Another thing about Joi was how she was sort of blase about the nature of her existence. She made no pretense of being flesh and blood, altering her outfit at whim and literally sharing the same space as K when he’s using a computer or other equipment. Maybe that was to show how “close” they were. Her presence also gave Gosling a foil for exposition. I wonder if Joi evolved from Siri.
You’re the best Replicant Killer out there, bringing down the biggest and the baddest of them all. When you die, are you remembered as The Replicant Killer? No. But fuck one sheep, and suddenly you’re…
Electric sheep.
I saw the film today. The sex scene was very well done. Very romantic. But what happened immediately after that? Before the travelogue scene. My bladder was protesting and I had to leave when the prostitute woke up. I should have waited a few more minutes for the travelogue scene but them’s the breaks.
The prostitute had a few moments alone in the room where she got dressed and slipped a tracker into Joe’s coat. Then Joi appeared and dismissed the prostitute, fairly curtly. The prostitute left, but not before saying some kind of parting shot to Joi that I can’t remember exactly, but it seemed to imply that Joi, as a non-physical AI, was a lesser being than a replicant. At least that’s how I took it.
Thanks.
The prostitute also sees the wooden horse, and recognizes it from her own memories - foreshadowing the reveal that K is not Rachael’s kid after all.
There is a later scene with a Joi billboard emphasizing how they are mass-produced pre-programmed subservient disposable robots with no free will.
…like the replicants and humans.
I was left wondering what the ‘rules’ are, in-universe, about replicants killing/attacking humans. K is a replicant police officer (police equipment? police property?) tasked with killing other replicants, but when he is attacked by human scavengers at the dump, he doesn’t seem to have any problem responding with deadly force. It does seem that he shoots a few in the legs, but I do think that he straight up killed at least one before Luv called in her airstrike. He does kill a couple of goons who are trying to kidnap Deckard, although those were possibly replicants. Now, maybe he gets to bend the rules because he’s a police, hence the heightened surveillance of his stability via the baseline tests. Maybe a pleasure model doesn’t get to harm a human under any circumstances, but presumably doesn’t get stability-tested all the time either. Luv kills the lieutenant, seemingly on her own enraged initiative, but maybe she’s a special case; a one-off killer model for Wallace (she’s special enough to have a name, after all). It’s weird though that she says that she’ll claim that the lieutenant tried to shoot her first, which would somehow justify (maybe only to Wallace) the killing of a human. The fact that she could lie to Wallace implies that Wallace’s control of her isn’t what it should be. ISTM that replicants of the new Wallace types shouldn’t have a drive for self-defense, or at least shouldn’t be able to harm humans in pursuit of self-defense. I know they aren’t Asimov robots, but how do they reconcile ‘safe enough to let them run around on Earth’ with ‘can kill in self-defense, or maybe in defense of others, or maybe just because they want to’?
K’s earlier discussion with the lieutenant at his apartment implies that he could not refuse to have sex with her if she asked, but he would prefer that she didn’t ask. And one of the shorts showed Wallace ordering a replicant to commit suicide, and the replicant did so without delay or complaint. Certainly there was enough anti-skinjob hatred on display that a replicant would have a high likelihood of running into a human that would order the replicant to kill themself, just out of spite. Are they powerless to refuse all such commands? I suppose you could end the robot uprising pretty easily that way.
Wallace’s plan to have replicants reproduce biologically made no sense to me on its face. He can obviously make an adult replicant in a matter of days (he spins up a Rachel for Deckard pretty quickly), which beats a nine month gestation and multiple years of childrearing by a long shot, especially when you take into account the sunk costs of feeding a useless replicant child for the first few years (they go to work in the mines at 6 or 7, I suppose). Now, maybe his factory can only make 10,000 replicants a year and maybe it takes longer to build a new replicant factory than for an individual replicant to come to sexual maturity, etc. etc, but replicant pregnancy can’t possibly be the most efficient way to make fresh replicants. After all, they have to be cheap and quick enough to build currently that they are already “a disposable workforce”. What Wallace seems to really be doing is designing replacement humans to take over the universe. Like Elon Musk, he seems fixated on getting humanity off of Earth forever, and the current humans are too fragile to do it on our own. I think that Wallace expects that self-reproducing replicants would eventually escape and make his dream come true. Or maybe they’d enslave humans or exterminate humans, but humans2.0 spread across the galaxy would be just as good from his viewpoint.
