The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

haha yeah narratively the film is not *that* clever

saw this tonight in a relatively packed theater

loved it. which surprised me! i had reservations going in, like in the back of mind though i love villeneuve i worried that with ridley not directing would ford muscle villeneuve into making the “guys deckard is totes a human” rebooted sequel...and of course i was concerned about leto

but it was really good. the storytelling was clean & simple & the pacing was impressive. the only time i noticed the run time was the end during the endless water fight scenes like GUYS CAN WE GO

villeneuve brought so much open space & weather & elements to the bladerunner world, those early sweeping landscapes of california 2049 were stunning. and some of the sets & locations were O_O

and hey, turns out gosling makes a great robot :D

thank u dave bautista for putting gosling through a wall <3

^^ this is the movie i saw, right down to the only moment that felt long... well okay that and the part where jared leto bondvillains harrison ford for like 45 minutes

i really liked it too. super slow, but so was the original. a beautiful movie, lots to absorb. could've been cut a bit for sure, but i was into it

i thought it looked great but entirely lacked charm. struggling to think of any memorable dialogue or characters, unlike the original. well leto was memorable but not for the right reasons. why exactly did he shiv that new replicant? it can't have been to demonstrate to luv that he's a crazy and dangerous guy since presumably she knew that already. maybe it was to demonstrate to us, in which case the motivation was the director's or the script's, not his own. oh well if this had been prometheus he'd just have said "i'm a crazy & dangerous guy!" so that's some improvement.

I am hoping to go and see this tonight. Having rewatched the original twice lately, I am expecting this to be better.

why exactly did he shiv that new replicant?

It’s implied that he’s been trying unsuccessfully to develop a replicant that can procreate. This particular replicant was just the latest failed attempt.

How was the storytelling good? Spent half of the time going wtf is this plot

The storytelling is not good in the original.

True but it had more going for it. Looked unique, great score..

It’s implied that he’s been trying unsuccessfully to develop a replicant that can procreate. This particular replicant was just the latest failed attempt.

didn't seem like she was given much of a chance!

Eyes, I just do eyes!
Nothing is worse than having an itch you can never scratch.
It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?
Home again home again jiggity jig! Gooood evening JF!

Any lines like this in the new one? Even "I need the old blade runner. I need your magic", doesn't look great on paper but the character makes it. Or how about Deckard playing the wheedling performers' agent in the strip club? K doesn't get up to anything like that.

The only sorta memorable lines come from Leto's Replicant henchwoman.

ah yes, "YO YO YO, I'M THE BEST ROBOT!" shouted Duke of New York style

Seeing this today, how many people will be in the theatre at 11:40 on a Wednesday?

You alone.

plus some sexy robots

Improvement on It no one wants to watch a film with sexy clowns

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/53/31/ce/5331ce571383ec266309af2a3b12dac1--daryl-hannah-fiction-movies.jpg

going to be that guy and admit i'm interested in watching Halt and Catch Fire now after realizing cuet replicant is in it

And she actually has a character of substance!

Why does K have a hologram girlfriend instead of a replicant girlfriend? They had sex bots back in 2019, Pris was one. Why can't K date one now? Clearly the replicant bodies aren't expensive to make, since Jared Leto eviscerates a newborn one without a second thought. For that matter, if you can swap hologram identities with little black boxes, why does it matter at all if K or Luv get physically destroyed? Can't you just download them into a new body? Surely they have cloud backups of their minds in case a piano falls on them.

Like surely K would have a spare K in his closet? Since he gets beat to shit every day at work.

Clearly the replicant bodies aren't expensive to make, since Jared Leto eviscerates a newborn one without a second thought.

― erry red flag (f. hazel), Wednesday, 11 October 2017 16:53

Might be the kind of guy who destroys expensive things because he can.

i had a hard time getting past the plot holes in this

for example: someone hides something in a furnace and finds it ~20 years later. what, did they just decide to shut off the furnaces that day and leave them off forever?

also as noted upthread luv walking in and out of police HQ stealing evidence and murdering people along the way ... don't they check ID? security cameras? etc

I was going to post about that earlier but held off.

There's both a social and economic wall that K lives behind. Part of it is evident in the PKD-evoking small apartment, and the advertisement he sees late in the film where the generic version of his hologram girlfriend mentions "Joes." It's an incredibly dehumanizing moment on top of others he's experienced -- for the hologram programs, he's a Joe. It wasn't an inspired choice, it was base programming. I don't know if, outside Leto's character, we see anyone with actual money in the film. None of the replicants we see outside of his henchwoman are owned by individuals, they're all either working in an industry or secretly free. His discretionary spending is less of a salary and more of an allowance.

