The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

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.

who is doing these backups

K's boss, after he finishes quoting Pale Fire at the wall at the end of each assignment.

I think backup is a much more arduous process than that, in that it's implied if K malfunctioned they'd just retire him. It's like making soup, you can't reduce soup back into it's individual components.

They can in 2049

There are things going on in there that I have never seen in a film before.

I'm very skeptical of this (unless you're talking about tech stuff)

Some examples might be nice yeah

Harrison ford punching Ryan gosling

Good point. Hopefully other filmmakers will rise to the occasion now the possibilities of cinema have been expanded

I'd never seen a single frame of that in a film before. Not one.

The entire Deckard / Gosling fight scene was ridiculous and nearly ruined the whole movie for me. And then to end it with them just grabbing a drink and being buds? So weak. Why did they let Ford in this movie? He was terrible and looked like he didn't give a shit.

Within the film itself are demonstrations that soup-reduction technology exists: created memories are implanted in new replicants, and memories both implanted and experiential can be read from a living replicant. This tech is good enough to have replicants who don't know they are replicants and replicants who suspect, but aren't sure, they may have been born and not created. At least in the original the writers provided a bit of technobabble from Tyrell to explain why replicants have longevity issues, summarized by "you were made as good as we could make you". The new film tries to tackle themes of reproduction as longevity/mortality is clearly no longer the focus, but they don't seem to really know what they're trying to say about it. I could read the end scene with K lying wounded in the snow as the tragedy of wondering what your purpose is if you can die and simply be replaced immediately with a new you, or what an implanted desire to procreate means when your creators spend most of their time hunting you down and killing you, but the rest of the plot doesn't really support that... it feels more like they wanted "finale with main character being reflective in rain... no, snow!" and why Harrison Ford is there at all I have no idea. The subplot of "being a great dad sometimes means avoiding your daughter for her entire life" could be compelling (I guess?) but has fuck-all to do with being a replicant? Yeah, I know, everyone wanted to see Harrison Ford. But he didn't need to be in this movie at all. If it is about reproduction, it should have starred Sean Young instead. And Ryan Gosling should have been the hologram boyfriend.

Hard to disagree with the last two critical posts but I still thought this was surprisingly pretty good

Sure look it was all ridiculous why watch a movie at all

Memories are not minds. For instance, even simple neural networks can't be reverse engineered. They can be copied if the medium they live on allows for that, but biological or some form of 'quantum' system would be much more difficult if not impossible to read.

I had no appetite for it at all and a few people I know said it was amazing, and they were all quick to assure me that jughead lego is only in it for two scenes; they failed to mention that those scenes go on for hours tho. That guy really is as terrible as everyone says eh

It did not feel like a three-hour film at all though! Even though there's loads of shit that shouldn't be in there.

I liked arid jetoil in this

That's scandalous

Oh, I liked the movie. I just thought that fight scene was horrible. I don't even know who Jared Leto is, so I couldn't tell you if he was good or bad in this. I thought Ford was terrible, Gosling was boring and dull (exactly why people like him I guess - a friend said he was so dull he was perfect for a replicant).

I dont know what i think of the fight scene because it wasnt clear to me what its purpose was. But yeah that scene, and the scenes leading up to it, did more or less bring the movie to a halt. That was the only part that didnt work for me, and perhaps the Mackenzie Davis stuff as well, since I'm a Halt and Catch Fire watcher and was expecting a bigger role for her.

If, like darraghmac, you only want to hear affirmations that I have seen the movie and what I liked about it, feel free to skip these thoughts.

Memories are not minds. For instance, even simple neural networks can't be reverse engineered.

If replicants exist in the world of the movie, then by definition these problems have been solved in that world. The replicants are born with human-equivalent knowledge and capabilities (and this is not just facts and sets of instructions... it is a set of behaviors and expectations that we know humans have to develop iteratively by interacting with the world and are represented somehow in the biological medium of bodies), otherwise they would reject implanted childhood memories because there would be a very jarring discontinuity in their experiences. So neural networks that are in fact extremely complex must have been engineered and implanted into the replicant bodies. If you posit that they are based on humans, then that means we have a way of "reading" human minds. Otherwise, we have created bespoke yet human-indistinguishable representations of both memories and neural networks (or whatever biological system contains us) and figured out how to move that data from one thing to another. I can't buy that this would be a one-way process, even if the movie didn't show us movement in both directions (repository -> replicant and vice versa). Otherwise what medium are you developing these neural networks in? It has to be some kind of machine! And at some point you have to have sufficient knowledge of some storable state of the machine in order to customize and create physical versions of it with legs instead of a big box inside a lab. And Jared Leto says there are millions of them.

Nah I was giving out about something as basic as "I didn't like them fighting it was ridiculous". What was ridiculous about it, the fact of it, the style of it, the rhythm of it within the narrative, that deckard wouldn't have crushed k or vice versa, you don't like Elvis, what?

Cool thoughts are cool

The stuttering holograms are a really lame idea on paper that I quite liked in actuality, the fight was otherwise boring but not fatally so (and had the unprecedented ford-gosling punching obv)