Blade Runner 2049

How many years til they break and release the 4 hour cut? I. Want. It.

edited 30th Oct '17 1:51:04 PM by googlebot

I'm honestly satisfied with the film as it is. It'd be nice to see more emphasis on characters struggling with their own nature as manufactured beings, some more elaboration on the offworld colonies and the revolution, that sort of thing- but I feel that's material for another film. 2049 told the story it wanted to in full. That's all I need from it.

As a general rule of thumb, commenting on the objectification of women while objectifying women is pretty difficult to do—inevitably some of the shots will come off as gratuitous and man oh man, did some of the stuff in this film come off as gratuitous.

There may be a lot of female characters in the film, but the fact that three of them are, respectively, a psychotically devoted servant of a male character (Luv), a sexbot who uses, well, sex, in the name of the rebellion (Mariette), and a literal toy for men whose entire arc is caught up in her relationship with the hero (JOI) pretty much ruins it for me. That one of these characters literally shares her name with a genre of pornography (JOI, Jerk-Off Instructions) does not help, nor does her eventual fridging or the plot orbiting pregnancy-as-a-marker-of-humanity.

There's also a lot of plot holes. Take the idea of Wallace needing the ability to make his Replicants reproduce. Why? He says he can't make them fast enough—yet after receiving Rachel's remains he was able to, within days, produce a fully grown Replicant modeled on her. Even if every Replicant were born pregnant, it wouldn't notably increase the number of Replicants in the world any time soon—the children grow up at the normal rate, so he'd have to wait years, heck, decades, before there's a sizable increase in his workforce. Worse yet, any Replicants born in this way are going to have the potential to be born outside of Wallace's control which will eat into his profits—and possibly result in another straight up rebellion. This plan doesn't make sense, and since Wallace's attempt at gaining control over Deckard's daughter is a primary conflict driver it desperately needs to make sense for the film to work. I'm sure that people in the thread can come up with reasons why the plan isn't as self-destructive as it appears to be, but that's beside the point—the film doesn't explain it.

I think, in fact, that it's really worth contrasting the villains of the two films in this regard. Roy, is, at the end of the day, a pretty simple character, albeit one played with utter conviction by Rutger Hauer. He's a dying Nexus 6 who is approaching the end of his run time and is desperate for a way to live a little longer. This is a motivation that almost anyone can understand, and it's that motivation that drives the whole of the original movie. Deckard may be the main character and get the most screentime, but the first film is about Roy and his efforts to put off his death as long as possible. My fiancee jokes that the movie is "The Tragedy of Roy Batty" and that's substantially true—Deckard, Sebastien, even Rachael and Tyrell, they're all characters who get caught up in the fall out of Roy's last mad dash for freedom—and the fact that the new film essentially ignores that in order to act as if the first movie were all about Deckard and Rachael's (rapey) romance bothers me a lot.

Contrast this with Wallace. His motivation is...what exactly? To make more Replicants so that humanity can colonize more planets? Why does that matter so much to him? Why for that matter does he think getting the Replicants pregnant is the only way to do this? Hell, why can't he make it so they can get pregnant in the first place? In the first film it was ambiguous as to what extent the Replicants were made from human material and to what extent they are synthetic, with the fact that Roy's failsafe mimics a machine shutting down suggesting that it may be the latter. Here, the fact that even one of them can get knocked out indicates that we're basically looking at clones, in which case the ability to get pregnant should be the default, not an issue that Tyrell and Wallace alike have struggled to work around. Wallace obviously has a God complex, what with his relentless quoting of Scripture and nonsensical angel references, but where is that coming from? Did he develop a God complex from manufacturing people, or does he manufacture people because he has a God complex? What, exactly, am I looking at here? I don't know, and since he, through Luv, is the one pushing the primary conflict of the film, that seriously hurts the movie. That's not getting into the fact that, independently of my storytelling issues with him, he's just a horribly unpleasant ableist stereotype. The misogynistic Evil Cripple who uses his genius to manipulate women who should otherwise "naturally" avoid him? Don't know if that's the intent, but absent any clarification of his motivations that's what they put onscreen, and he's only a step removed from Doctor Psycho when it comes to being a retrograde character.

