Bladerunner - I missed the hints? (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
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[QUOTE=dropzone]
Yep! Don’t think of this as yet another crappy Dick story but an instance where someone turned a crappy Dick story into a far-deeper movie. News to All! Philip K. Dick was shitty author! If you keep this in mind it will simplify analyses for literature classes you take in the future.
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Well… and mind you, this is from someone that read a bunch of his stuff when I was 11-14 (~12 years ago) and can’t remember any of it… I think it’d be more fair to say he has great (main) ideas, but the actual execution tends to fall short of the potential. Great source for movie ideas and other adaptations, in my opinion.

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Like I said, a source of movie ideas but full of shit if you, an intelligent person, think about what he says.

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one point to his being a replicant that seems to have been missed.

he could have been created AFTER Rachel, with the memory implants there is no reason he coulndt be a shiny new model created to deal with the threat of 4 skin jobs landing on earth. and the chief and Gaff are just feeding him lines about how long they have all worked together. hell his memories could have come from the cop who got shot by Leon.

it makes for an interesting twist. but I still like not knowing for sure.

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Anyone given the Voight-Kampff test to Ridley Scott?

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[QUOTE=Critical1]
one point to his being a replicant that seems to have been missed.

he could have been created AFTER Rachel, with the memory implants there is no reason he coulndt be a shiny new model created to deal with the threat of 4 skin jobs landing on earth. and the chief and Gaff are just feeding him lines about how long they have all worked together. hell his memories could have come from the cop who got shot by Leon.

it makes for an interesting twist. but I still like not knowing for sure.
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At that point you may as well speculate that everyone in the movie is a replicant. Besides, if Deckard was specifically created for this, would Tyrell have to know about it? Why waste all that time interviewing Rachel and such. Doesn’t Tyrell want Rachel to get VKed in part to show off his shiny new toy and in part to test the memory-implanted Nexus 6 under tough conditions? And why is Deckard, presumably the latest model, physically weaker than any of the escaped replicants?

Maybe the movie doesn’t actually exist. We only think it does.

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[QUOTE=Vinyl Turnip]
Anyone given the Voight-Kampff test to Ridley Scott?
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He works in Hollywood. Of course he lacks a soul.

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[QUOTE=Scumpup]
Deckard may not display elevated strength like Batty, but he sure does display some more than human durability during the course of the movie. He not only survives some pretty savage beatings, but is still able to function nearly normally afterward.
.
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“Indiana Jones” “Die Hard”, or are they replicants too? :dubious: :stuck_out_tongue:

68

It’s a twist I never cared for personally. “Robot-hater turns out to a robot himself” strikes me as one of the more hoary and creaky sci-fi tropes, along with “It was Earth all along!” and “God/Jesus/Adam&Eve were really aliens.” I could do without it in a movie I otherwise enjoy very much.

I prefer the idea that the replicants are more “human” in their emotions and desire for life than the soul-deadened people of the Bladerunner world, including our hero Deckard. That’s the interpretation I’m sticking to.

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[QUOTE=dropzone]
Like I said, a source of movie ideas but full of shit if you, an intelligent person, think about what he says.
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I guess that’s the problem with a lot of science fiction short stories, nice ideas but not much of a story.

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On the Deckard-is-a-Replicant thing, there’s the bigger problem of “Who would care enough?”

Think this through: does Tyrell really care? No. He can’t help the replicants and he’s not going to go through a huge rigamarole to try to. Why would he? He has no idea what the replicants want and they’re goong to die soon anyway. He can probably look up and find out very nearly the exact dates of their deaths.

Does the government really care? Why? They may want to hunt down the replicants, but why would they go to the mess of making one themselves and unleashing it? If they were all that concerned about casualties they wouldn’t send out cops solo to do interviews with extremely dangerous suspects with no reason to surrender. These are not people who worry overmuch about a few random killings.

