superflyninja wrote:

Nawwwwwh. Wallace would set up replicant farms. Keep that green coming in.

Also possible, but I don’t think reproduction is a genie that can be kept in a bottle. Once replicants can breed, the cat’s out of the bag. They’re off. Multiplying like rabbits.

He could keep innovating though. Improvements on the species. You want a stronger replicant? Military spec with night vision and super strength? That’ll be 100 times the price, and it’s neutered. No breeding for you.

I dunno.

Wallace already saved humanity once, with his ‘farming methods’, whatever they were. Farming grubs for protein, by the looks of it. Money from that is what enabled him to buy up Tyrell Corp and expand on their research. He didn’t invent replicants, he reverse-engineered the Tyrell ones. He still doesn’t understand how Tyrell made them fertile, and that’s his grand frustration.

I saw Wallace as an exaggeration of the tech industry figureheads we have around us now. Zuckerberg, Page, Musk, Gates, etc …

voices wrote:

I thought it was interesting how the pleasure bot looked down on the AI - "I've been inside you, there's not as much there as you think". At least I liked how they didn't dwell on that aspect, but it was there.

Same here. There was a clear pecking order established. Humans looked down on replicants looking down on AI. That's a clear allegory for class division. Set the middle class against the poor and the rich can get away with everything.

Re: Wallace being artificial, in the BR2036 short he manages to get a Nexus 8 on Earth, which suggests if he was a replicant it would be in his power to go undetected. But then what model of replicant would he be? If he was a Nexus 6 his lifespan would have long ended by 2049. He can't be a Nexus 8 because that's the model he made. The other alternative would be Nexus 7 like Rachael and maybe Decker but then you're getting into the realm of does he even know he's a replicant etc.

Or...exposition is tedious and writers trust the viewer enough not to be spoon feed them every detail or allow for know-it-alls to nit pick points they don't like or understand.

bad_hair_day wrote:

Or...exposition is tedious and writers trust the viewer enough not to be spoon feed them every detail or allow for know-it-alls to nit pick every point they don't like or understand.

This also, yes. I rambled but was the point which I didn't get across.

And such was in the first and is still discussed to death today, hence why is the original brilliant due to that but this not so much.

I live for ambiguous cinema though, Evolution is a film that tells you nothing whatsoever and that is its brilliance.

Sapper could have been the go between, the horse was one of many items transferred between Deckard and Rachel. There are loads of ways the horse could have got there, but I'm not really arsed that they chose not to explain it as it's not important to the story.

Whether or not the AI has gained true sentience is though, and has to be kept ambiguous to tie in with the overall theme of the films.

Booked in to see this at 8:50pm - 2D Imax. Going on my own. Fuck it.

The Imax near me is the only one in town that I know of. We have an Odeon which also might have it. Not sure about the rest of NI.

2D IMAX is best for pretty much everything.

I went to a normal VUE screen but has that Sony sound system they do, the audio was insane, probably the best thing about this film.

If I'm honest I didn't really notice it.

Finally saw this last night.  I thought it was very good, though maybe not quite excellent.  (Which, for what it's worth, is pretty much my view of the original.)  

Gripes first.  It's too long - for the first 90 minutes I was completely rapt, but then the finale felt too drawn out.  I felt that a few things were too heavily sign-posted or explained.  Repeatedly cutting to Bautista for instance, or the laboured reveal of the horse.  Leto was awful.  Many of the ideas were, for my money, made much more explicit, and more clearly spelt out, in a way that not so much removed ambiguity (there's still loads) as went "look at this!  Think about it!  Oooh, isn't this amibiguous" rather than letting me work it out for myself.

On the other hand, I liked it.  I felt that it fair teemed with ideas, each of which would make a fine film in and of itself.  Each is, appropriately for a sequel, an expansion upon ideas in the original, but no longer obscured by the "is Deckard a replicant?" question which seems to have taken over any debate about the ideas in the first film.  So we have the inevitable questions about what it means to be alive - not just the replicants, but also the AIs.  Questions about love - does the AI love K, or does it just say and do what it know he wants it to do?  Does the difference matter?  Some subtle stuff about gender, and less subtle stuff about class and discrimination. etc etc etc.  I predict a whole slew of earnest essays from film students.  

I confess I've only briefly skimmed the thread, but picked up on a few  things people took issue with.  I didn't have a problem at all with the notion of them having a kid.  I think once you've accepted the idea of replicants, then the issue of them having kids isn't a big jump.  If they're really indistinguishable from humans without resorting to the Voightt-Kampff test, then obviously they have fully functional reproductive organs et al.  (Otherwise that opening scene in the original where Leon is interviewed could have been replaced with a guy saying, "just jizz in this cup will you?")  Besides - reproduction is literally the only pre-requisite for being considered "alive" that the original replicants didn't fulfil (and maybe growth) - so it's sort  of inevitable that a sequel would address the question of reproduction, and the idea that this vindicates for the replicants the notion that they are valid living creatures.

I also liked the stuff about control - that this new batch of replicants are considered not to be an issue because they can be readily controlled, and yet it gradually becomes clear that this is an illusion at best.  First K goes of the rails, then it becomes clear that Luv is doing her own thing as well - then finally it emerges that there's a whole underground army of self determining replicants.  

So, yeah, I liked the ideas in here a lot, and actually think a lot of it is a Hell of a lot more thought through than people seem to give it credit for.  I'm slightly more ambivalent about the way in which they kept Deckard's true nature uncertain.  (The conversation with Gaff was literally taunting those who've debated  it since the original - "there was something in his eye" "he retired" etc etc.)  Personally I think it would have been fine to have put that particular argument to rest, but I kind of respect them leaving it open for those who don't want it resolved.