There were plot holes in the original film, don't get me wrong. The failsafe is meant to stop the Replicants from rebelling, yet Tyrell tells Roy they've tried and failed to remove it. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Fortunately, you can write it off as Tyrell lying to the murderous android that's a second away from taking off his head. The new film though, puts something that doesn't make sense (namely Wallace needing the power to make impregnatable Replicants) at the center of the story, and that just kills it for me. It doesn't help that other plot elements that make no sense abound.

Take, for instance, the existence of Nexus 8 models with unlimited lifespan. I know the Doylist reason they exist—they need some old Replicants who ran with Rachael and Deckard to still be around. But what's the Watsonian one? Short life spans were a failsafe against rebellion—sure, they might drive the occasional Replicant, like Roy, mad, but they ensure that any rebels will be dead before they can do too much damage. Even if you assume Tyrell was lying to Roy about how they cannot build Replicants with longer lifespans, it doesn't make sense that they would—if anything the aftermath of Roy's murderous rampage should have seen the Replicants on a tighter leash than ever. Instead they gave the Nexus 8 models unlimited lifespan...and triggered the rebellion mentioned in the opening. Why did they do this? Then there's the new models with supposed obedience protocols that are never explained. How does this whole baseline business work? What can send a Replicant off of it? Or there's Deckard's daughter. Is K the only Replicant she's fed her own memories into? Or has she done it to lots of them? Would any Replicant assigned to this case have been triggered by it, or only K? Was this done on purpose, as part of the build-up to Replicant rebellion 2.0, or was it an accident? None of this gets explained...and that's despite the fact that the film certainly has the time to. A few minutes less spent with the Elvis hologram and on explaining some of these things would have made me a lot happier.

If people liked the film, great. I'm glad somebody did. But I am not among them.

So in terms of "making Replicants faster" it makes sense to me because he specifically wants them for a deep-space exploration trip. Meaning Replicants that can reproduce are a self-renewing workforce, and will grow at an exponential rate, rather than a linear one. Rather than having a Replicant... replicating center on the ship, he can just have Replicants banging. Depending on the size and needs of the process of building Replicants, this could be a huge difference, especially if it's delicate and could break down on a voyage of indeterminate length.

It seemed more to me that replicants naturally reproducing was more important for its symbolic value to Wallace due to his God complex instead of for its efficiency.

I get the impression Wallace is making excuses for the fact what he really is planning is replacing the obviously dying-out and useless human race. Replicants are a superior species in every way except for the fact they aren't able to reproduce it seems.

I also think the male gaze issues would have been better handled if the Chief had forced him to have sex with her.

I actually did have a problem with Wallace's interest in replicant reproduction when I saw the film. I could understand why a replicant child would be a useful symbol to rally around for a replicant rights movements, being concrete evidence that they're closer to human than folks give them credit for, but the time it takes to produce and raise a child the old-fashioned way seems like it'd take a lot more time and effort than prefabricating people and just programming them with a new mind. The Nexus-8 line with increased lifespans was something I could forgive as a necessary and relatively minor byproduct of the kind of story the movie wanted to tell, but I basically spent the entire movie with some small voice in the back of my mind wondering why finding a natural-born replicant child to study was so important. The personal element of the narrative was tightly written enough that it didn't impact my enjoyment, but it's still a problem.

