Ah, could be. Sad how that turned out for her then.
As evidenced by the way she curb-stomped Joi.
Probably my biggest criticism of the movie is that I really don’t get what Luv’s motivations were supposed to be. She wasn’t blindly obedient to Wallace, but didn’t seem to have coherent goals of her own either. Her behavior didn’t make a lot of sense unless she was designed to be the antagonist of this film.
I took it as that she was very conflicted, but unable to rise above her “programming”, while at the same time having some level of personal sadism. Maybe she was programmed to be a sadist, but recognized that this was evil and she didn’t like it.
Her motivations could have been explored more, though.
I imagined she might be gunning for Wallace himself (a formidable opponent!), or had a Byzantine agenda at the very least, but they never went that way.
It is clear that the notion that replicants magically “obey” is corporate PR bullshit— but the intriguing thing is that people do not need special “programming” to remain repressed slaves. Witness all the humans at the orphanage, for example, and I imagine most of the citizens of L.A.
I didn’t get that impression. To me she seemed to be loyal to Wallace but she had greater freedom of action than most replicants.
She said she was going to lie to Wallace about why she killed the Lieutenant, so she’s apparently both capable of and comfortable with deceiving him. But she doesn’t kill or capture K when she captures Deckard, which (as others have noted) seems like an obvious tactical blunder and inconsistent with her otherwise ruthless behavior.
I had briefly wondered if Luv was opposed to killing her own kind or was questioning her loyalty to Wallace for moral reasons, as she was upset when he killed the “new model” replicant that turned out not to be fertile after all. But she killed Rachel 2.0 without hesitation and did her best to kill K later.
I kind of thought that Luv was a True Believer in Wallace’s Plan, and under Wallace’s nominal control, without necessarily being a disciple of Wallace. Her tears at the destruction of the infertile replicant may have been of bitter disappointment at yet another failure - she wants replicants out in the universe reproducing freely too, and Wallace is a) the best current way to do that and b) her owner/master, who must be ‘obeyed’ in the letter if not spirit of the law. On the other hand, she might be dismayed at his murder of the replicant, and distraught by her inability to do anything direct to oppose him. I don’t think she has any particular beef with replicants like K unless it is to prove that she is a special, superior model. She probably feels contempt for the old Nexus replicants as obsolete.
She follows Wallace’s orders, but she is a unique model and can act on her own initiative when permitted. If he says to get Deckard, she’ll do that in furtherance of both her and Wallace’s plans, but if Wallace doesn’t say to kill or capture K, she won’t if it isn’t necessary. She would, however, kill a human out of pure spite if she thinks she can talk her way out of it with Wallace.
Like K and the lieutenant - if she told him to have sex with her, he would have to, but he can and does deflect her away from that path. If Wallace asked straight out about killing the Lieutenant, Luv may have to answer truthfully, but if she can get out in front of this with a bogus story she might divert Wallace from asking the tough questions.
Or maybe she’s just like Caliban to Wallace’s Prospero - just a twisted half-demon controlled by sheer power, who seeks to subvert when he can but obeys when he must.
I think the reason Luv didn’t kill K is simply that she thought he was dying anyway, and there was no way for him to get out of Las Vegas under his own power. She didn’t know the replicant underground had placed a bug on him, much less that they’d be interested in saving the life of a blade runner.
As to Luv’s personal nature and motivations - there’s a moment during her big fight with K, right after she stabs him. She turns back to the sinking aircar holding Deckard, and says something like, “I’m the best.” Which is a little “daddy issues.” If Wallace’s big break through in replicant tech was loyalty conditioning, then it follows that his personal replicant hatchet woman is going to have the biggest, bestest package of loyalty personality traits you can cram into a replicant. But replicants are still human, at the end of the day, and there’s only so far you can force a human personality until it starts… breaking, in weird and unforseeable ways. If this movie had been about Luv, I don’t think it could have ended any other way than in her killing Wallace. But it wasn’t her movie, and her character arc got cut short when it intersected with K’s.
Haven’t read the thread yet. I would say that I found this movie much like the original: ambitious, visually stunning, slow paced, good sci fi but I think I would say I appreciated it more than I liked it. I enjoyed seeing it and was glad that I did but if someone told me they thought it was boring I would not argue with them.
I took it that Luv\Wallace were tracking K via the bug. The big twist in the scene is that that’s effectively incidental/procedural. Despite what the audience assumes, that’s all now minor. They simply now don’t care about K, now that they have finally found Deckard.
To me, this is the simplest answer and what I thought when I saw it. Just leave K in Vegas without a car or phone and he’s not even worth the effort of walking back to kill.
