Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)

[Spinal]

I don't understand this complaint. I understand that Spinal or others might have trouble relating to a protagonist who's a robot, but K's motivations and character arc are very well done. He works for a system that despises him doing a job that hurts his own people. He's assigned a case which makes him question his own identity. He comes to believe he's the Chosen One for his kind. He discovers this is not true. He decides to make his existence worth something and sacrifices himself to help Deckard. The end.

The more I think about it, the more I think my dissatisfaction can't be solely due to the fact that the protagonist is a robot, although I admit, it doesn't help. After all, when HAL is shut down in 2001, that is a captivating, emotional moment for me. I'm fully invested in HAL as a character, even though he is little more than a voiceover.

I think the problem for me may be more to do with my feeling that if K is not "The Chosen One", then why is he at the center of this movie? I don't really get a whole lot out of his sacrifice emotionally. I started the movie thinking he was a sophisticated piece of machinery. And that's where I end it. He doesn't assume any of the duties and responsibilities of "The Chosen One", so the filmmakers are banking on the fact that I will care about his loss of identity. I didn't. Deckard is alive ... and this matters because? What can he accomplish that no one else can? I concede that this might make more of an impact if I liked the first film more than I do.

[Irish]

You seem to be a very critical fellow with a lot of films, and I appreciate that since it generates a lot of useful discussion which is what this site is for, but let me ask you a question that's impossible to answer... I'm assuming you like Blade Runner a lot. If you watched it today for the first time, would you still like it as much? Some of your usual criticisms about plot would apply to it. For one thing, it's very murky why Roy Batty just gives up and dies in the end.

Well... that's tough to say. I saw the original on VHS when I was 12 or 13 and, by happenstance, was drawn into it in the middle of the movie. (I had no idea what was going on and didn't particularly care because the visuals were like nothing I had seen.) Since then, I've watched every cut dozens of times on every format available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and several times at the theater during re-releases and revivals; read books about the production; watched every documentary about it I could, including the 4 hour "Dangerous Days" on one of the DVD releases; got into PKD's novels; read a biography about him, plus his diaries, letters, and various interviews. I probably know more details about the production of "Blade Runner" and everything surrounding it than I do any other film.

So I give it a pass on its rough and haphazard plotting, because I know why it happened and what tradeoffs Scott was forced to make. "Blade Runner" is half a good movie with a brilliant score and insanely good production design. It benefits greatly from the source material, because no matter what sort of hatchet job Francher, Peoples, and Scott did to the book, they couldn't eliminate all of it because the themes Dick pursued are baked right into the premise of the story.

Spinal's mention of "Brazil" is interesting, because even though it doesn't share much with "Blade Runner," both movies are dystopian sci-fi about a guy pressured by a bureaucracy to do a job he doesn't want to do, who falls in love with an unobtainable woman in a fetishistic way, and who wants nothing more than to run away with that woman and escape the society that oppresses him.

In other words: Both movies are love stories, which makes them very relatable -- and very in tune with there precedents. There's a helluva lot of pulp mystery, sci-fi, and noir that have, one way or another, romance at their center.

[Dukefrukem]

So you saw the original cut for the first time. Without the unicorn scene and voice over. What are your takeaways on the film wrestling with whether he's a replicant or not?

Because if Decker is a replicant, and 2049 doesn't exist, it really takes away from the whooooooole movie. And I'm putting emphasis on whole here because...it's literally the movie? Why does the entire movie matter? Decker falls in love with Sean Young. Why? A replicant needs to kills replicant. So what? Why do we care?

It's not until we get hints of this "war" or child are there any stakes worth caring about it.

It's almost like Scott knew 2049 would be made, and he needed to make changes to the Director's Cut to make it align with the story.

[Morris Schæffer]

I've had a few glasses of wine Duke but still that's a sloppily written post.

[Dukefrukem]

Spinal doesn't think so.

[Irish]

Except that the two relationships are different. When Deckard first meets Rachael he thinks she's human - that's the whole point of that scene. Joi is not even a physical presence, more like a futuristic gadget. The kiss under the rain scene shows that K knows their love is just a game of pretend.

Right -- so if Joi is only a gadget, why would the audience care when Luv stomps on her? Can't K just go out and buy another one and resume their relationship?

That's more or less the problem with every artificial character in "2049." They have no personality, no wants, no desires, and they don't seem particularly worried about anything. Dramatically, that's dull. Watching this movie was like watching a toaster chase a microwave for 3 hours. The outcome has no stakes and no depth because the "people" involved are commonplace and replaceable.

