would have changed/happened if Deckard failed just as nothing really changed or happened when he succeeded - the four replicants on the loose just wanted to live normal, regular lives and would have bled in to normal society.

Joi and K's relationship is  interesting because both of them aren't human or ''real'' yet it comes off as the most humane in the story. Giving K a human, or physical love interest just to go ''haha see we're noir!'' betrays the essence of the film.

The child's existence in itself makes it important. Replicants can produce - they top being objects made at a factory/lab and became an actual species/living organism of sorts. It breaks down the prejudice against them. I agree with you on Rachael/Deckard - what happened in the first movie was just kind of flat out rape but Wallace points out Rachael was engineered to seduce Deckard. Deckard sees it as grandiose love, and we get things from his perspective here but really it was Tyrell playing god and playing his last ace in the hole.

How is it lazy? 

I thought the point of the bit in the theater was to show that K could have snapped him in two if he wanted to but he wasn't there to fight.

That's kind of the point though, isn't it? K's boss points out how easy it is to forget that K is in the end a machine and not a man. Ultimately the lines between human and inhuman are blurred as we see countless replicants showcasing actual humanity and aspirations. You can't wipe that away with code.

He found some bees there, didn't he? and if you assume Deckard's a replicant it makes sense as to why he'd survive the radiation.

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Quote

 

Blade Runner is a cyber punk sci fi

 

I've always found it interesting that Blade Runner is assumed to be cyberpunk. Later cyberpunk borrowed its setting and aesthetics, but the cornerstone of cyberpunk is AI and merging the human mind with computers, a concept that is utterly absent in the first film (the replicants even firmly point out they are artificial humans, not computers) and only vaguely nodded at in the second (and, if anything, subverted by the implication that Joi is nothing more than a very clever simulation but without any internal volition). Some definitions - including the somewhat arbitrary Wikipedia article on the term - suggest this is actually not at the core of the term, instead suggesting that "contrasting the lowliest in society against the richest in a futuristic society", but this is a bit bizarre as several key cyberpunk works (Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex and The Matrix Trilogy) don't really feature this at all.

I see Blade Runner as proto-cyberpunk and influential on what followed, but it is questionable if it is firmly part of that genre.

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54 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I've always found it interesting that Blade Runner is assumed to be cyberpunk. Later cyberpunk borrowed its setting and aesthetics, but the cornerstone of cyberpunk is AI and merging the human mind with computers, a concept that is utterly absent in the first film (the replicants even firmly point out they are artificial humans, not computers) and only vaguely nodded at in the second (and, if anything, subverted by the implication that Joi is nothing more than a very clever simulation but without any internal volition). Some definitions - including the somewhat arbitrary Wikipedia article on the term - suggest this is actually not at the core of the term, instead suggesting that "contrasting the lowliest in society against the richest in a futuristic society", but this is a bit bizarre as several key cyberpunk works (Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex and The Matrix Trilogy) don't really feature this at all.

I see Blade Runner as proto-cyberpunk and influential on what followed, but it is questionable if it is firmly part of that genre.

Yeah I don't agree with the Wikipeadia article about Cyperpunk SF,  "a combination of low life and high tech" is just kind of weird as a characterization. CyberPunk SF goes back to the 1950's , one can see it already in Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956), Scoot used elements of that in Blade Runner, in fact, and I think I noted this somewhere, much of Galaxy Magazine from 1950 to 1960 was cyberpunk ,Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's novels, short stories by Phil Dick , other writers and stories , some appeared also in the magazine IF. The production design of Blade Runner was influenced less by Syd Mead and more by Jean Giraud ( Moebius ) who was influenced by the great SF artist Ed Emshwiller.

In modern times the actual term Cyberpunk was cemented by William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), and the novels of Gibson, Sterling and Ruker.

The other characterization in the Wiki article is:

"Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body."

This is better.