Oh, and I thought it looked stunning.  Saw it in a regular cinema, without any of the IMAX nonsense, and was still blown away.

But please, no sequel.

davyK wrote:

This is the whole point - like it or not - it's a proper film. You can pick at it and find fault but that's OK.  It isn't a movie which for me reads as a slideshow of wisecracks and glorious set pieces which you forget about instantly. This isn't like that. It's film. And it's cinematic. You can talk about it. I'm thankful for that. And as for Harrison Ford.....those final few seconds. For anyone who is a father......he earned his fee for that alone. And I agree with tin - leave it. Maybe wait another 30 years.

Totally agree about that bit. Most affecting moment in the whole movie IMO.
Harrison Ford eh? Indiana Jones, Han Solo and Rick Deckard. Some CV.

I saw this tonight. I hadn’t gone near this thread, and was nervous to open it. I was so relieved to read g’s opening posts. What a big fat pile of meh.

Forgive me if my thoughts are poorly organised.

Regarding the original film, I remember watching the Director’s Cut when it came out. I own the tin box set that came out a few years ago. I haven’t watched very much of it, and don’t know the different versions

The thing is this; the ‘final cut’ I’ve watched (iTunes, 2007, 117 minutes) doesn’t bear much resemblance to some things people have spoken about. It’s clear that Deckard eis a former Blade Runner being brought back, it’s clear that he barely knows Gaff and they’re not partners, and it’s not remotely unambiguous that Deckard is a replicant. In fact, the only indication I saw that he might be is a solitary shot where his eyes ‘shine’ in a certain light, in a way we only see happening on replicant humans and animals elsewhere. Not being familiar with the different versions, I’ve always written off the Deckard-is-a-replicant thing as typical internet-nerd what-if-ism gone mad. Given how much Ridley Scott laps up the hype around his world building, its unsurprising he’s latched onto the idea. (As an aside, I’m still not sure whether he’s a brilliant film maker who fucks up about half of what he touches, or a charlatan who flukes it half the time.)

So, where I see significant ambiguity in an apparently unambiguous cut, it’s no surprise that I see no ambiguity in Villeneuve’s Deckard. I don’t see where there’s room for him to be human. This despite the fact that the repercussions of him being a replicant only make an already ludicrous plot even more ludicrous. I nearly walked out of the cinema when they first tried to palm us off with replicant reproduction. I only stayed because I thought they were going to give us a reasonable plot at some point. “Of course that didn’t happen, that would be daft, this is really what it’s about.” But, no, they stuck with it.

The Joi stuff was interesting, and there is ambiguity there. She appears to want to be more than she is. That could be sentience. That could be AI written to enact the owner’s desires, and this one is tapping into its owner’s desire to be human. Or it could be neither. There’s an interesting idea worth exploring there; an examination of love as a chemical reaction in humans versus love as the result of two artificial intelligences interacting with one another.

We didn’t get that, though. What we got was an exploration of how many times we can needlessly splash her nipples, close-ups of her nipples, giant versions of her nipples and close-ups of giant versions of her nipples across the screen. The sexism in this film is fucking rotten. I’m sorry, i don’t buy it as a comment on female objectification in a crass, sexist future. You can do that without a sex scene that, in its length and framing, gave itself away as nothing but vulgar titillation.

To give the film its due, it is visually stunning. The problem is, though, that it largely doesn’t look like a sequel to Blade Runner. It looks like a stylish sci-fi music video, interspersed with some props and homage shots to try to fool the audience into this being the same universe. The action sequences don’t fit the tone of the original either. They’re good, but they don’t seem right.

Just like the KA-CHING product placement. Every single ‘Sony’, ‘Atari’, ‘Johnny Walker’ and, most ridiculous of all, ‘Peugeot’ punched me so hard I was knocked clean out of any immersion I had been enjoying up until that point. To be honest, the original cast cameos did much the same thing. I don’t know if it’s a product of the whole film feeling wrong that seeing the original cast made them look even more wrong, but it didn’t work for me.

I like the idea of a replicant thinking they’re human, and then trying to come to terms with a memory that isn’t theirs, but that was handled perfectly by Rachel in the original. I like the idea they briefly flirted with of a human being fooled into thinking they’re a replicant, but it wasn’t explored.

There’s possibly an interesting story in the genius businessman with a god-complex who loses sight of his dream and both becomes and creates monsters but a) we’ve seen it before and b) it couldn’t be good and have Jared Leto. So, instead, we got some guff that didn’t fit the rest of this film, certainly didn’t fit the original, and will no doubt be dropped entirely in four of the seventeen versions that will be released over the next few decades, to the collective Partridge shrug of all mankind.

It’s one of those pieces of entertainment - like The Last Guardian - that I found myself enjoying and being slightly annoyed by while I was experiencing it, but get increasingly pissed off by the more I think about it. I walked out of the cinema thinking, “I enjoyed seeing that, but meh,” and I’m now at the point of thinking it’s garbage.

The one possibly good thing to come out of it is g’s posts in this thread, which make me want to work my way through all the discs in that tin case on my shelf.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, please don’t think my dislike of 2049 is anything to do with placing the original on a pedestal. I like the original, but I don’t venerate it or consider it beyond follow-up. I just like a follow up to look/feel like it follows on from the thing it says it does.

(As a total aside, nothing to do with BR but since you mention it, I find the female-lead Ghostbusters remake eminently more rewatchable than the messy, massively overrated original. I loved it as a kid but it has aged incredibly badly.)