The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

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

i don’t think the tor.com piece is off the mark or even wrong and i think it’s good to reframe it in those terms

it’s a useful perspective!

yes. i thought the piece was excellent fwiw, yes it's extremely basic but that's its point

2049 fairly blatantly frames it in those terms and it really cheapens it. (weirdly when TNG does it, it's fine)

I think this movie is designed

Shitty day intervened so I was unable to see if I would be the only one in the theatre. Do androids dream of Schrodinger's cat?

Ha I was in the middle of type that when I got a call and I guess it posted?

I meant to say: I think this movie is destined to be one that people remember when they talk about this era.

I think this movie is designed

In 2000, Harrison Ford gave his view on the director's cut of the film, where he said that although he thought it was "spectacular", it didn’t "move him at all". He gave a brief reason: "They haven't put anything in, so it's still an exercise in design."

he hates everything tho

well in terms of this and Han Solo, he has a point

I heard he would continually forget Ryan goslings name in press junkets

he’s also old and a well-known bullshitter who does a shtick

8pm showing on a Wednesday (which is 2-4-1 if you’ve got the right insurance/phone etc) at the biggest cinema in town was about half full.

Initial thoughts:

I enjoyed this from a first viewing more than any single complete viewing of the first film.

The plot, emotionally, felt totally satisfactory to me; the 'holes' outlined above are not even remotely issues (multi-zillionaire businessman destroying his own expensive product prototype when it fails his brief, vs underpaid service class 'Joe' not being able to afford a real one? I bet Steve Jobs used to wipe his arse with failed prototype iPhones.)

It looks amazing, obviously; contained all the shots and vistas that could make it feel like Blade Runner, and added a huge amount of new stuff to flesh it out.

I am not a massive fan of the first film; I love the idea of it and the aesthetic, but have never found any of the versions to be satisfactory. I've rewatched the final cut on bluray twice in the last couple of weeks and still stand by this. As such I think this is a more satisfying film experience. Is it a 'better' film? God, I wouldn't want to begin to try and argue that.

Didn't check the time once, and I was watching it alone, slightly ill, with no popcorn or posh ice cream to distract me. Pacing felt absolutely fine.

So much better a resurrection than Prometheus. I've avoided Alien: Covenant.

Is it woke enough in 2017? Again, I wouldn't try and begin to argue either way. It's not depicting the world we live in, though, obviously.

Callbacks to the previous film worked better than other recent things I've seen.

Not perfect, but really damn good. Better than I expected or hoped it would be years ago when it was announced. Probably as good as I hoped when I watched Sicario and realised who Villeneuve was.

No thoughts beyond initial from you again, thanks.

Cheers for that then.