I found it to be a GREAT WORK OF ART, which seems to be rare with movies nowadays. I enjoyed all of the echos to the original. It was nice to see Olmos. Mariette looked like Pris. Luv looked like Rachel. Wallace had the blindness, which echoed Sebastian’s thick eyeglasses / blinding. The scene with the bones “zoom in, zoom in”.
I found the emotional depth of K’s “journey” to be very well done.
However, I had some problems with it.
The pacing, to me, was almost comically slow. I can see doing spoofs using the slow pace as the comedic hook.
The use of female characters and nudity images felt kinda outdated… They were either geisha-servants (yes, I know, by design), hookers, or badass (the tropes of the hard-as-nails boss, or hot-assassin, which we’ve seen in a million other movies). The only somewhat female human being was the daughter. This aspect all seemed to me to be playing up to adolescent fan-boys. Someone tweeted: “Of all the crazy shit to dream up in futuristic movies, the one thing that’s too crazy to envision is women being less objectified.”
Didn’t do much for me. Way too slow, too loud, too confusing, too misogynistic.
The worldbuilding didn’t make sense. If humanity is so valuable that people pay for replicant humans, how is there a huge orphanage of kiddies being exploited for slave labour?
Jared Leto’s lair looked like Syndrome’s in The Incredibles. So many scenes were way too dark, confusing shadows and glaring highlights, but I did like the gag where bad bot lady turned on the light.
So sick of the trope where two good guys who need something from each other just trade punches until one of them gives up.
The sexual politics were just gross. Another version of the future where women are replaced by tech. It just seems so boring and obvious.
Wow, writing this out has been illuminating. This isn’t ambivalence, I really didn’t like this film.
The billboards I was OK with because that went to the mood. Lingering on the bright, clean Sony logo in an otherwise completely dingy room breaks the mood. Likewise with the Johnny Walker. Although I did think the bottle was cool and priced it out. Stupid advertising that works… I hate it.
i think the product placement was actually done very well. The original movie is about a dystopian society where corporations own society. And has the additional 1980s fear that the Japanese and Chinese are going to ‘own’ the United States. So advertisement is everywhere with no regard for how it intrudes. I think the fact that they include Atari and Pam-Am speaks to that fact.
Also I have heard charges of misogyny, but I don’t think the Director (who also directed “Arrival” FWIW) intended all the nudity to be “hey, look at these boobs”. One of the themes of the original movie was that Replicants were ‘better’ humans than humans, including in morality. I think it builds on that notion that when making Replicants completely docile, they’ve turned them into slaves for the pleasure of humans. And when humanity is left to its devices, they debase everything, whether its Wallace who treats them like his own playthings and only wants them to reproduce because he can mass produce them for forced labor off-world or whether its general society, which explicitly displays them for sexual slavery. It’s a sign of human debauchery, IMO, and asks whether we are deserving of ruling over androids we create in such ways.
Yeah I am inclined to agree. I too liked this more than the original for the reason that you cite; it has a more interesting plot with a classic character arc for the protagonist. I also agree that the Deckard part should have been cut sharply. I wonder if they were influenced by the success of the Force Awakens including Harrison Ford’s return. Of course the difference is that Han Solo is a far more popular character than Deckard.
One aspect which left me a touch disappointed was the visual design which was fine but didn’t blow my mind on IMAX 3D quite the way I expected, partly because many of the scenes just looked very dull and bleak. Relative to its time, I think the original was more impressive in this regard.
I was a bit confused by Luv’s character arc. At first she seemed an ambiguous character with her own agenda but by the end she seemed to have become a straight villain. I think the Joi character worked better, she is like the next level for the AI character in Her.While she clearly represents a male fantasy, she also has agency and her own character arc.
BTW did K die at the end? That is what the Wiki summary said but I admit it went completely over my head.
Overall I liked it quite a lot and I hope there is a sequel though the disappointing opening weekend makes that less likely.
I can see that POV, and in true Blade Runner homage perhaps it can be a different ‘cut’ of the film (the steronz cut) ;). However, I actually like that they included all that in there. The original film as well as this one has as a key principle that corporations are not our friends (from Tycho and Wallace Corporation’s views on its Replicants or poor people to the ubiquitous and never avoidable advertising). Wallace does that take that to even greater ends in asserting that he’s fascinated by a Replicant having a child because then he could even more mass produce slaves. On the other side you have the resistance who want to use the child of Replicants as a rallying call for revolution. And in the middle (somewhat) you have Deckard and K who simply want to reunite a father and his child (which K originally believes is him, but then afterwards wants to do it because it is right). Deckard even asks him, why are you doing this. It’s another example he’s seen of a Replicant being better than humans. I think that’s a beautiful story in the midst of two groups that want to use the Replicant child.
In a couple of scenes, the monitors appeared to be CRTs. So this was some sort of alternate history version of our world.
And one scene (I think the one in the morgue), the sign on the wall had English language text and what looked like Hindi or another language using a similar script. That was a little weird.
