SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 139 - Blade Runner 2049

[Tufts]

Tyrell had the secret and he never told anyone, Rachael was the only one ever made.

That makes sense. For some silly reason, I thought it just happened. LOL

 

[MusterX]

Yes!

Was she a particular little girl? If she is, I missed that. I thought maybe he felt affection for her since she reminded him of the one he saved?

It was either that he was attached to that little girl for the reason you say or because that was THE little girl, I think it was THE little girl. He destroyed those guys over her. Also, when "K" confronts Sapper in the movie, he asks Sapper how he knows or something like that and Sapper said, "Because you've never seen a miracle." So we know Sapper saw the little girl at some point. The Replicants are hiding her because she's the golden child that can reproduce and the police want her because as Joshi said, she's the thing that "breaks the world", and Wallace wants her because he can't figure out how Tyrell made Rachael. As smart as he is, he can't figure out Tyrell's last secret.

 

[moreorless87]

Roy Batty was on an ubermensch trip for sure. He had realized that God is dead / humans are inferior and not a worthy cause. He lead his vanguard to the source to see what’s up, found more meat puppets and went on to inspire Deckard with his dying moments.

I always got the feeling personally that Scott was the one who really took the story in this direction(possible due to his brothers death) which is what caused the disconnection with Hampton Thancher who was looking more to the replicants as standing in for slavey/racism/inequality. That Thancher was involved in 2049 and the replicants ended up being used in that fashion doesn't seem like a coincidence to me. Again I did feel like Joi and the idea of K's sense destiny were the most interesting ideas in the film that pushed it beyond a more straight forward anti slavery story which is why I'd have liked to see them given more focus. In terms of economics as well I think in retrospect keeping the story a bit smaller with that kind of focus with say half the budget would probably have been better.

In terms of the visuals I think you could definitely argue the nature of the story has a big effect. the originals grander romantic metaphysics(I want to punch myself for writing that but can't think of a better description) I think naturally suited its very eye catching visuals. The sequel being more focused on a down to earth oppressive gritty story naturally moved away from the more romantic visuals

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

It is also interesting to me that discussion was centered only around the danger the replicants could pose, with no one giving a shit about anything that might happen to the replicants themselves.

What's to give a shit about? I've seen how you take care of your Jeep, in spite of giving her a name.

 

[Bullitt68]

Caveat 1: Not a Blade Runner fan.

Caveat 2: Not a Denis Villeneuve fan.

Caveat 3: Not a Ryan Gosling fan (unless you count enjoying watching him bust up here and here).

Caveat 4: Not a Harrison Ford fan (though The Fugitive and Air Force One rule).

Caveats out of the way, this movie was pretty stupid. Not terrible, but nothing really going for it - and, outside of its connections to the original, literally nothing going for it. I don't really have much to say beyond that, and I certainly don't have anything deep or profound to say (because the movie didn't have anything deep or profound to say). So, to make up for the fact that this is an extremely sparse review, I'm going to post the unedited (save for the added gif and clips to clarify what was going through my mind) little notes/jottings that I made while I was watching.

For the record: Unlike when @jei and Tufts do this, this isn't a full play-by-play, and unlike when @FrontNakedChoke and Cubo do it, I was neither high nor drunk
___________________________________________________________________________________
Opening is dumb. Bautista sucks. "Never seen a miracle." Huh? Is this supposed to be Batty profundity? And don't even show him get shot? Why? Just stupid. Then he happens to notice a flower from in his car? Should've been walking by it and stopped.

Flying in to city, Ridley's 1982 future looked better than Denis' 2017 future. This shit looks like a bad video game. C'mon son.

Cells. Interlinked. WTF? Some explanations coming any time soon? Is this supposed to be a new and improved Turing test? WTF is it testing?

Comes home and turns on Summer Wind. You ain't Mickey, motherfucker.

What's with the hologram chick who isn't real yet can start a fire to light a cigarette without touching it and have (or just thinks she has?) raindrops fall on her? Still waiting on those explanations of WTF I'm watching...

Pregnant replicants? What happened, she hook up with a Terminator with great motility? WTF is this shit?

"You've been getting on fine without one."



