The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

This is the closest stylistically to Enemy of all his movies (also my favorite of his until this one).

Yeah i meant the pacing regarding my Malick remark. Obviously not much of the malickian-nature themes here etc..

I really liked the slow pacing. A 90 minutes movie like this wouldve been generic as fuck. Giving the audiance time to obsorb the themes is great.

this seemed much more plot (and in a weird way action) driven than thematic.

I think there's a balance between the two more or less

I think the pacing was off regarding plot beats -- the entire replicant rebellion gets short shrift

This was very good

Haven't read any comments yet, no doubt I'll be back in an hour frothing at ye.

The only big missteps - they would've killed k after kidnapping declare, and the three minutes of matrix was shit and should never have made the screen

I saw it again, in IMAX, which I recommend. This is an astonishing piece of visual art.

I also picked up on some of the more subtle religious allusions the second time—Leto directly quotes Genesis at one point, in reference to the infertility of the biblical Rachel.

Also the secret daughter has something (fictional?) called "Galatians syndrome," suggesting that Officer K is a kind of Paul of Tarsus figure, a persecutor turned convert.

Re the replicant rebellion: it's there, but subtle. The implication at the end is that the daughter is a mole the Wallace Corp, implanting memories inside the replicants that, when triggered, can push them off baseline. That's the set-up for the sequel, I would suspect—or at least, it was, before it ate shit at the box office.

they've said, although maybe not truthfully, that there were no mysteries meant to be addressed in sequels

I thought the implication at the end was that the daughter is a mole for the _rebellion_ because K, like others, has this memory that is real that he dwells on. And it's the daughter's memory -- so while he's not the child in the memory, he wants to join with his kind to protect her and team with the underground

"all the best memories are hers" or something to that effect -- the rebels know where these memories came from

whoops you probably mean mole _in_ the Wallace Corp (although she's an independent contractor), not mole _for_

yeah, that's what I meant. they probably got the rogue subcontractor idea from Snowden

actually the plot twist I was waiting for, which never came, was that Joi was a mole for the Wallace corporation, setting up an Infernal Affairs mole vs countermole narrative

maybe it's better they passed on that one

they sure riffed extra hard on the Pinocchio angle for K

I know others didn’t care for it, but there was something compelling to me about the climactic fight scene. It’s duration, the relentlessness of the water. It felt like there is something going on there at least other than robots beating on each other.

It was a bit Bond. Maybe the car reminded me of that Bond one that went underwater.

having harrison ford flail helplessly for the entirety of it was (intentional?) chuckles

I thought the look on Gosling's face, when the car is engulfed in water and he walks out of the darkness and starts firing, was perfect. It was as if all doubt and emotion drained and he was completely purpose-driven

we needed the old blade runner

I thought it was clever. It alluded to both Altman and John the Baptist while still working as a credible fight scene

the whole idea of having a rendition program to take Deckard offworld so they could really torture him, wtf

it would have been cool to see what the posh offworld looked like. is it just a futuristic day spa? what if the torture facilities were also posh and comfortable?

rosewaterboarding

I know others didn’t care for it, but there was something compelling to me about the climactic fight scene. It’s duration, the relentlessness of the water. It felt like there is something going on there at least other than robots beating on each other.

― ryan, Thursday, 12 October 2017 21:17 (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Definitely was affecting Luv

I think perhaps it's the only force of nature we see in the entire movie?

the whole idea of having a rendition program to take Deckard offworld so they could really torture him, wtf

― mh, Thursday, October 12, 2017

yeah that was weird. no one knows he's alive anyway and you've already demonstrated you can pretty much do whatever in your fancy office and dispose of bodies. maybe there's a special kind of PAAAAAIN that requires different gravity or some specific element or something?

...

...

guess this means he's DUN DUN DUH not a replicant

Isn't it just to avoid him being killed / retired as an illegal replicant?

maybe he wants to show him a version of rachel that is also a spaceship?
something like this:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d4/d7/d3/d4d7d31dc1d9ec45269e13635878fa7e--my-neighbor-totoro-studio-ghibli.jpg

re Galatians syndrome: Galatians is a book of the new testament; it’s one the letters from Paul, and is where Paul “plants the flag” of Christianity, ie in opposition to Mosaic Law/Judaism etc
not 100% sure yet what the significance of the reference is, if any

there’s also a Jesus-fish pattern on the outer edge of the table in the orphanage when they are studying the ledger

plus there’s weirdass gnostic stuff too

it’s a fun rabbithole to explore imo

Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first.

can you specify the gnostic stuff? (though I guess it would be quite easy to identify Leto’s character with the evil creator god.)

and yeah I guess K’s dawning gnosis of an inner soul works too!

dick was a big gnostic dude, the novel & blade runner have a lot of the same themes, the creator, the fallen, the “awakened slave/s”, plus with K’s whole spoiler discovery, there’s all that weird gnostic meganerd stuff about jesus being a twin etc gospel of thomas stuff

I know this was unrelated to a disney film but I swear there were pinocchio audio cues

ooh yeah maybe

rewatched final cut tonight

Forgot how claustrophobic it is...even in some of those big cavernous locations Scott keeps the camera very close to the players, it gets so intense at the end

The constant sound whether ambient or soundtrack is something I never noticed before too. Even the lights make noises!