And while I'm talking, I think I'll address a couple of the other things Ambar mentioned:

• First of all, if I recall, when Roy was grilling Tyrell about how to extend his lifespan, Tyrell's reasoning was that Roy's solutions wouldn't work on a replicant that was already completed, not that it was impossible to make a replicant with an extended lifespan at all; if you need an explanation as to why he would try in the past, I imagine that there might have been some past Replicants Tyrell grew rather fond of and wanted to keep around past their expiration date. He seems like that kind of guy to me.
• The baseline tests came off to me as a controlled way to subject Nexus-9 replicants to stress to see how well they managed. If they kept their composure, they were baseline. If they started to break... not so much. Note how in the second test K takes, the one he fails, he has some gaps and hesitation when he gives some of his responses and in general seems to be having trouble dealing with the shit he'd just gone through.
• I think the movie declined to go into detail about the memories Deckard's daughter passed around because it wasn't relevant to K's story, which is basically the film's sole focus, and so those details wouldn't really be necessary. If you really want an answer for who they went to, though, note how the resistance leader says something to the effect of "We all wish we were [the replicant child]"- I think that might be intended to imply that some of the others received those memories as well.
• On the subject of Wallace versus Roy, I actually found myself liking Wallace a bit more as an antagonist. Roy, despite his evidently sympathetic motivations and actions in the tail end of the original Blade Runner, still came off to me as little more than a big bully for most of the film- a grinning asshole who'd leave an innocent old foreign man to freeze in his on laboratory for no obvious reason besides his own amusement. (I hear that Rutger Hauer came up with the "tears in rain" speech himself, and it wouldn't surprise me- there's a beauty and eloquence in it that feels very much at odds with Roy's lines beforehand.) Wallace, meanwhile, is straight up insane and several layers of fucked up. I like that. I feel like you can get more out of that kind of character than someone who's mostly just a total dick, and while Blade Runner gives Roy's origins lip service, for most of the movie it seems content with his total dickishness.
• And finally... what Rachael and Deckard had was not romance, but it was fucked up, and although I'm happy with the story 2049 told, the fact that it plays their relationship as a story of true love makes me squirm. >_<

So yeah. All in all, I agree with a lot of your points, Ambar- I just feel like K's narrative is done well enough to make up for it.

I have the opposite reaction. Wallace's brand of god complex madness can be interesting, but only if it's explored in detail. Since it isn't we're just left with a madman who has no explanation for being who and what he is. There's lots of potentially fascinating things they could have done with Wallace, looking at whether his building of Replicants is what's given him the god complex, or if he builds Replicants because he already had one (and if so, how he got it) but the story all but ignores him, which means I'm left with a character who does what he does because he's crazy and that's it. That said "crazy" villain is also a walking ableist stereotype of the evil handicapped genius, defying the natural order by controlling women who shouldn't be interested in him only makes it worse. Like I said before, he's one of the worst cases of Evil Cripple that I've seen since Doctor Psycho—and that character's a product of the forties.

Roy being as brutal as he is for much of the film makes perfect sense to me. He's a combat droid, designed specifically for fighting humanity's wars in place of human soldiers. That he's essentially an archetype of a swaggering alpha male warrior makes sense, because that's literally what he's programmed to be. Over the course of the film we see this persona break down though, and fragments of a real personality start to emerge—even as his preprogrammed brutality and callousness is made increasingly worse by his impending death and oncoming madness. In the back half of the movie, the meeting with Tyrell, followed by Priss' demise sends him right over the edge, only to pull himself back from the brink during the confrontation with Deckard and die as the person he could have been.

Roy is a machine in the act of becoming a human being as he dies. Wallace is just a profoundly regressive archetype without an explanation for what he is.

That's a fair assessment. I'm mostly working off of surface readings and my own personal dislike of certain archetypes when it comes to how much I enjoy watching Roy and Wallace. I'd probably be as mad about Wallace's portrayal as you are if I were used to the concept of the Evil Cripple trope; as it is, I still have too much trouble even figuring out how disability and moral bankruptcy are supposed to be even remotely connected to actually apply the stereotype to the media I consume. (It's probably also related that I'm only used to seeing ableism in regards to Asperger's Syndrome as opposed to anything else at all, since that's the context I see the term used in the most.)