What's "the Blackout"? Is the bald creep at the desk a human or a replicant (and, if the latter, old or new gen?)? If he's a replicant, why's he talking about his mom and baby pictures? Does he think he's a human like Sean Young? Explain your fucking movies, people.

Replicant chick flirting with Gosling. Even fake people get real horny.

Edward James motherfucking Olmos. Not even a Blade Runner fanboy, but that's fucking awesome. Has anyone ever mumbled quietly with more profundity and gravitas than this man?

So 40 minutes in and the first bit of exposition just adds confusion. So Tyrell made fertile replicants? Sean Young was the first and last "fully functional" female replicant, she had a kid, that (ostensibly also fully functional) replicant (or human/replicant hybrid depending on whether Deckard was human or replicant) is out there, and Leto and Wright both want it. What was with the stomach stab on the new model, though? WTF was that business?

So Gosling thinks he's Sean Young's baby? Guess Bautista never met him? Or didn't recognize him (Blackout wipe?)?

What happened to Gos, then? Has that one memory that was real which means he was a child which is impossible. Who got him from where and how is he now going along thinking he's a run of the mill replicant with no real past?

Sex scene retarded. They needed to invest more in that relationship for it to mean anything. I don't give a fuck about them as a couple, about her and her struggles to be real for him, I just don't care, so the stupid "romantic interludes" interrupting the mystery of the replicant child hunt are just getting in the way and pissing me off.

They took Ford but not Gos? Why? And how did hooker chick show up in no one's ever been there Fordland? Who writes these awful scripts? Has no one in Hollywood ever taken a screenwriting class or even read a How To Write A Movie book?

So it's not Gos? It's memory girl and she put one of her own memories in him. Why? To what end? Like some street graffiti artist tagging her shit? This movie is so fucking dumb.

Dies on steps in snow. You ain't Cagney, motherfucker.

This is one of the most gorgeous movies I’ve ever seen.

You need to see more movies. I know there's no way for that to sound like anything other than the most pretentious dickish response ever, but I don't mean it in a "You're a piece of shit who knows nothing and needs to learn you some good shit," I mean it in a "If you think that's gorgeous, then you've got so much more amazing shit out there just waiting to knock your socks off" way.

Out of curiosity, what was so gorgeous about it? Other than the shot of Luv walking to Wallace's office after the Olmos scene, it seemed pretty pedestrian to me.

The Elvis scene was incredible.

It was kinda dead creatively IMO.

More than "kinda." Take away the link to the original and it was utterly lifeless.

This movie looks great so you should watch it in theatres or something but if you just watch it on tv like I did it's pretty meh. Visually it's stunning. Story-wise it's okay. In terms of acting I think Ryan Gosling is usually terrible and this movie didn't sway my opinion. I got so excited when Harrison Ford showed up so we can see a real movie star. Would never watch again.

Pretty much this, except that I didn't think that it was visually stunning (for the record, I watched it on Blu-ray on my big HD TV - not the big screen, but not my computer, either) and I got excited when I saw Edward James Olmos, not Harrison Ford.

How I felt while watching in theatres when this first came out

This is how I felt while I was watching it tonight. I actually caught myself just listening to it with my eyes closed at one point.

Joi feels like she is alive

Does she, though? She's just executing the program. It literally says on the box, "Everything you want to hear." People think it's cold if, after a dog dies, you casually bring up the idea of just getting another one. Well, in the case of Jois, that's actually legit. No replacement dog will be the same, but what differentiates one Joi from another? Do they have individual personalities? Are they "learning computers" like Terminators who grow and change and form personalities on the basis of the specific relationships that they form with unique "customers"? Or are they just going by the programming "script"? Seems pretty clearly to be the latter, and if they were going for something deeper, they failed miserably.

The next glaring elephant in the room is the gap in speed and power between humans and Replicants, a good example being the cold-hearted Luv [...] Luv is an example of a driven A.I. that wants not only to bring about a major paradigm change but she wants to do it for her maker, Niander Wallace

Two things.

First, I don't think that "cold-hearted" applies to Luv. If she was cold-hearted, then Joshi telling her that K killed the miracle birth baby wouldn't have cut her so deep. She's not a Terminator. She absolutely has feelings. But they're reserved for (a) her kind and (b) those of her kind who are on her side. If you're not a member of either (a) or (b), then she's remorseless, but that's because she believes 100% in her cause, and her cause entails full- and warm-hearted commitment to her kind, to liberating them and providing them with a better future.