It’s a direct sequel to a movie that was explicitly set in 2019. Either we’re going to get flying cars, off-world colonies, and an entire subclass of manufactured people in the next two years, or the new movie is in an alternate timeline.
That’s kind of my point. It’s some sort of weird mixture of backwards technology (CRT monitors) and futuristic technology (flying cars, holographic advertisements, realistic artificial people).
Well I’ll amend my desire to say, keep the evil corporation but remove Wallace.
It’s all well and good to say that a theme of this movie is that corporations are not our friends, but I have several problems with the Wallace character.
His personal motivations don’t have any meaningful effect on the plot or on the development of the main characters. The only effect is that K is under lots of pressure to find this child, making him question what he’s doing. But you can apply that pressure from off-screen. Keep the Luv character, have her come in to the LAPD and show how the corporation is really in charge, and you have the same effect.
What lesson should the audience take away from Wallace’s desire to make money by selling baby Replicants? Good sci-fi should make us question something about our own humanity, but I think “Forcing Replicants to have babies that you then sell off into continued slavery” is a theme that’s missed it’s window by about 150 years. There’s no depth here.
He’s dull. This should really be #1, but I’d excuse dulls scenes if they were important to the plot. Keep the corporate HQ, I liked the archives and the guy working at the front desk. Just have Wallace be an unseen force, he’s less of a cartoon that way and we don’t have to sit through expository dialog.
Really enjoyed the show. The music was too loud at some points for me. I liked the world building, as well. really gives you a context for the plot. I found that the bleakness of the setting fitted well with Ks persona.
I liked Ford being in the movie, but feel that he could have been cut and had K investigating a real cold case. But that would require a real change to the last hour of the show and taken away the father-daughter reunion. I like that the Nexus 8 had a much more mature attitude, either by design or the longer experience he’d gotten from living so long.
The central idea of replicant breed was pretty good. An actually momentous event. The captain talked about how the case had to be kept quiet to prevent war. But I think she was scared of the consequences for humans if replicants could multiply without us to make them.
Joi is sort of disturbing in that on one hand you have this awesomely interactive companion. But on the other hand, you have no way to touch her short of getting a hooker to play along. Seems like a tragic Ladyhawke kind of existence. Wallace probably also makes a “Cool Friend” companion so you can have a bro to hang with and play Call of Duty 27.
Wallace himself being blind seemed more like a affectation than an affliction. I mean, Chew could make eyes back in 2017. Surely Wallace could have perfect eyes if he wanted. Probably he liked the multi-view aspect of using the drones.
And why the “Blackout?” Seems like such a huge event to include in the backstory simply to show that the records are incomplete.
One question. In the scene with Barkhad Abdi, I assume he was speaking in Arabic? Is Arabic so universal that everybody understand it, or is K’s model designed to speak multiple languages?
I think Wallace could have been a more interesting character if he had been developed properly, particularly his relationship with Luv. As I mentioned, Luv’s character seemed to harden towards the end without any real explanation. There should have been a sub-plot where Luv had genuine misgivings and Wallace sensed this and figured out a way to manipulate her into doing what he wanted.
I can see where some would prefer the faceless corporation, but I tend to like the crazy CEO. We tend to deify our talented CEOs (Jobs, Musk, etc) and there is no doubt that Wallace is incredibly talented. He invented the synthetic farming that saved civilization (at least in the Western US) and then refined Replicants to be more obedient. He’d be put on the biggest of pedestals. For him to also a bit a crazy sociopath is something that I liked seeing. I like the direct pressure of Wallace on K in trying to get a child Replicant and the pressure he put on Deckard to talk by producing a new Rachel (in which Wallace was truly chilling).
As for wanting Replicants to have children so you can mass produce slaves “missing it’s window by 150 years”, I couldn’t disagree more. I think it shows that as much as we say we abhore slavery (well most of us) that all we need is a lesser race to re-create all of the horrors of chattel slavery again. Luv, when killing Joi, even refers to this somewhat by saying “I hope you enjoyed our product” or when the Police Chief tells K it’s probably good he doesn’t have a soul and toys with him about ordering him to do things he doesn’t want to. I think it says a lot about humanity and that all we need is to feel threatened and we’re totally fine with using and abusing others and portraying them as less human. I think now more than ever that’s a good lessons to ask ourselves, because we definitely aren’t over it, even if we in the US ended official chattel slavery then.
The main issue with Wallace is that we only really see him in three scenes (since Luv does most of the dirty work). Perhaps his story and motivations (aside from making oodles and oodles of money mass producing his products) could be developed more, but that would require a longer film. Personally I think his inclusion was fine. Perhaps Jared Leto’s acting is the problem people have with Wallace?
Now that people keep mention Wallace, there’s one thing that distracted me during each one of his scenes: I kept thinking that a modern Dothraki interested in having slaves would naturally want to breed them rather than form a horde to capture them. Just, that beard and dark makeup.