The contrast of style in 2049 feels even more meaningful & interesting now, the light & dark, indoor vs outdoor.

Batty & K go through similar journeys too, knowing from the limitations of what they are and being allowed to explore the possibility of freedom only to have the fantasy ripped away ... the fleeting euphoria of believing in it and being snapped back to the reality of their limited selves, is like another death

sorry for obv, just thinkposting :)

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.

I've been thinking about this, because I didn't think about this during the film at all, in that it never struck me as remotely problematic.

Joi is software; a programme. And a generic, off-the-shelf one at that. When he pauses at the giant neon naked billboard hologram version towards the end, she says 'Joe', showing that this is default name Joi will give to anyone. She's not conscious, she's just aware, like any software programme. She's programmed to say she loves him, to make him feel special, that's why she exists. To make the drudgery of his home life a little more tolerable so he doesn't go postal with his genetically-enhanced muscles and reflexes.

K and Luv, on the other hand, as manufactured as they are, are biological entities, not software; not even really advanced hardware with software installed. The baselining thing is like neuro-linguistic programming; that and implantation of false memories (through whatever method, but not uploading 0s and 1s into a hard drive) and various other methods of control are what keep them doing what they do, the way that any ideological state apparatus controls any group of people. You can download software into a new machine (from a home computer to an emanator, for example) but you can't download a personality. Can you? (Maybe those weird crystal things do that?)

Replicants aren't robots / androids / machines with code that's become sentient (like in Humans on C4, for example), at least I don't think so based on the evidence. They're genetically identical to humans - that's expressed several times - who are prevented from believing they are human.

Toddlers aren't emotionally aware / in control until the frontal cortex is fully developed - maybe that's partly the four-year lifespan on the Nexus 6s.

Saw 2049 last night. I wasn't feeling it. It looks nice, but I was bored with the story and didn't like the music.

I loved it. There are things going on in there that I have never seen in a film before. The plot wasn't spoonfed but it wasn't terribly difficult to follow either.

The plot was pretty bad but it had to be there and to be fair they kept it out of the way most of the time.

I've upgraded my opinion, this was great

The main issue I had with the plot (and this is a problem for me and the OG film), is that because everything unfolds so slowly that I drift out and start taking in all the lovely effects before realising I've forgotten exactly WHY the characters have gone to a certain place and for what reason. I have this problem with almost every film I watch though.

Not being funny I have that problem at work man

The claustrophobia of the original echoes Deckard's task. The escaped replicants haven't been on earth long, and most are trying to get jobs and blend in while Roy is hellbent on figuring out how to live longer. But the authorities are nearly immediately on to them and Deckard's on to them within days.

By 2049, the entire scope is much larger, and replicants have been wandering around for *decades*. Deckard seemed to have more freedom of movement than anyone else in the original, with the flying cars seemingly at a premium. Meanwhile, back in 2049, Sapper's living in the middle of the wide-open sprawl of solar farms and agriculture while K has to dodge through hallways and accept the judgment of his neighbors before he gets to his small apartment

xp same

They can't be genetically identical to humans, because humans require a period of like 8-10 years where they learn how to be human. Like, almost every aspect of being human is developed via interaction with the world. How to move, how objects behave, stereo vision, language, how to deal with other people... if newly-born replicants are adult-sized and can already stand up, as we saw in the birth/murder scene, and they can have plausible memories of a childhood they didn't have, then personality must be something you can implant in them. Like, the mind/body separation must be a solved thing if they have figured out how to A. skip the experiential development required to make humans human and B. have an application that can create memories that can be transferred into a replicant. So you should be able to make backups and copies of any given replicant. Maybe there are technical issues with reliably uploading the identity of a replicant once they've been in the world for while, but that still means you can just make another K if the current one gets eviscerated by Jared Leto because he's bored.

(oops, forgot to quote... that's a reply to Hey Bob up there)

we see them creating memories, and it's a painstaking process done by people using specialized tools. there's no indication that you can transfer memories in any sort of efficient way out of a replicant or human

so sure, you can make another Rachel or K, but they'd be started over from whenever they were created

that's part of K's journey, his quest to figure out if he has a soul, if he was born, if his memories are real

really the truth is that memory is a blurred filter on the past and it's irrelevant, but it's the thing on which he hangs his hope

There's no discussion of how the replicant's brains work but if they are biological computers or something like Asimov's positronic brains they could be 'programmable' by feeding information in or using attached storage while being almost impossible to decant.

I watch it assuming replicants are peak humans who happen to have serial numbers tattooed on a few parts of their bodies and anyone who treats them otherwise is a jerk

we see them creating memories, and it's a painstaking process done by people using specialized tools. there's no indication that you can transfer memories in any sort of efficient way out of a replicant or human

I dunno, the first scene where K visits Ana (the memory-maker) suggests she has a machine that can read K's memories, because that's how he shows the horse memory to her. If that sort of transfer is possible, why couldn't the machine she's using just download a dump of all of his memories? Also, she makes a distinction between real memories and created ones. Which means she can also read memories that were a result of a replicant's (or a human's) experiences, not just implanted ones. So a K backup could also include memories he has formed from experience.