I looked at that scene as he’s been told he must kill Deckard, but when he stops and sees Joi once again in this generic form, he realizes what he lost (and in ways can never have), but Deckard did, and has a daughter from it. And he’s not going to take Deckard away from his daughter by killing him, so he decides to save him instead.
Though I’ve seen the original, it was a long while ago so when Rachael appeared on screen I had no recollection of who she was supposed to be but there was something about her face that looked very fake and CGI.
I enjoyed it, but I agree it was on the too-longish side. There were also some scenes that were so slow that I started dozing off, but fortunately I never lost consciousness.
But I do have some questions:
When K and Deckard are found, Wallace’s people snatch Deckard. What about K? Did they just leave him there to be found by the rebels? Why didn’t evil bot kill him right then and there?
Was the boy twin a ruse? If so, who created it? The rebels?
I agree that it doesn’t seem to make much sense to have left K there.
My main complaint was, if everything is so ridiculously scarce, how does Deckard get to live all by himself in an entire abandoned city with electricity and unlimited booze, and presumably working plumbing, etc. I guess it was supposed to be Las Vegas, although at the time I just assumed it was another part of LA. It just seemed needlessly over-the-top.
Overall, fascinating and enjoyable. I really loved the relationship between K and Joi. The scene with her kinda-fusing with the “real” prostitute was fantastic.
K found the location because of the radiation signature on the toy horse. So presumably people were avoiding it because of the contamination. (Still, things were pretty bad back in Los Angeles, and Deckard’s hideout was pretty swanky.)
My question was around the analysis that guy performed on the horse. He said it was extremely valuable for being made of real wood. And yet, there was that dead tree right outside that farm at the beginning. If that little horse was that valuable, how much would that whole tree be?
I had the same question, but I think my wife answered it – the assassin-lady-replicant liked K and didn’t want to kill him. That seems pretty reasonable – she was more complex then a straight obedient killer, based on her tears and other reactions.
I think that was deliberately left unanswered, but I’m not sure if he was a twin or another replicant implanted with her memories.
I don’t think she’s the only one creating fake memories for Replicants, but not only was she was able to instantly tell it was a real memory she had a pretty obvious emotional reaction to it as well. Like any “writer” she draws a lot from her own experiences.
It’s make sense for bees to be extinct (at least outside controlled biospheres), but Replicant bees just sound stupid. They’d wouldn’t even be able to produce honey (at least now without Replicant flowers) so they’d be purely decorative (like a museum exhibit about beekeeping).
It is. Joi is just an off the shelf virtual companion product of the Wallace Corporation; programmed to tell her owner whatever they want to hear. She’s not really self-aware like the Replicants are, and K finally admitted that to himself then.
I’m guessing enough that it’d be really suspicious that anybody would keep it sitting around on a small protein farm. :dubious: Like a meth dealer with a solid gold lawn sculpture outside his trailer.
This was pretty much my reaction to it. I’m not certain it’s the film at fault, though, or if it’s the fault of the cinema.
Other than that, as a Blade Runner fan, this movie was great.
Just saw it. It was a gorgeous and beautiful work of art. Just incredibly captivating and thought provoking. I can’t believe they did a sequel of a beloved sci-fi movie 30+ years after the fact and it turned out so well!
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My first thought was that the filmmakers had found an actress who looked like 1982 Sean Young. She looked 100 percent human (not CGI) to me, but did not look exactly like Rachael from the original film (not to me, anyway).
I loved the moment when Joi dismissed Mariette the prostitute, saying “I’m done with you,” and Mariette sneered at her, saying “There’s not as much going on up there as you think.” Even the oppressed replicants look down on AIs.
What didn’t make sense was when they said the two had identical DNA, despite one being male and the other female.
Magnificent. I loved this more than almost anything I’ve seen in years. Such a beautiful film. Design awards have to come after. And I’d love to see an Oscar nomination for Ryan Gosling, though the Academy doesn’t seem to like him very much (pace La La Land).
Amazing female characters. Joi and Luv, and the actresses who played them, were great. I thought the actress who played Luv looked like a younger Paulie Perette.
I saw it yesterday.
I am a huge fan of Blade Runner (the director’s cut). I hated this film. It felt like seasons 4,5, and 6 of Lost. I could feel the studio execs saying, “If this does well, we’ll do a sequel and make a mint.”
Why did it feel like the final seasons of Lost? It was so many unanswered questions----plus the feeling of a 10 year old saying, “And then there was------And then there was-------And then there was. . .” They were just making it up as they went along. What was Luv’s motivation? What was Wallace’s motivation? Did you even know their names? I had to look them up on IMDB.