The other half of it is K's self image. He's a tool for the humans and a killer to the replicants, and doesn't see himself worthy of love with an equal, or thinks himself below other replicants because his primary relationship with them is executioner.

The replicants are bioengineered, not computer technology, although they can be implanted with memories and basic impulses or limits. We see where thoughts and memories can be implanted into replicants at the time they're created. It's implied that they're either terminated or basically brainwashed if they deviate from baseline, not hooked up to a machine and reprogrammed.

One of the main points of the film is replicant scarcity, so why would he have a second one?

Luv wasn't anything like K, she's a computer program and hologram, and he explicitly killed her backup because she knew too much.

sorry, mostly a response to f. hazel

you mean joi not luv, right?

Luv was the personal assassin lady, not K's holo-girlfriend. Her name was (sigh) Joi.

read that first as "k hole's girlfriend"

I'm surprised there wasn't a character named Fuk, honestly.

yeah, thanks

Her name was (sigh) Joi.

― erry red flag (f. hazel), Wednesday, 11 October 2017 17:13

I have been wondering if that was a reference but I doubted it.

K's apt is a mansion compared to Bruce Willis 5th Element econo-closet. Also, Amy Adams' beach house in Arrival totally out of scale for Ling. Prof salary. Maybe she used future closed-loop alien lingua powers to insider trade.

pretty sure this hasn't been posted

This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017

There are cops, and there are little people.

There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.

Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things. If you do not have enough empathy for the correct things, you will be murdered by a cop who does have empathy for the correct things....

Deckard...can be power or he can be vulnerable to power. He chooses power. And power means murder.

The first such murder we witness is that of a woman who escaped slavery and came to Earth. She has found herself a job. It’s a degrading job, a job that even the hard-boiled, world-weary Deckard flinches away from watching. But it’s a job. She is participating in society. She is working. She’s doing the things that she has to do in order to be a part of the world that she risked everything to reach.

Deckard comes to her workplace. He finds her there, and he knows what she is, and she runs away from him because she knows what cops do to women like her. He chases her through the street and corners her. He aims his gun at her through a crowd of people. He squints. He takes a second too long to decide whether to shoot. She runs again.

(Nobody tells you about that part, when you tell them you’re about to watch Blade Runner for the first time. They tell you about all the different versions, and they tell you about the ambiguity of the ending, and they tell you about the fact that all the effects are practical effects. But nobody tells you about the part where a cop aims a loaded firearm into a crowd of people and tries to decide whether it’s worth risking their lives in order to murder an escaped slave.)

https://www.tor.com/2017/10/03/this-future-looks-familiar-watching-blade-runner-in-2017/

It's weird how Leto makes the same speech as Whoopi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Eg67jDh2Ts

had a hard time getting past the plot holes in this

for example: someone hides something in a furnace and finds it ~20 years later. what, did they just decide to shut off the furnaces that day and leave them off forever?

― the late great, Wednesday, 11 October 2017 16:08 (four hours ago

Pretty sure it was an older furnace that was broken or out of use. Remember the kids running past all the other ones that were functional?

In any case that’s not anywhere near being a plot hole.

pretty sure this hasn't been posted

I assume because no one's interested in poorly written plot summaries

latebloomer OTM. if your plot hole is a nonfunctional furnace in the back corner of the basement of a dilapidated structure that, 20 years later, has not been repaired and put into use, this thing is airtight.

i found that essay compelling as a piece of writing but completely obtuse... like yes, this is the point of Blade Runner, and if your people are telling you the point is how many different versions there are you're talking to the wrong people.

if you're writing for tor.com as a science fiction or fantasy writer, and friends have told you about blade runner, then yeah... you're going to get a hodgepodge of basic plot, nerdery over changes and revision, and gossip about the "controversial" plot bits and not the key issues

ideally there'd be some deeper analysis but over the years the plot dissolves in aesthetics and behavior and the meta details, which is arguably a problem with new additions to old series and remakes -- they're more about the cultural observation of the original, and not the plot

it's like reading 1984 and realizing that it's not all about big brother and dystopia, but at its heart it's about a man who is killing himself with fake gin and somehow pulls himself out of the greyness to make a choice

otm

ok nerds, wait for your next turgid fetish object

tbh my main takeaway from that tor.com thinkpiece is that you should not try to summarize the plot of blade runner after seeing it only once

whole lot of hostility to a first reaction piece

i missed the ridiculous bellows on the nu-voight kampff

ok nerds, wait for your next turgid fetish object

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, October 11, 2017 2:48 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

blade runner 2049 in theaters now