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I watched this yesterday in a empty cinema. I liked it and it was very very good, maybe even great, but I don't think it wast a masterpiece by any means. And not as good as the first one.

It was and absolutely gorgeous movie. The story was good and the themes very interesting and appropriate. Plus the action scenes were pretty damn good too. K, Joi and Luv were great, and I would have liked to see more of Mackenzie Davis character. The acting was stellar all around, Harrison Ford made a very strong showing and I really liked Barkhad Abdi's small role.

The fight/chase-scene between K and Deckard was too long and drawn out. I don't really think the chase portion was necessary there. The movie was also too loud at times and almost hurt my ears at a few occasions, but that may just have been the cinema?

While I liked it and it was better than I ever though a Blade Runner sequel would ever be, I'm still not sure that it feels like a necessary sequel. I would have been fine with Deckard and Rachel's story being left where it ended in the first film. I'm not sure how I'd feel about more Blade Runner movies though. I can't say that a movie about the Replicant resistance feel like a very tantalizing prospect.

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8 hours ago, Фейсал said:

Are genre movies stuck to their trappings and cliche conventions with no way of innovating or giving them a unique twist?

This is assuming that any of this was a unique twist. It wasn't. It seemed very derivative of the awful shit fest that was 'Her'  --  going home and masturbating to Siri seems antithetical to the noir genre itself. Plus -- it was kinda just objectifying sexbait down to the core.

 

8 hours ago, Фейсал said:

It's also interesting that you knock on this movie for having low stakes when the first movie had literally none. Nothing would have changed/happened if Deckard failed just as nothing really changed or happened when he succeeded - the four replicants on the loose just wanted to live normal, regular lives and would have bled in to normal society.

I absolutely disagree. Deckard's life was on the line the entire time -- much less the lives of the replicants he is brutally hunting down. The first blade runner has points when you can say it slows down -- but the movie operated very well as a hunt/chase movie, unlike the sprawling plod fest that was the sequel, where you are asked to care about the protagonists shitty fake, emotive existential journey that ultimately and very foreseeably goes nowhere. (The comparison here would be the first blade runner spending almost an hour and a half on Deckard questioning if he is real or not, and then to climax with the anticlimactic reveal that he IS real. which is very much not the case of the first movie -- although the book kinda meanders there for a time).

 

8 hours ago, Фейсал said:

The child's existence in itself makes it important. Replicants can produce - they top being objects made at a factory/lab and became an actual species/living organism of sorts. It breaks down the prejudice against them. I agree with you on Rachael/Deckard - what happened in the first movie was just kind of flat out rape but Wallace points out Rachael was engineered to seduce Deckard. Deckard sees it as grandiose love, and we get things from his perspective here but really it was Tyrell playing god and playing his last ace in the hole.

How is it lazy? 

It isn't Deckard who views it that way. It's the script -- as narrated by the awful blind jesus look alike villain man who makes something along the lines of 2-3 short clichéd visits in the movie. My issue is that it isn't something that is shown -- it is something that is assumed and dictated to us. Also it makes no sense that Rachel was specifically engineered to seduce and soak up the spunk of a very specific, average police detective. That's stupid. It's not good writing. Same with the circular reasoning that the child is important because it is important. Or -- it exists ergo it is important that it exists. We are never given anything concrete about how or why this kid is special -- it's just special because the script needed it to be. With a splash of special messiah jesus bullshit thrown in because the movie had to go that extra distance to be clichéd and pseudo-religious.

--- Also, it bugged me that the movie was essentially about Rachel and her female daughter. It was pretty much their story, except they were almost entirely absent, and instead the story that circles around them is told to us by some dudes who really had nothing to do with any of it. K was boring and pointless, and Deckard was an absentee father who seemingly abandoned his daughter and pregnant repli-wench to 'protect' them -- so some weird maggot farmer could take care of them and perform what may have been a botched cesarean (which is science by the way -- not a fucking miracle) - and them dump her body in a suitcase and throw it into a hole in his backyard.

