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Blade Runner & Blade Runner 2049

The interesting thing about the film is that people are supplying their own thoughts on motives and rationale to fill in the deliberate ambiguity of the scripting.

That's exactly part of the appeal of the original, too.
 
My main issues was the pace and the the enemy replicant and Leto.

Re: Replicant enemy. Why was she was so paper-thin? Roy Batty was immense even Pris had more character. Yes she cries a few times but to what purpose we never really get her motivation.
 
Re the Leto character:
I really didn't like that bastard, and I didn't like the fact that he got away with it!
 
Re the Leto character:
I really didn't like that bastard, and I didn't like the fact that he got away with it!


unclear what he got away with. He was sort of a Palmer Eldritch character I thought.
 
Did anybody else see visual biblical reference?

Sidebar: 2017 Politics from 2049!
  • Luv delivering drone strikes on the poor at great distance while having her nails filed.
  • Extraordinary rendition for Deckard--in the off-world colonies!
  • Child-labour factories for consumer electronics.
  • Lt. Joshi LAPD thinks we need a 'wall' to keep the non-humans from the genuine humans--or it'll be a bloodbath.
I thought the drone strike scene was amazing, hadn't noticed the rendition parallel.

I'm puzzled they missed out post-Snowden 2017 computer surveillance paranoia - as I understand it, K's conversations with Joi were secret, even though she was a Wallace creation. There was a bit about what would happen if the baddies broke in and got a piece of Joi-related hardware (I can't remember what would happen if they did that, access her memories?) but (unless I missed something) K didn't seem perturbed about talking to a Wallace product apart from that scenario. Apologies if I missed a key plot point and Luv was getting info on K via his Joi conversations. I can see why the film needed someone for him to confide in.
 
ps I wondered if Giantess hologram calling him Joe implied the holograms were networked (which would make them insecure) or whether it was the default name in the programming (which made Joi's choice of it a bit bleaker).
 
Did anybody else see visual biblical reference?

Derivative of a few movies.
  • Luv delivering drone strikes on the poor at great distance while having her nails filed.
Yet she never follows up on K’s investigation which leads to the Miracle.
  • Extraordinary rendition for Deckard--in the off-world colonies!
Why any need for this? Wallace already eviscerated a newborn nude female replicant in his office. Ridley Scott claimed Deckard was a Replicant. Why not just torture him right there?
  • Child-labour factories for consumer electronics.
What did they eat? Again, this is a reference to a modern day issue of kids trawling through trash to survive. K worries about his horse.
  • Lt. Joshi LAPD thinks we need a 'wall' to keep the non-humans from the genuine humans--or it'll be a bloodbath.
Yet even she becomes a sex puppet propsitioning K.
 
ps I wondered if Giantess hologram calling him Joe implied the holograms were networked (which would make them insecure) or whether it was the default name in the programming (which made Joi's choice of it a bit bleaker).

I think it's probably a default name in the program and the ad tagline “saying exactly what you want to hear.” implies that she's really is just an extremely sophisticated chatbot, not a conscious AI. Which is pretty bleak.
 
i figured the k was for kaspar (as in the wooden horse) and joe was the masculine of joi hence almost derogatory by the end

my main gripe at a weeks remove is how off kilter 2049 was as a true sequent ... the original movie was a straight forward policeman hunting down criminals, arguably well told and extremely stylishly presented by a cast with gravitas and chops, whole thing genuinely layered with meaning, good for serious discussion, or not depending on the viewer, but at its heart its a very personal story

this new one insists on being of huge existential importance, a quest to find the one, of course this is all rammed down your throat as you watch it, you dont get the opportunity to enjoy the film as a narrative told in spectacle because its so busy with creation myths and saviour hunting ... the only cast members i liked were bautista, ford and young, even cgi young ... thank god scott was reined in from going full prometard on this, but even the hints of the alien franchise in here (i spotted a couple, im sure there were more) were a bad joke ...

i tangented blade runner 1982 to alan parkers angel heart somewhere on the thread (i even thought i saw direct references to angel heart in 2049, kermode did too) ... imagining the equivalent sequent to angel heart, cast from this mould ... rourke and bonets incest-born lovechild grows up to become satanic anti-pope, rules the world in the 1980s, is ultimately defeated by heroic doctor over administering prescription medication
 
MRe: Replicant enemy. Why was she was so paper-thin? Roy Batty was immense even Pris had more character. Yes she cries a few times but to what purpose we never really get her motivation.
The thing I thought was that as a sentient being she didn't want to participate in the acts programed for her to do but based on her code she had no other choice...
 
But a lot of that violence was by women against women.

And as the Weinstein affair shows, women are often the victims of unpleasant actions. Why would that have changed in a sci-fi version of 2049? Why wouldn’t women be in less of an equal position of power in an alt-future that obviously has a lot more in common with the 1980s than the 2010s? Or do all films, even sci-fi, fantasy and futuristic ones have to adhere to 2017 moral and PC codes?

