Blade Runner 2049: Seen it (Open Spoilers after the first post)

[Skammer]

@Cartooniverse

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.

Possibly - but still, that hair DNA wouldn’t have led him to the orphanage if the orphanage’s records had been changed to hide her.

[Lamia]

@Skammer

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.

No, the hair found with Rachel’s bones was apparently Rachel’s, and IIRC was never mentioned again after the forensics expert examined her remains.

K searched the records for children born around the time of Rachel’s death (going by the date carved on the tree) for anything abnormal. He found two records with identical DNA that were listed as belonging to a girl who had died and a boy who went off the grid. He realized that one of these records was just a copy of the other with the metadata altered, and assumed that the boy was Rachel’s child. I don’t remember the dialogue at this point, but something in the records presumably mentioned the orphanage.

[SlackerInc]

@Elendil_s_Heir

I think I have a new actress crush.

That’s how I felt, too–but then in Googling her afterward, none of the photos look anywhere near as hawt.

@DPRK

It is clear that the notion that replicants magically “obey” is corporate PR bullshit

You think? That short film, in which the replicant obeys the suicide order, suggests otherwise.

@brossa

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.

Yes, I think both these are well observed.

@Hypno-Toad

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!

Ha, true!

If I’m going to be nitpicky, I would think there would be others there already besides Deckard. Look at Chernobyl, for instance, where people snuck back in despite all warnings.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@steronz

…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…

You remember there were quite a few language mashups and corporate logos shown in the original BR, don’t you?

@Icarus

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”…

This thread may interest you: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=839081

@ISiddiqui

…The original film as well as this one has as a key principle that corporations are not our friends (from [Tyrell] 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.

Well said.

@ISiddiqui

…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…

Yes. Slavery and its monstrous moral toll is an underlying message of both BR movies.

@SuperNelson

This is more fantasy than speculation, but when the film ended, K was quietly dying on the steps of the one place that could plausibly capture his memories and re-implant them in another replicant, with or without editing them for convenience. This shows how deeply and thoroughly replicants were enslaved; they don’t even own their memories. And yet, the only possession that K seemed to value was Joi, a personality construct whose very existence and identity he controlled. Joi was K’s electric sheep.

Nice.

@brossa

…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?

Maybe, as in Minority Report, there’s a future black market in eyeballs…?

[Hypno-Toad]

Maybe K and other replicants are generally better than humans because they start off directly as adults without being taught evil. Even their bad memories are only implants and they know this. Luv has learned her evil at the knee of a Master.

[BlutEngel]

Loved it. Incredible visuals, and I actually dreamed about it after watching it - something that no movie has ever done to me.

I also thought they handled the “Is he or isn’t he?” debate really well.

I had to wonder how many people in this world are replicants? Seems that K was running into them all over the place.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Dropo

…The villainess clips a police lieutenant in LAPD HQ and no one notices? WTF?..

Yes, and the lab tech, too. That seemed pretty implausible to me.

@Miller

…Wallace has all those floating eyes that are plugged into his nervous system. I think that might have been an actual medical examination. Wallace was checking to see if his latest attempt to create a fertile replicant had worked, and then disposed of her when he found out that it hadn’t.

I wasn’t sure when I was watching the movie, but now I suspect you’re right. Monstrous.

@DPRK

…Why not employ replicants to build more replicant factories? That would lead to exponentially increasing numbers of them pretty quickly…

“So, robots building robots. Well, that’s just stupid.” - Will Smith, I, Robot

@brossa

…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 difference between machines and human beings is that human beings can be reproduced by unskilled labor.” - Arthur C. Clarke

@brossa

…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.

I think Wallace was trying to get Deckard’s willing cooperation. The Rachael (note spelling) 2.0 was the inducement.

@Miller

…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…

Sapper Martin (the worm farmer K retired in the first scene) was presumably a combat model, as was one of the replicants in the animated BR2049 short.

Sapper

@SlackerInc

…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?

IMDB doesn’t say it was, but it sure looked that way to me. Hence the tragedy of Luv seeing her “twin” murdered before her eyes and being powerless (or was she?) to prevent it.