Oh, and one other thing. Putting a code on one eyeball is cute, but even dumb old cars have the VIN in more than one place. Maybe both eyeballs and, heck, patterned all over the skin everywhere on the next series?
I was prepared to be a bit disappointed even after I saw that the movie was getting generally positive reviews, but while I have a few criticisms of Blade Runner 2049, I thought it was good overall and would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the original.
A lot of what I would have wanted to say has already been covered upthread. I am curious as to whether people think that Ana (Deckard and Rachel’s daughter) actually had a genetic disorder or if this was just a story to keep her away from people. When K realized that it was Ana, not him, who was the mysterious child, I thought “Oh, and that whole immunodeficiency thing is a cover!” But when the movie ended with Deckard’s hand on the glass, I took this to mean that he could never be fully reunited with his daughter – he could meet her, but never give her a hug or even a pat on the shoulder.
I saw upthread that Miller favors the cover story explanation, but at the moment I’m leaning towards Ana’s account of her childhood being basically true. She was adopted from the workhouse orphanage as a small child (presumably not long after hiding her toy horse, since she never retrieved it) and a few years later her new family was going to move to an off-world colony, but she had to stay behind after being diagnosed. I don’t think the movie gives us enough information to be sure either way, though.
Is it explained exactly why the new-model replicants are supposed to be more obedient than classic replicants?
Why not employ replicants to build more replicant factories? That would lead to exponentially increasing numbers of them pretty quickly.
They were able to read a clear serial number off the skeletal remains.
The prostitute’s retort was “I’ve been inside you. There’s less there than you’d think/There’s not much there/There’s really nothing there/Something like that.”
Would anyone like to weigh in onthe discussion Miller and I were having upthread? I remember that Luv and Wallace knew that there was a child of a replicant out there, and they specifically were trying to get her, presumably to learn how to make reproducing replicants. That’s why Wallace was trying to bribe Deckard with Rachel/going to torture him off-world. Miller believes that Luv and Wallace didn’t know about the birth. I asked my son today (he went with me to the movie), and he recalled Wallace was trying to find the offspring. What does anyone else recall?
I recall when K was ambushed in that junkyard, Luv called in an airstrike then as K lay stunned she said something like, “C’mon, idiot. Get up. Do your job. Find the child.” I’m not sure how you square that with not knowing about the birth. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the question.
If Wallace didn’t know Rachel had given birth *before *he had Luv steal her remains, he must have figured it out after he had the chance to examine her bones.
I don’t want to speak for Miller, but it looks to me like he was saying that Wallace and Luv knew that Rachel and Deckard had a child, but that they believed the child had been killed by K (since this was what K had told his Lieutenant). I don’t remember all the details well enough to say whether this is correct, but Luv continued to pursue K after killing the Lieutenant so she presumably thought he was likely to lead her to something she wanted.
They don’t explain why the new models are more obedient, Wallace just demonstrates it with the suicide command. I wonder if one replicant can do that to another?
The speed at which replicant populations grow from factories vs. pregnancy depends on starting assumptions. I suppose it’s possible that there isn’t enough of some critical resource to build even a second replicant factory on Earth, or on any of the marginal colony worlds. An individual semiconductor chip may be of vanishingly low cost, but the whole infrastructure needed to make them by the millions may have a substantial dollar value attached. Still, to prefer old fashioned reproduction is a long-term strategy, not a short- or medium-term one. It takes a few generations to really get your population exploding.
The skeletal serial number was a nice callback to the snake scale serial number, but the rebel series 8 replicant had only one eye, with the implication that she could evade easy detection that way. Obvious labeling should be obvious.