As for the film, crowd I went with bemoaned the length but while a tighter and edited version might have been a better film I don’t mind spending time in a well constructed movie environment and enjoying the details.

I do find it annoying that films today always have to deal with such grand scale issues, the original BR was just a case, you could have had any number of films based around Deckard hunting down a band of replicants. Now though it has to be the hybrid child of a replicant that will change the future of the whole world... That was what was great about the new Dredd film, amazing visuals, a world you believed in and we just visited o e small part of it.

Overall, not as pretty, not as engaging as the original but still better than most dross that gets made these days. 7/10
 
Hasn't been a box office disaster though. It will make its money back and make a profit with DVD/Blue Ray and pay to view.

With $194 million worldwide, it will all come down to Japan and China. Blade Runner 2049 will debut in both markets next Friday. And yeah, it is possible that both markets could overperform. But even a run slightly better than Terminator Genisys (say, $25m in Japan and $115m in China) gets the film to a global total of around $365m, or right about where Mad Max: Fury Road (which didn’t play in China) and Edge of Tomorrow ended up.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottm...-kingsman-2-scores-big-in-china/#7819e5aa229e
 
The new theory is that a lack of spoilers in the trailers, interviews and publicity damned the film at the box office. That's almost as damning as the explanation that modern audiences are dumb and don't like to think at the cinema.

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/10/blade-runner-2049-denis-villeneuve-box-office-1201886155/

As a general rule I've stopped watching trailers as these days they more or less give you it all up until the final reel. If today's generation need to have the whole story spooned to them in order to make them go see the film then they'll never see C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
 
I watched one trailer for Dunkirk and assiduously avoided everything for Blade Runner; perhaps it's coincidence, but those two are the most 'enjoyable' things I've watched for years. The only recent film that I liked to a similar extent and consumed the pre-release hype was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I already knew the plot to very well.
 
I do find it annoying that films today always have to deal with such grand scale issues, the original BR was just a case, you could have had any number of films based around Deckard hunting down a band of replicants. Now though it has to be the hybrid child of a replicant that will change the future of the whole world...

Maybe this Bladerunner fell between two stools -- it was more than just a simple case, which meant lots of convolutions, but it didn't actually deliver the world-change it promised - I'd love to have seen the replicant rebellion, though maybe they're saving it for the next film.
 
The new theory is that a lack of spoilers in the trailers, interviews and publicity damned the film at the box office. That's almost as damning as the explanation that modern audiences are dumb and don't like to think at the cinema.
Yep, that's the explanation.
 
... I do find it annoying that films today always have to deal with such grand scale issues, the original BR was just a case, you could have had any number of films based around Deckard hunting down a band of replicants. Now though it has to be the hybrid child of a replicant that will change the future of the whole world...
my biggest gripe also, after the poor cast and absence of noir ... its already gone and forgotten
 
A dissection/deconstruction of Blade Runner 2049. rather than a review. Warning here be spoilers.



... There is an eerie sex scene in the middle of Denis Villeneuve’s new film, Blade Runner 2049. A replicant cop named K, played by an impassive Ryan Gosling, comes home to his avatar girlfriend, who “emanates” as a slightly translucent hologram from a device attached to the ceiling. Joi has a surprise for him. She has hired a sex worker to embody her so they can have physical intercourse. Joi syncs with Mariette, stepping into her from behind and aligning their bodies so that the holographic form conforms to the human one. As K stares, their faces overlay in a shifty coincidence; they are similar but not the same. The layered image is distinct from the weird gloopy CGI facial manipulations we know from that old Michael Jackson video or from that new app that predicts the genetic amalgam of potential parents. K’s two lovers in one, by contrast, are skittery, uncanny. Their stuttered movements as they reach out to caress him at different speeds—a measure, it seems, of the respective urgency of their desires—look like trails from an acid trip. Their arms drift apart, yielding a many-limbed goddess; they caress K with their four hands; they offer up a quadralabial kiss; we cut to a post-coital bed at dawn, ruffled with the aftermath. Villeneuve recently told Vulture that the visual effect took a year to perfect and “used a blend of very, very old techniques and cutting-edge technology.” Its imperfect matching was intentional: “I didn’t want Joi to just envelop Marietta, I didn’t want it to feel magical, I wanted to feel the limit of the technology.” ...

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/10/20/blade-runners-immaterial-girls/
 
was more first impressions than a review ... i like robs videos, mainly because we tend to dig the same movies from the same period for the same reasons, im aware hes somewhat of a film maker, but im never sure how together his film theory is
 
Another take on BR 2049.

Blade Runner 2049 is breathtaking. It has already been said, but there’s no harm in reiterating: it is an amazing film in so many ways. It works very well alone, and even better when side by side with the other occupants of the Blade Runner cinematic universe. Maybe it’s just a thing a fan would say, but there’s not much not to like about it. And yet, there have been many dissenters. ...

https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-movies-anime/blade-runner-2049-and-gender/
 
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