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13 hours ago, Dolorous Gabe said:

These are contradictory. It can't be trying to be an homage whilst also intentionally avoid its noir sensibilities. It's a different film set in the same universe, whose story is influenced by events in the first film.

Not so. By trying to pay tribute to it's predecessor it failed to develop on it's own. My contention is that it was a sci-fi movie. But not a Noir movie -- even though it was trying to be, or at least dressing itself up to be just that.

13 hours ago, Dolorous Gabe said:

An opinion, not necessarily a bad one but I don't see how this improves the movie. Joi has her function in the themes of the film and I don't think the themes would have been served so well by a relationship between K and Joshi.

I don't see how Joi improved the movie at all. It interacted poorly with the protagonist, acting as a crutch/sounding board to explore his nonsensical angst -- and had no meaningful interactions with any of the other elements of the movie. It was an isolated, boring, pointless character that didn't even fulfill the formulaic requirements of a love interest all that successfully.

13 hours ago, Dolorous Gabe said:

No, the replicants believe the child is special and yes, it does matter to them that a replicant gave birth. Quite obviously it would. Don't know what your point is here. I think it's pretty interesting that the child herself seems to be the one character who shows no signs of succumbing to any kind of messiah-complex, as Wallace, K and Luv do.

We get that at the end. Some replicants care -- because they simply do. This might have worked if it had been a reoccurring element of the movie. Or if we got some inkling of a replicant freedom movement. But we didn't -- aside from this lazy set-up for this sequels' sequel towards the very end. And still -- the movie seems to operate on the premise that the repli-child is objectively important, and not just symbolically essential to a beleaguered group of escaped artificial slaves. The whole quasi-mystical exploration of the 'miracle of birth' was very poor sci-fi. Which makes sense given that this director also did Arrival, which had good elements but was also full of mystical spiritual depok chopra style bullshit.

 

13 hours ago, Dolorous Gabe said:

Multiple models of K in the same department? That's what an assumption is.

As opposed to K being a designer, absolutely unique replicant? Even his designation 'K' seems to point towards the possibility of 10 other models possibly proceeding him. If not a fuck ton more, since K is an incomplete serial number. It makes no sense that they would design a replicant to be a cop and only produce the one. The entire logic of the movie points towards the fact that he was produced on a factory line to serve a designed non-unique purpose. That's essentially what replicants are.

It also would have made more sense if he was actually kept in a box, like his debriefing seemed to kinda infer he should have been, instead of paying to live in a flat, and living just like an ordinary person. (This movie really dropped the ball in the representation of replicants as slaves -- and K as an enslaved slave-catcher).

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15 hours ago, Фейсал said:

Are genre movies stuck to their trappings and cliche conventions with no way of innovating or giving them a unique twist? Blade Runner is a cyber punk sci fi and also a noir. It gives its noir elements a sci fi twist - the love interest being a digital AI in this case. It's also interesting that you knock on this movie for having low stakes when the first movie had literally none. Nothing would have changed/happened if Deckard failed just as nothing really changed or happened when he succeeded - the four replicants on the loose just wanted to live normal, regular lives and would have bled in to normal society.

Joi and K's relationship is  interesting because both of them aren't human or ''real'' yet it comes off as the most humane in the story.

 To me Blade Runner 1's neo-Noir was more veneer than plot motivation. (I mean it didn't present Noir like , example, The Lady from Shanghai ,1947, Orson Welles, or about 100 other 'noir' films from that era.)

Blade Runner 1 and 2 science fiction elements are rare as visual narrative form. Tho things have improved from the 1950s when I had to endure Queen of Outer Space and Plan 9 from Outer Space! In recent times there has been Gravity, Predestination, Arrival and even Interstellar (which should have been better). So far recent high production value SF films like Alien Covenant (I wish Scott would give this poor story up!), Ghost in the Shell, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (a comic book story that didn't do anything for me back in the 1960s) , I saw form and little substance.