I too was flummoxed by them taking Deckerd and leaving K. Did K die? We really don’t know. He looked at his injury and lay back in the snow. In the original, there was no doubt that Roy died. We don’t even know if Luv died.
What about the horrible fake Svangali score? It was like Svangali meets Dub Step. In the original Blade Runner, the pacing set mood. In Blade Runner 2049, it seemed to say, “See what we can do with CGI?”
Where were the actual humans? In 1982 Blade Runner, we had J. F. Sebastian, Hannibal Chew, Tyrell-----all the subway people. The humans helped make the replicants sympathetic.
In Blade Runner 2049 we had, what I assume was a human orphanage. And for what purpose? Did it really move the plot?
Mark my words, if this reboot does well, there will be a sequel. And the sequel will be just as satisfying as Lost.
The sly way that Jared Leto delivered those lines gave me the impression that Wallace is just fucking with Deckard. Everything Wallace says and does in that scene is psychologically manipulative.
Villeneuve may have been throwing a bone to the Deck-a-Rep crowd with that line, but everything he shows us indicates that Deckard is human. The best example was the scene where Deckard’s hideout is under attack. Alleged replicant Deckard runs through a door, while actual replicant K simply crashes through a wall.
Sorry about the wrong name on the musical score. It was Vangelis not Svangali. Brain fart, whatever.
If the boy twin was a ruse, it would make sense. Confuse the search if someone finds the DNA.
I loved it.
I think this demonstrates something about what really makes me love a movie (or book): world-building. I can forgive anything with regards to plot or acting if they manage to put together an intriguing universe. Fortunately, BR49 had a perfectly serviceable plot, but that’s not what I was watching.
The universe was like all the best parts from the original BR, the Fallout games, and Her. I so want a game set in this universe.
And it is, indeed, an alternate universe where Atari and Pan-Am are still around, as is the USSR, and a dirty bomb went off in Vegas. We didn’t manage to stop climate change in time so LA is surrounded by seawalls. And so many other little things.
I’m certain I missed half the little details like this, so I must see it again.
There was no twin. When they hid Rachel’s kid in the orphanage, rather than put the kid’s own DNA scan into the system where someone looking for Rachel might find it, they copied some other kids scan. There was no relation between the kid whose scan they copied, and Rachel’s child.
I thought the original was dreadfully boring, and I say that as someone who generally likes slow moving sci-fi movies. I also saw it when I was older, decades after it came out. Also, there’s so many versions out there, I don’t know which one people actually like. I saw the Director’s Cut, not the Final Cut.
2049 is better than the original. The world feels just as convincing and I like that they let us chew on the scenery still, but the plot and the character interactions aren’t dull. I loved the whole character of Joi, and I liked the extended hologram-hooker-overlay scene. I loved the scene with Dave Bautista. I loved the orphanage in San Diego. I loved the idea of K piecing together where his memory came from, and the whole idea of the Replicant lovechild becoming a memory maker was pretty solid.
That said, I know exactly what I’d cut. First of all, I’d firebomb Sony headquarters and never let them make another movie again. The product placement is distracting, as are all of the moments where you realize that the artistic vision is being compromised for foreign market sales. Not that I have anything against Chinese writing being in a futuristic depiction of California, but my brain knows why it’s there, and it’s not because the director thought it elevated the movie. Likewise the Sony branded jukebox, the Peugot logos on the flying trikes, the carefully framed shots of the Johnny Walker bottles… ugh. Just stop it Sony.
Then I’d cut Jared Leto and Harrison Ford out of the movie altogether. This story stands on its own without the throwback to the original movie, and while I appreciate a good Sean Young lookalike, Deckard somehow having a picture of her in his Vegas penthouse didn’t feel authentic to me. The events of the original can stand on their own, there’s no reason to pretend like Deckard and Rachael were critical players in the future of a new mankind. Just let the past be the past. And the Jared Leto stuff just muddied up the plot with nonsensical motivations and boring conversations in oddly lit rooms. Don’t need any of that.
If you kill all ties between this movie and the original, remove the evil corporation stuff, you have a really solid 2 hours of world building with a streamlined, engaging plot. K is a detective, created in a lab to be a badass detective, who accepts his fate at having a digital girlfriend and following orders. But he begins to question his existence when he learns that Replicants can reproduce, and that he could possibly be this child that he’s looking for. And at the end, he learns that he’s not, but is OK with it because he’s part of a more important story. Roll credits.