The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

Honestly, I'm just impressed they're not making a prequel.

Blade Runner 1989: Rise of Tyrell

I would be 100% on board for Blade Runner 1989

I would be 100% on board for Blade Runner 1989

the anime Blade Runner: Black Lotus had a couple moments but it was insanely slow and overly-telegraphed. kind of ended up being a prequel to 2049

Blade Runner 1889 with a tie-in to the Back to the Future cinematic universe.

Blade Runner 109 set in the Off-Rome Colonies

Blade Runner Nine-Nine set in New York's finest replicant hunting division. Hilarity ensues.

Blade Runner COPS 911: a reality tv series where you ride along with the police as they patrol the streets of Los Angeles, looking for replicants to retire.

i watched this with my boys

they loved the first half, hated the second half

it is a little weird, making your protagonist a bad guy and having him played by harrison ford, having the cops be bad guys, also having the replicants be bad guys

my adhd 14yo said the crowd scenes made him feel anxious and horrible. i was like yeah that’s what they were going for. he’s incredulous. “why would they want to make people feel that way??”

who is the what now

is it a controversial thing to say that deckard is the bad guy? maybe i'm ahead of myself but this hot take must have been typed out somewhere before. let's consider the evidence:

- he's a cop
- as the opening crawl reminds us, he executes replicants. it's not called that. but that's what he does. he's an executioner. he's a deadly tool of the state. he drinks to forget it. but that's all he is. why does he execute them? not because they slaughtered 23 people. (and did they? really?) he would execute them even if they killed no one. them's the rules.
- when he meets zhora backstage she's charming, suspicious, tough, glamorous - she's a complex personality. deckard puts on a weird voice and pretends to be a bureaucrat. she's seen it all before and she's not scared (she can take care of herself) but it's a vivid reminder of how deckard has just shrunk down to one dimension: a man with a gun. whereas zhora has a whole personality, a life
- he's apparently fine with just shooting his weapon on a massively overcrowded street??
- when he finally shoots zhora it's heartbreaking
- when leon gets ahold of him it feels like justice
- when rachel hesitates to kiss him, deckard blocks her exit from the apartment, throws her against the wall, and demands that she say she wants him. it's physical assault and it's mentally abusive
- batty mockingly calls out in the nightmarish hide and seek at the end.. "i thought you were good! aren't you the good man?"

what you've got is an executioner who is happy enough to kill every replicant he meets apart from the one he has convinced to be his sexbot

All sounds about right. Isn't that the point, really.

i guess it was?! i mean.. i do feel kind of dumb for getting the point about 40 years late.

and.. i should have known morbs had posted about this

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/

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 11 October 2017 19:39 (five years ago)

(that's written by the brilliant sarah gailey btw)

oh I was thinking you’d just watched 2049

carry on