Blade Runner 1 could of had a better story, but it is more faithful to prose science fiction than anything else at that time. Of course there is the grand daddy 2001:A Space Odyssey a Big Thinks SF the likes of which I don't think I will ever see again.

Surprisingly TV in the last 2 years put forward a SF story quite faithful to the spirit of SF on the page, the amazing THE EXPANSE.

 

 

 

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25 minutes ago, boojam said:

Surprisingly TV in the last 2 years put forward a SF story quite faithful to the spirit of SF on the page, the amazing THE EXPANSE.

I love The Expanse!

 

6 hours ago, snowleper said:

Not so. By trying to pay tribute to it's predecessor it failed to develop on it's own. My contention is that it was a sci-fi movie. But not a Noir movie -- even though it was trying to be, or at least dressing itself up to be just that.

See I didn't think it was trying to be a noir movie. It felt like its own sci-fi movie to me, just based on a sci-fi noir movie. Dystopian visions have naturally occurring noir-ish sensibilities. The original Blade Runner consciously played with film noir genre conventions. I didn't get that impression at all from BR2049.

6 hours ago, snowleper said:

I don't see how Joi improved the movie at all. It interacted poorly with the protagonist, acting as a crutch/sounding board to explore his nonsensical angst -- and had no meaningful interactions with any of the other elements of the movie. It was an isolated, boring, pointless character that didn't even fulfill the formulaic requirements of a love interest all that successfully.

I thought it was an interesting concept for 30-years-on technological advancement, opening up another question in the "what it means to be human" theme. Joi may have started off as a factory setting but she seemed to genuinely develop an authentically formative relationship with K. Does the fact that Joi has no physical form mean that their emotional connection wasn't real even though it developed organically?

7 hours ago, snowleper said:

We get that at the end. Some replicants care -- because they simply do. This might have worked if it had been a reoccurring element of the movie. Or if we got some inkling of a replicant freedom movement. But we didn't -- aside from this lazy set-up for this sequels' sequel towards the very end. And still -- the movie seems to operate on the premise that the repli-child is objectively important, and not just symbolically essential to a beleaguered group of escaped artificial slaves. The whole quasi-mystical exploration of the 'miracle of birth' was very poor sci-fi. Which makes sense given that this director also did Arrival, which had good elements but was also full of mystical spiritual depok chopra style bullshit.

I get that you don't like anything spiritual onscreen. Heck, I'm not remotely spiritual, a stone-cold atheist, but people are by-and-large spiritual and it seems to me a natural element to this story that a replicant giving birth is a seriously big deal. If replicants can give life, why should they be treated as less than human? This film gives no definitive answers, it merely asks questions through characters who have questions, so I think you're projecting your own biases against spiritualism into it that aren't there. The film has no spiritualist agenda. I don't need to be spiritual to appreciate Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. It's a work of art.

7 hours ago, snowleper said:

As opposed to K being a designer, absolutely unique replicant? Even his designation 'K' seems to point towards the possibility of 10 other models possibly proceeding him. If not a fuck ton more, since K is an incomplete serial number. It makes no sense that they would design a replicant to be a cop and only produce the one. The entire logic of the movie points towards the fact that he was produced on a factory line to serve a designed non-unique purpose. That's essentially what replicants are.

You're making assumptions here, using an unprovable hypothesis to fit your criticisms. As far as we know K is the only replicant with Gosling's look. K is only part of his name. He has a unique serial number.

7 hours ago, snowleper said:

It also would have made more sense if he was actually kept in a box, like his debriefing seemed to kinda infer he should have been, instead of paying to live in a flat, and living just like an ordinary person. (This movie really dropped the ball in the representation of replicants as slaves -- and K as an enslaved slave-catcher).

That would make it pretty tedious wouldn't it! K is the main protagonist of this story. He has to have a character arc.

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