@Measure_for_Measure

…I thought it was a vast improvement on the original release, which has a bad voice-over and tacked on ending. I can’t compare it to the Director’s cut or Final Cut (where they fixed those 2 issues), because I didn’t see them.

I kinda like the voiceover myself, but yes, it’s removed. In his later cuts of the movie, Scott also digitally removed the wires you can sometimes see the LAPD Spinners hanging from; digitally masked the stuntwoman with Zhora’s face as she crashes through the store display windows; added red to Deckard’s eyes in one of the apartment scenes to bolster his (inane IMHO) theory that Deckard was a replicant all along; used a new (and better) matte painting for the background when the dove flies away from Roy Batty on the rooftop; and ended the movie with Deckard and Rachael getting into the elevator.

@Dewey_Finn

…And as for it being a prequel, I thought I read that the reboot of the Alien franchise attempted to link the Weyland-Yutani and the Tyrell corporations.

Yup. The 1998 Kurt Russell movie Soldier is also meant to be in the same 'verse.

New Prometheus Material Confirms: Blade Runner and Alien Share a Universe! -...

https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-movies-anime/the-tyrell-weyland-connection/

Soldier (1998 American film)

@Lamia

I don’t think there’s much room to doubt that the replicants are sentient in the sense that they can perceive and feel, and Joi would probably pass a Turing test… we’re explicitly told this product promises “Everything you want to hear” and I don’t think there’s any clear indication that Joi could do otherwise.

My son and I thought for a long time that Joi might have been spying on K all along, eavesdropping in realtime for Wallace.

[DrDeth]

@Measure_for_Measure

ETA: I thought it was a vast improvement on the original release, which has a bad voice-over and tacked on ending. I can’t compare it to the Director’s cut or Final Cut (where they fixed those 2 issues), because I didn’t see them.

The voice over works fine if you have never seen the film before.

[SlackerInc]

Yes, I prefer it.

[TroutMan]

My perfect cut of the original would keep the voice over everywhere except the final scene with Roy. Excepting that, it’s good exposition and gives the movie a film noir feeling. The scene with Roy is the one place it’s unnecessary and detracts from the mood.

And completely remove the cheesy ending. End the movie with the elevator closing, as Scott did in the Final Cut.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Another change Scott made that I forgot (not really a spoiler): he corrected Bryant’s dialogue in the briefing scene as to how many escaped replicants there were: Six renegade replicants | Off-world: The Blade Runner Wiki | Fandom

[SlackerInc]

I could go with you on the Roy deal, but I love the snowy ending.

[DrDeth]

@TroutMan

My perfect cut of the original would keep the voice over everywhere except the final scene with Roy. Excepting that, it’s good exposition and gives the movie a film noir feeling. The scene with Roy is the one place it’s unnecessary and detracts from the mood.

And completely remove the cheesy ending. End the movie with the elevator closing, as Scott did in the Final Cut.

I like the ending. But yeah, the voice over in that bit was unneeded.

[SlackerInc]

@DrDeth

I like the ending. But yeah, the voice over in that bit was unneeded.

If someone makes a version with the voiceover removed only in that scene, they will have a couple customers! I suppose you could approximate it by switching discs at the appropriate moments.

[nicky]

Brilliant film

A couple of quibbles

If Vegas was habitable for Deckard, it would be habitable for other outlaws and desperadoes and looters.

It would have been good to glimpse a male Joi - she’s just one model among many.

One dislike: Wallace. It was unnecessary to make him a sick fuck. Id rather he was “only” a utilitarian megalomaniac - both admirable and abhorrent in his ambitions.

[SlackerInc]

I agree with your post, including the brilliance of the film but also the quibbles. One review said that Jared Leto seemed like he had not been advised as to the overall tone of the film and was acting as if he were in a different kind of movie altogether. This seems about right.

[Hypno-Toad]

@nicky

Brilliant film

A couple of quibbles

If Vegas was habitable for Deckard, it would be habitable for other outlaws and desperadoes and looters.

This makes me think about the scene in the first one where JF is telling Pris how he has the whole building to himself because there’s plenty of room. The implication being that everyone is heading off world so fast, the population is dropping. I guess by 2049 the population has bounced back to Malthusian levels, requiring synthetic farming. OR the earth is so ravaged that even the lower population is starving without Wallace’s farms.

