Happy birthday, Roy! Sorry you have such a crappy life ahead of you.
Oh wow. Hadn’t seen that. Thanks! What a fun thing to connect the dots on.
Such a brilliant movie. Has cast a huge shadow.
I knew that this was coming up, but I somehow had the idea it wasn’t until next week. Sorry, Roy.
One thing I don’t understand is that since it’s expected the Nexus-6 could become dangerously unstable after four years, they built in a four-year lifespan. Why not play it safer and have a 3.5-year lifespan? It’s clear that a replicant in the last weeks of passionate life can do quite a lot of damage.
Crappy life?? Come on, he’ll get to see things you people wouldn’t believe.
Come to think of it, who in the right mind would consider a limited lifespan to be a viable safety mechanism? Can you imagine Apple saying “The new iPhone can overheat and explode after 800 charge cycles, so we’ve designed in a safety mechanism: it shuts down permanently after 2 years.”
It’s still a brilliant movie though.
I simply took it as an illustration of how the Replicants were viewed as Tools, not Beings. It could’ve been that they have to do a mind-wipe and reset to avoid chaotic behavior over time, but the end date fed the drama better in this case.
It occurs to me that there is, in fact, a Nexus-6 Android (phone) available today. (Though I believe it’s been discontinued.)
I guess this means Roy never got to meet Marty McFly.
Really? Like what?
That means we only have four years until the flying cars and bored Harrison Ford narration.
He’ll know adventures, see places you people will never see, He’ll be Offworld and back…frontiers! He’ll stand on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in his eyes watching the stars fight on the shoulder of Orion. He’ll feel wind in his hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and see an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. He’ll see it… and feel it!
Well, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, for a start.
I suspect that 4 years isn’t a point where it’s guaranteed to happen. Rather, it’s a bell curve and 4 years is the trade off between cost and risk of insanity. Maybe only 1% of them go insane before 4 years. By 5 years, it’s 20% by 6 years it’s 50% and so on. So their real thought process is exactly the one you’re following: “If 50% of them go insane at 6 years, we’ll play it safe and set their lifespan to 4.” If the insanity calculation is a true bell curve, then there’s some non-zero chance that one will go insane at only 1 year, so there would be no limitation of life span that gives you perfect safety.
first Back to the Future catches up with us, and now Bladerunner.
What I want to know is – Where is my damned Flying Car?
they were in both movies. I don’t need replicants, or self-fitting clothes, or Jaws 19. But I want my goddamned Flying Car.
I’d settle for a Hoverboard.
A REAL Hoverboard, not a Two-Wheeled Lithium Firetrap.
Uh, I’ll take a Pris replicant if we’re placing orders.
Exactly! It’s not like Blade Runner was any kind of utopian vision, but I wanna know why all our technical advances have gone to coming up with new ways of consuming LOL cats and none towards flying cars and murderous replicants. Or talking blimps. That was pretty cool too.
When I first saw this movie, 2016 seemed unimaginably distant and cool. Little did I know it would be all conference calls and spreadsheets and RFPs.
I guess you can get the umbrellas though, so not all’s lost.
Uh, Lobohan, you know she’ll probably kill you, right?
And C-beams! Don’t forget the C-beams!
You know, I did forget.
I guess my memories have all became lost, in time.
Like tears.
In the rain.