g.man wrote:

I saw that, but then why is Deckard the only person there, in an entire city?

Did you miss the bit about environmental collapse in the mid 2020s? Vegas isnt the most hospitable place ouside of artificial means even today, so perhaps it was uneconomic to repopulate a desert-bound city that got hit by a dirty bomb. That's not a contrivance.

I keep thinking about it and the discussions on it.
The conclusion I have come to is the film is a load of old nonsense and we have all been fooled into thinking it is somehow intelligent because it has slow dialogue delivery and is called Blade Runner and isn't as obviously fucking stupid as Jurassic World.

A lot of people are assuming they made this knowing if would be a cult hit that would make its money back over time but actually the production company bet the house on this, hoping they could turn it into a big franchise.

g.man wrote:

While we're at it, why does the wooden horse have a radioactive signature that matches Vegas anyway? When was his daughter ever there? Deckard isn't meant to have ever seen the child iirc?

Was thinking about this while walking the dog.
Two conclusion I came to, both are a bit shit.

1. Rachael was in Vegas with Deckard while Preggers. She took/was given the horse on leaving before giving birth.
Then someone else carved the date on it.

2. Deckard heard of the birth and the date. Found the kid and gave them the horse. Lied to K for no reason.


The bigger questions are how this miracle child was lost to a child labour camp?
Who tore out the the pages from the records?
What morons thought this was going to make Avengers money?

Having said that, and I know it would be a travesty, I’d be up for them trying to make a video game in this world. Open-world but you’ve got eg 10 colossi rogue replicants to track down in any order. Flying car, cool gun, good coat, job done. It would ruin the source material but it would be a game so it wouldn’t matter.

If my secret santa says anything negative about Bladez I'm sending an origami figure in the shape of poo made of poo.

Place a delicate flower in traction engine. OK.

It isn't ambiguity it is piss writing.
Load of old shite for a film.

No it is guff.
Projected intelligence on a dumb movie.

More modernist than brutalist, I’d say.

I love the word ‘brutalism’ as everyone, entirely unsurprisingly, presumes that it’s the noun form of brutal and so uses it for any building that seems to eschew elegance (which is something that many brutalist buildings do), when in fact the word is derived from the French word for ‘raw’, from the phrase ‘raw concrete’ (béton brut).

It’s bare concrete, but finished. To my understanding, if it was brutalist it wouldn't have been so smooth.

No need at all for his character to be blind. That and the flying eye cameras were daft additions and distracted from what could have been a properly chilling performance.

I think it is.

They said in the film that those that could afford it left earth I believe.

It's a wasteground for the poor, abandoned by those that could long ago.

Wallace made that possible, which made his fortune, and probably gave him leeway with replicants - being seen as a savour of human kind of sorts - and I imagine he saw that as his role.

Anyway, from what I remember the original had a pretty poor basic noir detective story.
Nothing like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Visually is was great and groundbreaking.

So visuals and sound were great, but that's it for me.

Little depth, and a pretty basic/superficial treatment of the ideas expounded by Philip K Dick.

Poor story.

Wasn't keen on the acting either.

So, don't really know why the plot of the sequel is being picked apart when it seems substantially better to me - and closer to the novel.

The atmosphere and visuals are great too. And the acting this time is actually decent.

I presume people that love the original didn't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep first, otherwise I'd expect them to be disappointed.

Philip K Dick is my favourite author, and I think this is the only film based on one of his stories that I've really enjoyed.

The original, paycheck, adjustment bureau, mintority report and even a scanner darkly were all disappointments for me.

Anyway, the plot isn't there to be picked apart - I think the idea is to enjoy the atmosphere/visuals - and general feeling while thinking about the ideas presented. Having slow shots and slow dialogue helps with that.
It's not meant to be tightly written, just absorbed in almost a trance.
It's that visual poetry thing I'm really into.

So I thought it was great.

You're kidding right?

He wrote to eat. He lived most of his life poor, so wrote novels quickly so he could feed himself.

He was horse lover fat. Can't remember if he actually ate horsemeat from a can when times were really hard, or if that was a joke, but yeah he wrote quickly.

You don't read a Philip K Dick novel for tight prose. You read it despite its prose, for the concepts, the ideas, the prophetic vision.
Also, there's something to be said for having novels be accessible and easy to read.

Anyway, Philip K. Dick is placed no less than 14 times in the SF Masterworks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is number 4.

He's an award winning author and widely seen as a visionary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Awards_and_honors

He wrote deeply introspective, philosphical pieces, in the form of easily accessible pre cyperpunk science fiction.

I don't want to sound like a ranting fanboy but it's a bit of a travesty that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep doesn't seem to be mentioned once in the thread other than referenced in the title.

Most of his novels had one neat central concept.

What if time ran backwards?

What if you could predict crime before it happened?

etc.

But then rather than go the obvious route, he used that a base to explore the nature of reality, consciousness, a paranoid delusional approach to what is real and not. Questioning existence.

That's generally why the films are so different, as it's difficult to tackle that, and people tend to go the easy/lazy/more accessible route.

He didn't take stories in an obvious direction, he tended to go somewhere else entirely.

Anyway, if you like either of the films it's well worth reading if you haven't already (or have), it's only 274 pages:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Androids-Dream-Electric-Sheep-MASTERWORKS-ebook/dp/B003FXCSNQ/

Some reviews give some useful quick insight:

I have seen the film 'Blade Runner' many times over the years, in it's many variations, and always loved it. The visuals set the standard for all science fiction films that followed, and it seems to create our vision of what the world would look like in the future. But I never got round to reading the book that was the inspiration for all this; until now.
Well, where to begin? As others have pointed out, the book is clearly the inspiration for the film, but the film is clearly not a close adaptation of the book. They are so different that you can really treat them as two separate entities. The world that the book is set in is completely different from that envisaged in the film; it is a dying, decaying place; fit only for the dregs of society; those with nowhere else to go. It is not the glowing, colourful world of the film.
The basic premise of the story remains similar, but virtually everything else changes. The book is more ambiguous, more thoughtful, asks the reader questions without supplying all the answers. The characters are substantially different as well. Deckard is less heroic than in the film, more uncertain, and the androids are altogether simpler beings, almost one-dimensional, and I don't mean by this that they are badly written, I think this was quite deliberate on the author's part.
Overall, the book is a great read. I have to admit that if you have seen the film, you cannot help letting that colour your mind while you are reading. However, the book is still definitely worth trying; it will make you think.

First bold bit shows how Blade Runner 2049 better fits the vision of the novel.

That's cyberpunk.

It's typical for novels to be deeper than the films based off them, but that's especially the case here.

Anyway, I think the majority in the thread actually think the story of Blade Runner is poor, it's the visuals and sound that did it for them.

Well the visuals and sound of the sequel are fantastic.

Obviously it's not ground breaking visually, as it's not the first, but I wonder how they stack up in a comparison.

As for the aesthetic of Blade Runner, it's straight out of a classic William Gibson novel - e.g. Neuromancer.

From what I remember of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner 2049 is a much better fit.

It didn't disappoint, while all other adaptations have. So I think that says something for the movie.

I felt like I watched the most fabulous opera that moved me through its sound and visuals, then I forgot to applaud at the end because I didn't realise it had finished.
I experienced br2049. Its so filmy and experiency and everyone is really good in their roles but for goodness sake it left so many things unfinished.

When the credits came up, I think people were expecting another 20 minutes. People sat there looking around as the lights came up.

acemuzzy wrote:

...when Luv was fighting in the water, she said something like "I'm the last one".  It felt like that was hinting at something I didn't quite get.

I think she said 'I'm the best one'.