There is theory that Wallace is a replicant that was created blind or blinded himself to avoid the test from the first movie.

edited 10th Nov '17 1:21:01 PM by googlebot

...that raises a lot more questions.

So the Evil Cripple trope is all tied up with notions of gender conformity and what makes a "real" man. Since a handicapped man is unable to perform masculinity in the traditionally accepted way, fiction tends to use being handicapped as a short hand for that person being bad or wrong in some fashion. There's the implication too that their inside is as broken as their outside or, in some slightly less reactionary works, that their resentment over their disability and/or societal treatment of their disability is what fuels their villainy.

Where the trope gets really ugly, however, is when it interacts with our attitudes towards women. Since a disabled man isn't performing masculinity correctly, there's an assumption that no woman is going to want him. Ergo, the assumption continues, he is going to hate women and lust after them in equal measure, and the only way he'll be able to get with a woman is to force himself on her. Wonder Woman foe Doctor Psycho, who I've twice mentioned in this conversation, is the personification of this variant of the trope, being a Depraved Dwarf who uses his Psychic Powers to force women into being interested in him.

All that said, see why I find the portrayal of Wallace, the blind man who manufactures women who are mindlessly loyal to him to be pretty ablelist?

Ah. Yeah, the stereotype makes more sense to me now. Yeesh.

Re: Rachel and Deckard's romance

There's a lot of Values Dissonance with the way Deckard comes off to her and I'm actually the guy who put the Alternate Character Interpretation up which that Rachel is playing him. Her only way out of the situation she's in is with a protector and what better protector than a Blade Runner? I have a similar view Gaff lets Rachel go because they're such a corrupt organization that one having a Blade Runner Sex Slave who will die in a few years anyway isn't a big deal.

However, that's NOT what the movie was going for. No, Deckard hates himself, hates his job, and sees Rachel as someone he can save. Rachel sees possibly the only person in the world who is still left treating her as a human being despite her beinga Replicant. They're two lost damaged souls who find each other and stay together until she dies.

Re: Wallace

I actually took his blindness as a sign he's meant to be a seer figure. Wallace is a man who manufactures the Replicants and wants the child because she is the embodiment of his creation rather than being a "lesser man." The movie never gives the impression he's anything less than the complete master of his domain despite being an Evil Cripple. The way he dresses, his blindness, and the army of followers he has instead gave me an idea of an otherworldly figure. He is, in his own way, the only one with vision left but he does not see his creations as people.

Versus Roy, I think of Wallace as a better villain because Roy isn't a villain at all. Yes, he's violent and brutish as well as a thug but he's FOUR YEARS OLD. He's also terrified and angry as well as losing his only friends in the world one by one. In the Tyrell as God system, Roy isn't Lucifer but humanity—and we curse God for making us this way.

edited 25th Nov '17 4:24:27 AM by CharlesPhipps

I see Wallace as a bog standard god complex villain. The first thing we see him do is make life and then take it away, just cause he can. Him being blind just felt like the sort of literary flourish you get with bad guys, especially in neo noir fiction.

While I've not given much thought to comparing the movie to the original, I think it's an excellent example of a classic sort of hard boiled detective story with the sci fi elements being integrated very well.

Though part of that may stem from one of my current favorite book series being about a private detective robot and his female 'secretary' who is basically a supercomputer.

Deckard rapes Rachel. Onscreen and in front of us. It doesn't matter what kind of spin you put on it, because that that happened is an unavoidable fact, and for the new film to romanticize that and make the two of them having a kid a central plot point is revolting.

I'm aware of what we see on screen. I just spent the first paragraph explaining what I always saw it as.

And i also know it requires Death of the Author because no one was going for that in the screening room, writer's room, director's chair, or the actors. Nor were audiences supposed to take it as such, regardless of how it was framed.