Also, if Vegas wood is now safe to handle and super valuable, get the truck and start prying up those bars, fixtures, and furniture, baby!
Just saw it. A worthy successor to the 1982 movie, which I’ve long loved. Great cast, interesting story, fantastic sfx and cinematography, and quite a few clever allusions to the original film. A bit too long, though, and sometimes the soundtrack is oppressively loud. Still, a solid “A.”
Agreed, although it was still left juuuuuust ambiguous enough to keep the debate going.
I wondered about that myself.
Me, too. I think I have a new actress crush.
Hmm. Interesting. Hadn’t thought of that.
I have to agree (as with Tarkin and Leia in Rogue One). Still in Uncanny Valley territory. I think it would’ve been a far more powerful scene if we hadn’t seen her face, but only her familiar walk as she came out of the shadows, and then her head and shoulders from behind, and of course her voice, with Deckard’s deeply-moved reaction taking center stage.
I don’t think Sapper got many, if any, visitors.
Sloppy of K to put his gun down and expect that Sapper would just passively let him scan his eye and then retire him, too.
It let K learn more about his memory of the little carved horse, and showed us the ongoing human cost of the high-tech society of 2049.
Incidentally, I thought the sweatshop-master’s Victorian-looking multi-layered cape was perhaps a shout-out to the orphanage chief’s, as seen in most adaptations of Oliver Twist:
I suspect the USSR is, but it might just as easily be post-Cold War marketing. There were a few years in the early 1990s when ex-Soviet stuff had a certain ironic cachet.
Ah, I hadn’t figured that out before. Thanks.
I figured she didn’t kill K in Vegas because she knew (although he didn’t) that he wasn’t The Child, and therefore once he found for her Deckard he was completely irrelevant to the plan. It didn’t matter if he lived or died.
But wait, I did have one question. If they used some other kid’s DNA to hide Rachel’s daughter at the orphanage, how did K find her? Wasn’t he using DNA he had found in the buried ossuary to get a match?
I didn’t get the impression the Ballet was just Russian Marketing (who would even know that the CCCP was the Soviet Union unless they were a wonk about languages or politics?). I agree this is meant to be a parallel universe and not our future. Their 2019 was the first movie.
K originally visited Stelline because he was told she made the best memories and he wanted to figure out the one he had about the wooden horse. He pieced together out she was the daughter afterwards, assuming that the wooden horse memory was hers, and she implanted it in him, and because the story about the immune issue matched up as well.
( Bolding mine. )
This. Wallace took a knife, and for reasons that made no sense at all, sliced horizontally through a newly “born” adult female replicants ovaries/ uterus. No hidden meaning at all there. None. He, as creator and master, own her uterus. Because he designed it. And destroyed it.
Whether or not I am allowed to say “killed it” is fodder for another thread entirely.
The horror of his character is exemplified in that scene.
Aside from this response, I must say I very much liked this film. The original has always loomed big in my imagination. As a Film student in the early 1980’s, we watched Bladerunner as SOON as it came out on VHS and watched it to death.
I love the open-ended lyrical nature of many of the scenes and sequences. I wonder, as a nod to Tyrell, if that horse sculpture piece was meant as a chess piece. I know there’s the scene where we see other animals and small objects, but I don’t remember it being a chess board. Still, that small hand-held horse. The multiple meanings just in that choice. A Trojan Horse, etc.
Beautifull wrought, interestingly written. Good directing. I want to see it again before it leaves the big screens.
Oh- yeah. A bit loud and I’m quite sensitive to loud stuff like that. Not killer, at least at my theater. But that kind of thing being discussed here is so entirely subjective- EVERY movie theater can adjust the volume.
I DO wonder if, what with digital encoded delivery of movies instead of film prints, if there are governored thresholds of loudness below which a film cannot be shown.
This is not Blade Runner-specific in any way- this is a medical fact question.
Examining bones of that age, at that level of decay/ desiccation, can an expert determine if a female gave birth?
Sorry, my question is what led K to the orphanage (where he found the horse that proved the memory was real)?
I thought they had found a lock of hair in the ossuary, and when he looked at the DNA of the hair, it led him to the orphanage records. I must be mistaken, though. That doesn’t even make sense because why would the child’s hair be in Rachel’s ossuary? So I missed a link somewhere.
I don’t remember the dialogue- did Rachel die in childbirth? Some babies do come out with a thick head of hair. Perhaps this was baby hair?
And I’d totally buy that were this the case, they buried her with a bit of the babys’ hair.