"2049" doesn't seem to understand that when you kill a person, you end something that is unique. When you kill a replicant, you destroy an appliance.

This has already been said, but I think a sequel has a right to address the audience assuming they have seen the original. Otherwise, why are you not watching that? I get what you're saying about this being a huge blockbuster and as such, it should aim to have as large an audience as possible, but I don't really care about how much money it makes. I went to see it because I love Blade Runner and I have seen it numerous times.

I think there's a danger in tying a sequel too closely to its predecessor. I mentioned "Wrath of Khan" because it's a direct sequel to an episode of television that took place 15 years before the events of that movie. But if you watch "Khan" cold, the script is careful to make sure that you needn't have seen any part of "Star Trek" for the plot to make sense and the stakes to have weight. (There's even a moment where a character asks Kirk directly who Khan is and what happened all those years ago and Kirk chuckles, waves the question away, and replies, "It doesn't matter.") The story uses an old TV plot as a jumping off point, but it's really about age and obsession, friendship and loyalty, and it places those themes in the middle of a sci-fi actioner.

"2049" is easy enough to follow. Hell, the plot is so simple that it barely exists. (K has to find one individual, then another, while running away from obvious bad guys.) But I don't think it has any real emotional weight. The movie has Deckard and Rachel's relationship at its center; it's what drives every character's actions. But it doesn't explore anything about them. We don't learn anything about these people outside what's absolutely required for the plot (hell, it doesn't even mention Rachel by name until we're 2 hours in). When Wallace trots out Fake Rachel only to have Luv shoot her in the head, I was mystified. The scene is meaningless to the overall scheme, and it isn't well supported by the script. It doesn't stand alone. For it to have the intended impact, the audience would need to have seen "Blade Runner" and understand a little something more about the relationship between these two characters.

There's also the problem with placing K at the center. It's like we're getting the story secondhand, once removed. Good drama needs the characters to have something at risk, at play. For most of "2049," if K walked away from his investigation, nothing about his life would change. (And then when the script does make him personally involved because he thinks he's Replicant Jesus, most everything he does is for selfish reasons.)

The movie would have had more immediacy if it had been about a middle aged Deckard trying to find his own kid. But they couldn't do that because they thought Old Man Ford would bring something to it. (He didn't.)

I have no idea what you're talking about here. This film takes place 35 years after the original. The Replicants are different and made by someone else.

Think about characters like Gort, Hal, or The Terminator. They're sentient and powerful but don't have an ingrained survival mechanism. That's what makes them threatening. "Blade Runner" flips the idea of a typical movie robot on its head. Every replicant wants nothing more than to survive. That's a relatable, human desire. When Batty says, "We're not computers, Sebastian, we're physical," it takes the edge off their artificiality. It reinforces the idea that they're not unfeeling, blank, expressionless automatons because even though humans are fascinated by their own intelligence, we're not computers either.

Meanwhile, in "2049" it's 35 years later and yes, different manufacturer blah blah, but when K scans old records like a machine, it returns him to the pantheon of the typical movie robot (cf: Data in "Star Trek: Next Generation"). Watching that scene, I couldn't help but think how fucking stupid it was. Not just in terms of what it meant for the character or the world he inhabits, but in terms of basic technology (I could have searched those records faster in the late 1990s using a simple SQL query, ffs!)

What bothered me most if the feeling that the only reason they changed this aspect of replicants is to goose the plot along. The movie doesn't reference these new abilities again, and it doesn't really influence anything about the story or inform on the characters in an interesting way. In fact, I think it makes everybody a bit duller.

Well, I cared. But I agree with you that the one-eye was too cliché. Every Resistance leader worth his salt must have an eyepatch.

This bothered me more because it was such a genre cliche: Fortunate Son protag falls out of favor with the aristocrat class and takes up with a group of scruffy underground rebels (cf: "Dune").

The original film had limited, local stakes. Deckard wasn't trying to save the world. Nobody was trying to destroy it. He just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge with his girl. The sequel is more broad, and speaks directly to its themes with several characters going on and on with great portent about kinds, wars, and walls because they think Replicant Jesus will save society or doom it. It tries too hard to be weighty and meaningful.

[Spinal]

Spinal doesn't think so.

Made perfect sense to me.

[Spinal]

Watching this movie was like watching a toaster chase a microwave for 3 hours.

Cracking up ... next summer from Pixar!

[Grouchy]

the filmmakers are banking on the fact that I will care about his loss of identity.