The plot was supposed to be Deckard falling for Rachel and her turning to him and the same. Hence why there's a scene of her and Deckard happily driving off into the country. There's also an extended love scene (NSFW) where she is an active willing participant.

https://youtu.be/BbKSr3vb32U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wsvc8ETEAU

edited 25th Nov '17 9:34:20 AM by CharlesPhipps

See, I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren't indulging in "she really wanted it" style rape apologia. Apparently you were, so thanks for admitting to that. "It wasn't really a rape and she's just playing him" is an absolutely horrid thing to posit, to the point where honestly, I don't have much else to say on the subject.

How is it not rape if a person's life is LITERALLY dependent on it?

If Rachel says no, Deckard can kill her.

Given Phillip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as a critique of NAZISM and the Empathy Test is designed to be bullshit (after all, the humans would automatically fail it) one might draw some horrifying parallels.

My interpretation is that Rachel is a person desperate to survive but under EXTREME coercion.

Honestly, I wouldn't have saved Deckard's life she did but I'm not Lawful Good like her.

I just know my above opinion is not true by Word of God.

edited 25th Nov '17 3:07:26 PM by CharlesPhipps

Saying that Rachel is playing Deckard or anything else that implies she consented to sex in that scene is to say that it is not rape. If that's not what you were trying to say, fine, but it is what you said.

Uh no, it's not. The androids in the book are written as sociopaths who sit around cutting the legs off of animals. Book!Roy actively enjoys it when his companions are killed and becomes happier and happier the worse things get. The only human beings who could fail the test and be killed by it are psychopaths, and the whole Empathy Box business with Mercer is something that actively separates human from 'droid and which the androids try to destroy (unsuccessfully, might I add, because they don't understand how human empathy or faith works).

The film pretty much turns the book on its head by turning the androids into sympathetic villains and suggesting any differences between human and 'droid are mechanical rather than empathetic. The film androids clearly possess actual emotions, and are capable of concern and care, as evidenced by Leon and Roy's reactions to the deaths of their respective girlfriends. All of this is absent from the book, where there's precisely zero evidence that a 'droid is capable of any human emotion, let alone capable of empathy.

I don't know what book you read, but it sure ain't the one I did.

I don't know if you can consent to sex with someone who has power of life and death over you.

But I think we're drifting off topic.

I also don't think we're disagreeing either as I think its absolutely awful and shouldn't have been filmed that way if they wanted it to be in any way a "romance."

Edit:

Re: Androids

https://www.tor.com/2010/11/24/philip-k-dick-takes-the-stage-an-interview-with-do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep-playwrightdirector-edward-einhorn/

edited 26th Nov '17 12:25:58 AM by CharlesPhipps

... know what I find really weird?

How quickly this movie just sorta... left my consciousness. It's not exactly a popcorn flick or anything, but honestly I have very little to say about it. I enjoyed it but it just isn't staying with me at all.

Now that I think about it... yeah, I actually kinda get that feeling too. Like, I still loved the movie, but at the same time, it doesn't really stand out in my head the way the original Blade Runner did. A well-directed character arc gives you a sense of satisfaction few other things in a movie can replicate, if any, but a distinctive aesthetic is what really makes something memorable.

Blade Runner's 'distinctive aesthetic' is pretty much just 1980s Hong Kong with a few embellishments.

What really sets 2049 apart, for me, is that it feels like a really well crafted detective story, set in a futuristic landscape. Its basically what you'd get if Chandler or Hammet wrote science fiction (which Chandler kinda made fun of, and 'Chandler's take on Sci Fi' could also be used as a tagline for the Raymond Electromatic novels) leaning more towards Hammet's style-a fairly bleak tone, a protagonist who is less important than the people around him, a villain mostly unbothered by the story's events, but just a few tiny flecks of optimism that make it worth while.

The characters more than the setting do give it a fairly multicultural feel as well.

Netflix released a trailer for a series with similar themes called Altered Carbon. I hope this is first of many.