So I have tried to watch the new one. And there’s a few massive flaws with this universe that just jump out at me :
a. The whole Replicant/murdering them to dispose of them. Look, if the Replicants didn’t look exactly like humans and/or were purposefully made different or all mental clones of each other, I could sort of understand society allowing this. But in the Blade Runner universe, I simply can’t suspend disbelief. Ordinary people would be defending the Replicants, they are far too much like real people, and either the government would have made murdering them illegal, the government would have been deposed, or we’d have Civil War 2. Certainly nobody would allow “Blade Runner” killers to walk around, they’d be getting shot in the streets and their killers jury nullified.
b. A lot of the dialogue that’s supposed to be “deep” just feels like incoherent noise. I don’t see any art and the whole technology for verifying a Replicant’s personality seems worthless. It’s not how you’d do it. If you wanted to check a replicant’s programming you’d do it by hashing files stored in a chip in their head and/or checking an error log.
It might help to realize that replicants aren’t robots. You can’t check the hash of their files on a chip, because they don’t have files or chips. They’re biological constructs, engineered humans modified to be suited for their tasks.
As for how they’re treated, we’ve treated other humans like that at various points in the past.
When? This Quora post suggests that we didn’t in fact do this to slaves.
And the slaves looked different. The Replicants are made to look and act exactly like the majority population of the very city they are in. And then Ryan Gosling’s character isn’t some grey market quasi-legal bounty hunter, he works directly for the LAPD.
American chattel slavery is not the only form of slavery ever practiced. Other slaveholding societies have, in the past, done such things as give their youths annually free rein to murder their slave underclass (who were the same physical appearance as themselves more-or-less, unlike American Black slaves). So nothing depicted in BR is out of the bounds of historical models.
I don’t know this movie well, so maybe I misunderstood, but I thought the problem was the Replicants were neurologically unstable, and inevitably flipped out after a few years, going on a massive spree killing or something equally horrific. I think public opinion would be very much against them. Though I kind of had the impression that it was all supposed to be a bit of a secret anyway.
No. Replicants had a lifespan of only a few years, either through planned obsolescence or through limitations to the technology of building them. The reason replicants sometimes killed was because they resented being slaves, not because of neurological instability. (Although it could be argued that it would make sense to build them to not mind being slaves, but maybe that degree of personality control was beyond the state of the art.)
The gist was, I gathered, that the company could program in simulated emotional responses, but in their quest for constant improvement, the Nexus-6 model was sufficiently advanced that after about four years, the replicants would begin to form their own emotional responses, thus becoming unpredictable and, in all likelihood upon becoming aware of their slavery, resentful and rebellious. Hence… four-year lifespan. I’m guessing demand for labour in the off-world colonies was sufficiently high that public opinion could tolerate this, though replicants remained illegal on Earth itself.
The Rachel prototype was an effort to get around this - copy the memories of a known-stable human donor and imprint them on the Nexus-6 brain, in the hopes the replicant will enjoy long-term stability.
I have not yet seen the sequel and don’t know if it retcons, ignores or expands on any of this.
The reason for the Voight-Kampff test was to show that Replicants were getting to be “more human than human”. If you could only tell the difference by an extremely subtle test, then maybe there really wasn’t a difference after all. This was the central tenant of the film. Roy was in some ways more human than the human* Deckard. If Deckard deserved to live, why not Roy and Zhora and Pris and Leon?
Now, in fact the Replicants were observably tougher, could tolerate sticking a hand in boiling water for example. In reality that means there were other ways to determine if one was a Replicant. Asking everyone to stick their hand in boiling water might be a bit much, but there must have been something that would work.
And, in the same universe, the fake snake had a serial number embedded in each (?) scale, so the technology was there to do the same to the humanoid Replicants. You should have been able to just take a skin sample. Or use a DNA test.
But that would have made it impossible to tell the story they wanted. And Roy could never have made the greatest dying speech in cinematic history, and we would have been diminshed for having missed it.
*None of this director’s cut crap. Deckard was human, Get over it.
They did. Many an online petition was signed. Other claimed there wasn’t enough ‘representation of marginalized communities’ in replicants and wouldn’t sign until POC were getting replicated.
Or…you can also reference the photographs of the Replicants they were reviewing in the police station. I don’t know why they needed fancy Voight-Kampff machines. They knew what the Replicants looked like.
Replicants were emotionally immature, as they are “born” full grown and don’t have an adult’s accumulation of memories and experiences to reference. Over time, they could develop ideas and motivations of their own (like murdering their creators and escaping), which was one of the reasons for the short lifespan.
That was one of the reasons the Nexus-7 (i.e. Rachel) and later models were given artificial memories.
Observably, we’ve not seen the boiling water trick. I think we soy Roy stick his hand into liquid nitrogen, which began to boil where it contacted his body heat.
The replicant situation shown in the movie seems quite plausible to me. They’re useful so we’d build them. But then we’d resent them for being better than us. And the fact that they look like people would make us paranoid. And then some politicians would see a path to power by leading an anti-replicant movement.