I think you nailed it. K lives an empty existence as a glorified hitman. Everyone arounds him hates him for being what he is. His only solace is found in a relationship which is completely artificial and he knows it. So when his investigation leads him to think there might be some ultimate mission that justifies his existence, he embraces it and then he's denied even that. So he makes his own path by helping this guy Deckard from the first movie.

At least that's how I read it. I don't think it's a perfect script but to say that K's character has no point or no driving force is not really very accurate.

[Irish]

So you saw the original cut for the first time. Without the unicorn scene and voice over. What are your takeaways on the film wrestling with whether he's a replicant or not?

I have a soft spot for the theatrical release. Not just for sentimental reasons, but also for artistic ones. That's the cut they went with in 1982, and the one they released into theaters for general audiences, and so that's the movie.

Scott never would have dicked around with the recuts except that (1) the original workprint was shown by mistake at a festival and got buzz and (2) the recuts meant money in his pocket; every recut coincided with the film's anniversary and a new DVD or Blu-Ray release.

The most startling thing about the theatrical cut is how much information they packed into the voiceover. Like, 90% of what Deckard and Rachel's relationship is supposed to be is in there and all of that simply doesn't exist in the other cuts.

The film's a mess but when Scott removed the voiceover, he also removed a huge chunk of Ford's character.

Anyway, I posted this years ago in a different thread:

The problem I have with the film's ambiguity is that it wasn't intentional. They started production with a half-formed script and changed it on the fly, which is why the original cut has so many weird errors.

I've never bought Scott's explanation about anything around this film's story, because that story is a colossal mess. It still is, despite multiple cuts and more reshaping twenty years after the fact.

As for the origami: Gaff always creates it in the moment, as a commentary as to whatever is occurring in-scene (a chicken, a man with an erection, etc).

The unicorn scrap makes more sense in the original cut— Gaff went to Deckard's apartment, saw Rachel, and left a calling card. The unicorn is a commentary on Rachel's status. She's unique in the world, almost magical.

I've always found the idea that Deckard is a replicant to be almost offensive. It strips away the last vestiges of PKD's story, undercuts a big theme in the movie, and makes the entire story less dramatic. A film about robots who are more empathetic than their human oppressors might resonate. A movie about a bunch of those same robots chasing each other is meaningless.

As a reveal in the last 5 seconds of runtime, it's useless. If we go with that interpretation, it changes nothing about anything we've just seen. In fact, it makes the whole film feel more shallow. Deckard as a replicant is a Kaiser Sozse level of dumb twist.

Btw, I saw an interview with the principals about a week before "2049" came out --- Scott still insists that Deckard is a replicant.

[Spinal]

Scott still insists that Deckard is a replicant.

Wow, this is just astonishing to me, for the reasons that you outlined.

[Grouchy]

Well, he also insists Xenomorphs were created by Michael Fassbender. Or giant albinos.

I'm going to respond to your post, Irish - I'm just going AFK at the moment.

[[ETM]]

Right -- so if Joi is only a gadget, why would the audience care when Luv stomps on her? Can't K just go out and buy another one and resume their relationship?

That's more or less the problem with every artificial character in "2049." They have no personality, no wants, no desires, and they don't seem particularly worried about anything. Dramatically, that's dull. Watching this movie was like watching a toaster chase a microwave for 3 hours. The outcome has no stakes and no depth because the "people" involved are commonplace and replaceable.

"2049" doesn't seem to understand that when you kill a person, you end something that is unique. When you kill a replicant, you destroy an appliance.

What?! No. Just... What?! NO.

Is that what you got from everything? Wow. That's, like... the whole point of both movies. Replicants are models, but each is unique. They're given a starting point because they're activated as adults, but they're not identical - their experiences shape their personas, just like twins are not the same people. I don't think they were given the same memories between units of the same model. The Nexus 6s had a short lifespan and were neurotic adult children that couldn't be controlled. Nexus 8s are vastly different and the survivors are obviously fully formed individuals with strong goals and unique traits.

The Joi AI is probably pretty similar to the replicants, but mass produced and identical at the start, with simpler basic programming. However, the learning part and development of individual traits is likely identical to replicants. K can't just buy another Joi - she's been with him for years and probably knows him as well as any of us know our spouses/partners. The nature of their relationship and how unique or "real" it is is wide open for interpretation, but outright dismissal is bewildering to me.

I can't even believe we're having this conversation at all.