Moreover, they would have had to manufacture a bunch of memories, plop them together, put Deckard together, raise him to adulthood and pump him full of knowledge, including things like the local area and where to go to eat and how to take a dump, and then unleash him, blindly hoping that his “memories” will somehow lead them to the replicants. Oh yeah, they didn’t really send any backup, so hopefully he can kill them all himself.

Seriously, “Deckard-is-a-Replicant” this only makes sense if everyone on earth is a replicant already and they’re just making the babies in test-tubes from the get-go.

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[QUOTE=smiling bandit]

Seriously, “Deckard-is-a-Replicant” this only makes sense if everyone on earth is a replicant already and they’re just making the babies in test-tubes from the get-go.
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nah it makes more sense from the Ridley Scott wants to make some more money off his movie so he stirs up a crapload of controversy about one of the greatest sci-fi flicks ever around the time its getting a big rerelease.

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[QUOTE=Lemur866]
The point isn’t that Deckard is a replicant or that Deckard is a human. The point is to make you think about what it would mean if Deckard were a replicant? What would it mean if Deckard were human? Deckard is either a human who might as well be a replicant, or he’s a replicant that might as well be a human, and the ambiguity is the point, not the answer.
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I saw the final cut last weekend, and I agree with this. The implicit question “Are you sure you’re human?” means more than knowing for sure either way.

He hunts down replicants remorselessly, as if he was a machine, and when he was about to plummet to his death, Rutger Hauer saves his ass. Why would machine do that? Right there, the known machine beat the Voight-Kampff test. Can you say he’s not human if hat’s the criteria by which you judge them?

It’s more important that the line is blurred. Deckard could be a replicant… or not. But in the big picture, does it matter? Does it matter if Rachel learned to play piano or was programmed? She plays beautifully with feeling either way. At what point have you achieved “humanity”.

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[QUOTE=Swallowed My Cellphone]
I saw the final cut last weekend, and I agree with this. The implicit question “Are you sure you’re human?” means more than knowing for sure either way.

He hunts down replicants remorselessly, as if he was a machine, and when he was about to plummet to his death, Rutger Hauer saves his ass. Why would machine do that? Right there, the known machine beat the Voight-Kampff test. Can you say he’s not human if hat’s the criteria by which you judge them?

It’s more important that the line is blurred. Deckard could be a replicant… or not. But in the big picture, does it matter? Does it matter if Rachel learned to play piano or was programmed? She plays beautifully with feeling either way. At what point have you achieved “humanity”.
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Yep, agreed. The story has much more impact if Deckard is fully human; the invitation to compare his affect-less, spiritless existence with the lives that Hauer’s battle-bot is fighting for, and that Rachel has always thought she remembers, is compelling.

Of course, if he *is * a replicant . . . then we have to wonder what kind of replicant is he? Is he an older model, somewhere between machine and the more-fully human type that Rachel seems to be, or is he the “next” generation - so fully evolved, so human-like, that he has taken the leap toward the fully human characteristics of depression, ennui, and ironically mechanical existence?

If he’s human, the story is poignant, in that he finally embraces his humanity in the arms of Rachel, for however long they get. If he’s a replicant, it’s ironic, in that he has completed the circle, realizing Tyrell’s dream of creating androids that are just as emotionally and spiritually dead as the rest of humanity.

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[QUOTE=Genghis Bob]
Yep, agreed. The story has much more impact if Deckard is fully human; the invitation to compare his affect-less, spiritless existence with the lives that Hauer’s battle-bot is fighting for, and that Rachel has always thought she remembers, is compelling.
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Don’t you think the story has more impact if your embrace the ambiguity? There IS no difference between a Nexus 6 replicant and a human being. They are, in fact, “more human than human.” That’s what’s so funny about this debate-- whether or not Deckard is a replicant is functionally a moot point. It’s an academic question, a distinction without a difference. That’s why the movie is so great, that it makes this point in such a profound way, yet it seems like so many people don’t get that. Arguing about whether or not Deckard is a replicant is missing the genius of the film. I wish Ridley Scott had just kept his mouth shut about it.