Second, saying that she wants to liberate her kind and provide them with a better future for her maker makes her sound like a brainwashed puppet, but I don't see that in her. She believes in Wallace and shares his vision, but she's fiercely independent and has a mind of her own and her actions strike me as the products of her will, not Wallace's.

If pressed, I'd be willing to concede that there's some validity to europe's characterization...

I wonder if Luv's psychopathic tendencies are also comments on the "programming vs nurture" debate thing-y.

Luv kills viciously. But it's not because she's some cold ninja-killing program. It seems more about wanting the affection of Wallander. She has just a strong desire to become "human" as K does -- only for her, it means gaining the approval of her father-figure. She even tells K when they first meet, "It is invigorating being asked personal questions. Makes one feel... desired."

She's very much like an abused child. The kind who becomes sadistic yet also obsessed about living in the shadow of their progenitors.

...but even this takes it a little too far out of Luv's own hands for me.

How human can A.I. be? [...] That emotion, that tear, is one of the bridges between human and machine.

Nothing in the history of film or TV has ever even approached the disturbing poignancy of the way that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles dealt with this. Season 1, Episode 7, final scene. Y'all can thank me later.

I also felt Villeneuve did an incredible job recreating the Roy Batty "tears in the rain" scene by having K die in a snow fall after gifting Deckard a new chance in life, and telling him that his daughter had all the best memories anyway.

Perfect symptom of what Zer accurately characterized as the film's creative deadness. Batty's death scene features a legitimately profound moment of reflection. K just lies down and dies. For all of Blade Runner's flaws, Scott at least had something to say, he touched on something. Villeneuve just pointed his camera at it because he didn't have anything to say.

One other thing I want to add is that about 30 or 40 years passed in between the first Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. Deckard tells K that the "Black Out" helped to hide the child. The Black Out occurred in 2022. It was a huge EMP blast that destroyed all electronic records and some fear that the same could happen to us someday because we have digitized all information. The 30 years in between movies was covered with some shorts that have been compiled in the video below. If you are interested in the Blade Runner universe and what happened in between the first and second movies I highly recommend you watch this.

You're telling me that I have to watch Youtube shorts before watching a 3 hour movie in order to understand the 3 hour movie?

The Elvis sequence is one of my favorite scenes ever.

Jesus, dude, you seriously love this movie, huh?

I forgot Deckard was in 2049. That was some massively overdone fan service that added nothing to the film.

Added nothing to the film? That was the film.

It's like a terrible fanfic with all the smut edited out.

Yeah. Like I said: That was the film

I think the androids in 2049 are just analogous to oppressed minorities because we're in the victims are the new heroes culture. Because every film has to have the same social conscience nowadays. I definitely agree that the androids in the original Blade Runner were far more interesting and the idea that they'd lived fuller lives than most humans is a pretty profound way to make a statement, even if in 2017 it'd be a bumpy road saying slaves can find fulfillment in their lot.

It's like you're in my head, man.

Huh...

I thought it one of the worst in the film.

Mine too.

Not a lot of competition in 2017 though. Logan, Baby Driver, Shape of Water, Get Out?

Blade Runner 2049 doesn't need a lot of, or very stiff, competition to come out on the losing end. Logan, Dunkirk, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Fate of the Furious, they're all better. Logan in particular is ten times the film Blade Runner 2049 is.

Just looking at this stills I gotta give it to Ridley.

@Cubo de Sangre listens to some really interesting discordant "music" that makes my teeth ache at times. In this movie though, I found myself truly digging and appreciating the discordant soundtrack that accompanied most of the exterior shots. It really did a good job of creating that sense of disconnection, isolation, and chaos that was life existence in the movie.

Unless I missed it in someone else's post, you're the first person to bring up the soundtrack. I forgot to mention it, but yes, the music was excellent. By far the best part of the film.

Can we take a minute to acknowledge how freaking tough, hot and amazing Robin Wright is!

Her character actually kind of bugged me because it called to mind a tamer and less caustically hilarious version of Jessica Tuck's character Nan Flanagan from True Blood, which had me going...