[Omniscient]

So, I just fort back from the theater. Decided to see the movie on the big screen before it was too late. Came home and searched for this thread because I really needed to unwind some stuff.

First a couple quick comments based on discussions in this thread.

1. I’ve never felt that replicants are “programmed” in the sense that they are fully controllable or in any way limited. They are really just human clones that have been optimized genetically and their memories implanted and minds doctored to make them subservient. They aren’t AI.

2. Joi is in fact an AI, but she’s also not limited to just being a program. She too developed a personality and identity. She leaves the shop as a empty shell, but she builds memories and her AI evolves in a unique way. Her death was in fact real.

3. I’ve always thought the Deckard is a replicant theory was absurd and this film reinforced that thought for me. The mental gymnastics you need to do to close all the plot holes that creates is silly.

4. Fertile replicants makes a ton of sense as a strategy. Remember, sexual reproduction is exponential growth, manufacturing is linear growth. So while it might be cheaper and faster to double or triple production by making more factories, the only way to get to 100x production is through good old fashioned sex.

5. They list Sean Young in the credits for Rachel. My guess is that they used a body double and some good de-aging software for her superimposed face that scene. Came out slightly better than the GotG2 usage.

To the movie itself. I found it long, slow and loud in spots. That didn’t really bother me too much since I was prepared for the length and the “hard sci-fi” pacing. The loud moments seemed very intentional, so while it was jarring, I felt like I was supposed to be jarred.

There were a lot of plot holes and while I like a movie that doesn’t spell everything out for me, you can go too far and make a movie that is completely opaque. I think this movie came real close to that. One plot hole was the Vegas scene. If Vegas is radioactive and uninhabitable, so much so that all those valuables and booze don’t get at least plundered, then how the hell does Deckard survive there? This might argue in favor of him being a Rep, but that creates even worse plot holes. Plus, other replicants would show up here too if it’s safe for them.

There are a couple decent explanations of the 2 DNA copies from the records in this thread that seem solid, but you’re not figuring that out in movie. Seems to me like it was added on to help with the “K is the child” head fake while making the plot more confusing.

The horse memory being used in lots of Reps and K serendipitously finding it seemed all too convenient.

They really should have done a little more work to spell out how and why Ana was put in the bubble and how they get her that plum job. Seems like they put her pretty close to the threats if they really wanted her hidden.

Totally unclear why Deckard needed to “disappear” and how that really helped the cause. It doesn’t seem like anyone was looking for the child, or that anyone had any reasonable reason to think Deckard was the father. Why would he have been such a dangerous person to have around, it doesn’t seem like he knew anything really.

Also what exactly is the “cause”. Sure, the implication of the birth is obvious I guess, but what was the Resistance’s plan here? Just to keep her alive and secret? How does that help?

Wallace made no sense as a character. He was a cartoon. His motivations actually made some sense, but turning him into this weird, gratuitous villain made things way more confusing and lame. If he’d have been a plain ole greedy CEO running a conspiracy to track down this special prototype that ran off with Deckard years ago, that actually would have been relatable and allowed for some needed exposition.

Anyways, I enjoyed the movie as a theater going experience and I see the potential of this mythology, but it was kind of unsatisfying as a story. Which pretty much matches my opinion of the original.

[SlackerInc]

Omniscient, I agree with a lot of your points although I clearly liked the movie a lot more than you did.

On #4, I actually find that logic flawed if your corporation is actually trying to make money. Once replicants can reproduce, people don’t need to buy them from you. I guess the guy was more of a visionary (but I agree with you that his character was far from the best part of the movie).

The “cause” is, I guess, to learn how to reproduce from Deckard’s daughter, so replicants (at least the older models) can survive as a race.

[Hypno-Toad]

Wallace seemed to miss a very basic fact that the Lt. picked up on immediately. Replicants that can breed go from being servants to being competitors with humans. Manufactured replicants are inherently obedient. But would a natural-born replicant be obedient? And to whom? Its parents, replicant society, or human society? Maybe some combination of the three or even none at all. I can see why it would scare the Lt. Even if the replicants are totally non-hostile to humans, we’ve seen how humans react to such a perceived threat.