[Irish]

I haven't really followed every detail of the development of this. Is this something he had talked about? The racism against "skinjobs" seemed natural to me. Who are you calling an animistic totem?

"Skinjob" was used by M Emmett Walsh's police captain in the original movie, in obviously looped dialogue. Walsh said later he had no idea that it was supposed to be a slur, and that he and Scott never had a conversation about any racist aspect of his character. (The voiceover, which Scott later removed, reinforces that "skinjob" is supposed to be slur.) So I think reusing it in the sequel made for dumber writing, because it's also more explicit. This is a scifi world that already makes it painfully obvious that the replicants are basically slaves and that society views them as subhuman. No need to piledrive the point.

The wooden horse in "2049" is vaguely animistic. It's Scott doubling down on that fucking unicorn idea --- a totem connected to memory that has deep personal significance for the protagonist but also wider implications for the world.

Both films use memory as a plot device. The original does it a little better (Deckard cruelly quotes Rachel's memories -- private moments he couldn't possibly know -- as a way of proving to her that she's artificial.) Scott's recuts use the unicorn reverie to suggest that Deckard is a replicant. The sequel uses K's memory of hiding a toy to motivate him and drive the plot forward.

"2049" might have been directed by Villaneuva and written by Francher/ Green, but it has Ridley's fingerprints all over it. I don't know why, at 80, he's decided to become some sort of genre philosopher. He doesn't have the head for it, and he's never struck me as a particularly reflective or sentimental guy.

[Irish]

Replicants are models, but each is unique.

There really isn't anything in the original film to suggest this. Captain Bryant describes Pris to Deckard as "your basic pleasure model" and a "standard item on military bases" during their briefing. "2049" has a brief scene where somebody talks about customizing replicants to spec but I'm not sure that's the same as 'unique.'

I get what you're saying about individual experience, and that's why I think the themes of the story are so terrific. If we built a sentient android that looked and sounded like a human, and had its own memories and the ability to have its own experiences, then what's the difference between us and them? What makes humans human? PKD suggested the difference lay in our ability to empathize.

(Total aside, but in the book Rachel and Pris are the same model. There's a moment when Deckard leaves Rachel because he must retire Pris---in other words, he leaves his lover to kill someone who looks and sounds exactly like her. It's one of the freakier things from the novel I wish they had kept.)

K can't just buy another Joi - she's been with him for years and probably knows him as well as any of us know our spouses/partners.

For that to work, the audience must read a lot into a single moment: When K wishes Joi a "happy anniversary." Other than that, there's nothing to suggest how long they've known each other or even how long they've been 'alive.' (K is such a blank slate that for all we know he could have been incepted last week.)

I'd buy into Joi as anything other than an appliance if she ever demonstrated an individual personality or had any agency. But she's more akin to a holographic RealDoll than she is a person. In every scene, she's focused on K's wants and needs and never expresses any desires of her own. She has no inner life. Even when she's about to die, she's still looking to him. It doesn't come off to me as a real relationship. It comes off as a weird robot fantasy. (And possibly the fantasy of half the audience and a handful of the producers.)

[Dukefrukem]

Wow, this is just astonishing to me, for the reasons that you outlined.

Did you see his comments before 2049 came out? It's like, he doesn't even know his own material and makes it worse by like 10^10.

Oh, it was always my thesis theory. It was one or two people who were relevant were… I can’t remember if Hampton agreed with me or not. But I remember someone had said, “Well, isn’t it corny?” I said, “Listen, I’ll be the best fucking judge of that. I’m the director, okay?” So, and that, you learn — you know, by then I’m 44, so I’m no fuckiing chicken. I’m a very experienced director from commercials and The Duelists and Alien. So, I’m able to, you know, answer that with confidence at the time, and say, “You know, back off, it’s what it’s gonna be.” Harrison, he was never — I don’t remember, actually. I think Harrison was going, “Uh, I don’t know about that.” I said, “But you have to be, because Gaff, who leaves a trail of origami everywhere, will leave you a little piece of origami at the end of the movie to say, ‘I’ve been here, I left her alive, and I can’t resist letting you know what’s in your most private thoughts when you get drunk is a fucking unicorn!’” Right? So, I love Beavis and Butthead, so what should follow that is “Duh.” So now it will be revealed [in the sequel], one way or the other.

http://screenrant.com/blade-runner-2...ard-replicant/

[Dukefrukem]

There really isn't anything in the original film to suggest this.

Again, it depends on which cut you watch and if you believe Scott....