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[QUOTE=Rubystreak]
I wish Ridley Scott had just kept his mouth shut about it.
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Now THAT’S an idea I can get behind!

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[QUOTE=Rubystreak]
Don’t you think the story has more impact if your embrace the ambiguity? There IS no difference between a Nexus 6 replicant and a human being. They are, in fact, “more human than human.” That’s what’s so funny about this debate-- whether or not Deckard is a replicant is functionally a moot point. It’s an academic question, a distinction without a difference. That’s why the movie is so great, that it makes this point in such a profound way, yet it seems like so many people don’t get that. Arguing about whether or not Deckard is a replicant is missing the genius of the film. I wish Ridley Scott had just kept his mouth shut about it.
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Oh, I *do * embrace the ambiguity. That’s the (clumsy) point of my post - noodling with the ramifications of both assumptions is part of the fun associated with the uncertainty. It’s part of our humanity that we want to bring some kind of “closure” to the question, and we can spend endless hours worrying at it, arguing about it, posting about it . . .

But you’re absolutely correct. At his death, Roy is as fully human as Deckard has ever been, and for most of his life, Deckard has been as flat as any mechanism. We’re forced, in a way that Deckard never seems to have done, to examine for ourselves what it really means to be human.

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[QUOTE=Rubystreak]
Don’t you think the story has more impact if your embrace the ambiguity?
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Yes, exactly, but that ambiguity is undermined with Ridley Scott going “Bah…blah… blah… Of course he’s a replicant! Blah… blah… blah.” The weanie!

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[QUOTE=Rubystreak]
Don’t you think the story has more impact if your embrace the ambiguity?
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I do think it’s much better if you embrace the ambiguity. That’s why I like the “hints” (as asked for in the title) that suggest Deckard *might *be a Replicant. Of course they’re not proof, they’re not unambiguous. I like that about them. But they are there, waiting, lurking, adding to the ambiguity. And there are several of them, not just the unicorn that’s most often talked about.

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[QUOTE=WhyNot]
I saw the recent Final Cut, so my answers are limited to that (as mentioned in previous threads, I slept through every other version). Before that, I knew that there was a “debate” about the movie and whether or not someone was a Replicant, but I thought it was about Rachel. After the movie, I still couldn’t accept that the debate is about Deckard. These are the “obvious” clues in the movie that led me to the conclusion that Deckard is a Replicant:

First, the glowing eyes. Each Replicant’s eyes are shown as glowing yellow, and Deckard’s eyes glow yellow.
So you might disagree, but there are a lot more “clues” than simply the unicorn.
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What scene was that? I watched Final Cut as well and I specifically watched for this? Did I blink?

For a long time I thought something for a clue that Deckard is human was the fact that he eats and drinks. When Rachel is over to his place the first time he offers her a drink and she basically says nothing. Refuses by not accepting. He offers her a drink, and practically orders her to drink many times. Even when Daryl Hanna first tricks her way into Sebastian’s she doesn’t eat or drink. You would think she would be hungry with her act. Anyway this is blown when Roy shows up at Sebastian’s and takes stuff from the fridge and Darryl Hanna drinks.
Zohra and the Daryl Hanna replicants are switched up. Clearly DH is the kick squad assaign. But the images are switched up at the beginning.
but let’s face it. Blade Runner, in any incarnation is not a carefully made, or re-made, film that can be debated like this. We can dissected it all we want, we will never find the answer. Ridley Scott will then say that’s how he meant it to be.

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[QUOTE=Zebra]
What scene was that? I watched Final Cut as well and I specifically watched for this? Did I blink?
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Um…er…I don’t remember exactly…only that it was in a scene with Rachel at Deckard’s apartment. (Remember, I’m not an avid fangirl, just someone who recently saw The Final Cut as just another movie.) But a googlesearch shows lots of results saying it’s when Deckard is washing up and tells Rachel he won’t go after her, but someone will.

It was quick. I’m not sure if a blink would have missed it, but looking into your box of Raisinetes to get the mutant triplet Raisinete out the opening would have.