I think this film did a neat job of leaving Deckard’s status as human or replicant open, at least in the dialog. But plotwise, if Deckard really was a replicant, designed to bond with and reproduce with Rachel, then why wouldn’t Wallace just print out a new Deckard to go with his new Rachel and have them go at it, rather than presenting a new Rachel to an old Deckard? I suppose he might have been doing that in another room somewhere, and had nothing to lose by trying a Rachel out on old Deckard as well. If Wallace just learned the huge secret that a Rachel model can get pregnant, why waste one when old Deckard rejects her? Take her back to the lab and try to breed her with a K, or a Sapper, or a rando human, or whatever.
At one point Wallace rants about the replicant fertility technology being one of Tyrell’s innovations that presumably died with him, or the lab notebooks disappeared, and he has not been able to figure it out.
It would not matter if he cooked up a new replicant that looked/thought like Deckard or Rachel, since the problem was at a lower level and not a matter of programming.
Wallace’s Rachel can’t get pregnant. Wallace is seeking the secret to making fertile replicants, so any Rachel he provided before found that secret would be sterile. The ‘new’ Rachel just looked like the old one, it wasn’t a complete duplicate of the old one.
Ed: ninja’d
Replicants are property - which means they have monetary value. The people who own them aren’t going to want them to walk off with any random person who says, “Follow me,” nor are they going to want them to stand idly by while they get stomped to death by a mob. So, they’ve got to be able to put some nuance into the “obey” directive. Presumably, the directive allows for the concept of legal or lawful authority. They have to obey the person who owns them, or who has a legal right to order them around (such as the lieutenant), but not every random human they meet. As for not killing humans, there are military model replicants. Or at least, there were - Roy Batty in the first movie was a combat model. I don’t know if there’s any mention of newer combat models in the film, though.
It’s not the time, so much as the distance.
Replicants are cutting edge biotech - a replicant factory likely needs extensive existing infrastructure. Think how many subsidiary industries need to exist before a car factory can get started, for example - not just steel mills, but refineries, rubber plantations, glass makers, microchip foundries, etc. etc. Building a human being from scratch probably increases the number of necessary support industries exponentially. Until a colony is large enough to support that much industrialization, they need to ship a constant stream of replicants to the colony, both to replace damaged units, and to meet growing demand. And inter-planetary shipping is apparently really, really expensive.
Or you can just drop a thousand replicants off with some supplies, and let them grow their work force along with the rest of the colony. You could potentially seed thousands of planets this way in a very short (relatively speaking) time frame, just dumping replicant colonies on world after world, and letting them… well, replicate. The colonies that are successful will eventually start drawing human settlers.
I don’t think she removed her eye to avoid detection - I think she did it to fake her death. At the start of the movie, we see K collect Dave Bautista’s eyeball as proof that he’d completed the kill. The leader of the underground had her eye removed as part of some trick to make the police think she’d been killed.
I wasn’t arguing that Wallace never knew about the kid at all - for most of the movie, he absolutely does, and is actively trying to find it. I think that, when the lieutenant told Luv that K had killed the child, Luv (and by extension, Wallace) believed her. From that point on, Wallace is motivated by finding the rest of the replicant underground, which is why he kidnaps Deckard. But I could be totally wrong about that last point - I need to see the movie again to make sure.
I liked this a lot. It wasn’t quite as masterful as the original, but few films are. It’s still one of the better films I’ve seen in the past three or four years.
When was the suicide command shown? I didn’t get up for a bathroom break at all (though it sounds like they should have had a short intermission) but missed that.
That was so interesting to me. Instead of trying to square some of the false predictions of the original, they just went full alt-future. I want to know more about USSR 2049!
Ohhhh…I hadn’t thought of that! Great point.
I read a review that said the replicant Wallace killed was played by the same actor who played Luv, thus making it all the more understandable that she shed tears. But she didn’t look the same to me, and I can’t find the info anywhere. What do you guys think?