1. Rutger Hauer picks Decker up by his neck with one hand at the end. Doesn't this suggest some kind of combat model?
2. Decker puts on the DUMBEST persona when investigating one of the Replicants. She shouldn't know who he is anyway but he does. Detective model??
3. The voice over at the end of the theatrical cut, where Decker is reflecting on "life"- he says something like: "Why didn't he kill me? Maybe he loved my life"

[Irish]

Again, it depends on which cut you watch and if you believe Scott....

1. Rutger Hauer picks Decker up by his neck with one hand at the end. Doesn't this suggest some kind of combat model?
2. Decker puts on the DUMBEST persona when investigating one of the Replicants. She shouldn't know who he is anyway but he does. Detective model??
3. The voice over at the end of the theatrical cut, where Decker is reflecting on "life"- he says something like: "Why didn't he kill me? Maybe he loved my life"

1. Roy is a combat model. He's described so at the start of the film (by Bryant when he briefs Deckard).

2. I guess? There's a moment in "The Big Sleep" when Humphrey Bogart adopts a goofy persona for no real reason, either. I don't think it means anything.

3. Not sure what you're getting at there. Roy is dying during the chase at the end and he knows it. It's why his hand cramps up and shoves a nail through it; parts of his body are already experiencing a kind of rigor mortis. Anyway, Deckard says: "I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life. Anybody's life. My life. All he wanted is the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do is sit there and watch him die."

Every replicant character in the original film has a different function and slightly different specs, so in a way it makes sense that they all look physically different from one another. (Plus, I mean, in practical terms they were all different actors.)

I dunno if it makes sense to mass produce machines for slave labor, though, and make each one of them individually different. There's no advantage to do doing that from a production or design standpoint. I mean, as a rough corollary think about desktop computers --- for 20 years those sold mass market retail and they were all, for the most part, boring beige boxes.

It's part of the fun of the movie that we can get lost in the weeds on these details --- it's also another way I think the original was smarter than the sequel. They knew enough to avoid getting into exactly how replicants are produced, because it isn't really what the story was about.

[transmogrifier]

The more I think about it, the more I think my dissatisfaction can't be solely due to the fact that the protagonist is a robot, although I admit, it doesn't help. After all, when HAL is shut down in 2001, that is a captivating, emotional moment for me. I'm fully invested in HAL as a character, even though he is little more than a voiceover.

I think the problem for me may be more to do with my feeling that if K is not "The Chosen One", then why is he at the center of this movie? I don't really get a whole lot out of his sacrifice emotionally. I started the movie thinking he was a sophisticated piece of machinery. And that's where I end it. He doesn't assume any of the duties and responsibilities of "The Chosen One", so the filmmakers are banking on the fact that I will care about his loss of identity. I didn't. Deckard is alive ... and this matters because? What can he accomplish that no one else can? I concede that this might make more of an impact if I liked the first film more than I do.

Why do we need another Chosen One arc? That has been beaten to death, and I'm glad they subverted it here. We get to see a character start as passive and submissive who then stumbles across something that jolts him out of his mundane routine (mostly against his will). But the best thing about it is, just as he starts to accept his new role and position in the universe, it gets taken away from him, and he's left back where he started in terms of not really being of any great importance to the world at large.... but now he has some agency and he decides to actually act DESPITE being just another nobody. I'll take that arc over yet another boring Chosen One story any day of the week.

[TGM]

For that to work, the audience must read a lot into a single moment: When K wishes Joi a "happy anniversary." Other than that, there's nothing to suggest how long they've known each other or even how long they've been 'alive.'

There's also the moment where she requests he delete her from his computer at home. He's hesitant to do so though, because, as he mentions to her, if anything happens to his portable device that she's uploaded to, then she's gone for good. So they've at least been together long enough for him to fear losing her and all they've been through together, else he wouldn't have a need to think much of it, as he could always just buy another one.

[Philip J. Fry]

[Watashi]

I think Blade Runner 2049 and Lars and the Real Girl would make an interesting double feature.

[Ivan Drago]

Cracking up ... next summer from Pixar!

The Brave Little Toaster Questions His Existence 2049!

[D_Davis]

Philip K. Dick was ultimately concerned with the authenticity of the human experience and these films explore that to some degree. If you find that interesting you might like them.

[D_Davis]

I think Blade Runner 2049 and Lars and the Real Girl would make an interesting double feature.

Lars and the Real Girl probably does a better job at tackling Phildickian themes than any movie actually based on any of Dick's writing.