 

[gondo]

I said that I was done being Bull-late, I checked over the weekend and saw that this movie was available on HBO OnDemand, I planned my week so that I could watch and write about it today, and I just went to start it up and I found that it's no longer available OnDemand and that if I want to watch it on my HD TV I'll have to shell out 13 bucks.

Fuck HBO, fuck Comcast, and fuck New Year's resolutions.

VPN plus yify downloads. 720-1080p-3D options. Good enough quality to look great on my “100 projector screen. There’s free vpns that just limit you to 10-20 GB for every 3-4 weeks.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

For the record: Unlike when @jei and Tufts do this, this isn't a full play-by-play, and unlike when @FrontNakedChoke and Cubo do it, I was neither high nor drunk

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Replicant chick flirting with Gosling. Even fake people get real horny.

That's called good programming.

 

[Tufts]

What's to give a shit about? I've seen how you take care of your Jeep, in spite of giving her a name.

She's a Jeep. That's how she rolls!

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Out of curiosity, what was so gorgeous about it?

It looked great in an air-brushed sort of way. Texture will always win out though.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

She's a Jeep. That's how she rolls!

Little pig.

 

[Bullitt68]

That's called good programming.

That said, I think that Sheila 3.2 boasts superior programming and design

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Unless I missed it in someone else's post, you're the first person to bring up the soundtrack. I forgot to mention it, but yes, the music was excellent. By far the best part of the film.

Still comes up short. Vengelis' original score is cult classic stuff.

I got one of these bootlegs back in the day through a friend of the guy that did it. Right off the master reels. At one point this was going for 100's. Should have sold. He also did Excalibur and The Bounty. Dude had access and enough creative respect to do some quality booklets/liner notes. All limited to 2000 copies.

https://www.discogs.com/Vangelis-Blade-Runner-Original-Motion-Picture-Soundtrack/release/765048

https://www.discogs.com/Vangelis-The-Bounty-Original-Motion-Picture-Soundtrack/release/1002626

https://www.discogs.com/Trevor-Jones-Excalibur-Original-Motion-Picture-Soundtrack/release/10186433

Unfortunately Excalibur took some water damage.

 

[moreorless87]

The second CD of the 3cd special edition that came out a few years ago is definitely worth a listen, maybe not as eye(ear) catching as the tracks on the original but a lot of nice atmospherics....

 

[Zer]

I'm surprised to see this getting panned pretty hard ITT. I thought I was going to be the only one and everyone would be calling me an asshole. I kinda feel a little bad for the film now.

I'll mention my positives - I really liked Hoeks as Joi. She caught me off guard because I wasn't expecting her to develop the way she did, but she creeps up and becomes a really boss villain. She was definitely the highlight of the movie.

Anyone love the end credits music? tbh I thought it was better than anything in original BR. It was pretty amazing in the cinema with the volume cranked up

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

I'm surprised to see this getting panned pretty hard ITT. I thought I was going to be the only one and everyone would be calling me an asshole. I kinda feel a little bad for the film now.

I'll mention my positives - I really liked Hoeks as Joi. She caught me off guard because I wasn't expecting her to develop the way she did, but she creeps up and becomes a really boss villain. She was definitely the highlight of the movie.

Anyone love the end credits music? tbh I thought it was better than anything in original BR. It was pretty amazing in the cinema with the volume cranked up

If you don't need a movie to be attached, try this.




For fun, here's a track from a record composed as an "alternate" soundtrack to The Thing.

 

[Yotsuya]

(I want to punch myself for writing that but can't think of a better description)

Often after writing a sentence for a post at Sherdog I pause and wonder if it’s very cringeworthy. Then I deem myself irresponsible for being a non-native English speaker and post anyways. It’s nice to have an excuse to act ignorant.

 

[Yotsuya]

So yeah it's sentimental egalitarian message movie... but damit, that's a good thing!

Well sure, if you like sentimental message movies.

I guess the rationale would be that those original Replicants saw some pretty amazing shit in their 7-year life-span. The kind of mind-bogglingly things that make people ponder about their existence. In contrast, Replicants like K lived very regulated and mundane lives. This new kids on the block Replicants never became like that because they didn't have their experiences.

As I wrote before, my critique was not about the inner logic of BR2049, but the choise of themes in general. I just don’t think this ”androids can be more humane that humans” theme was very original or interesting.

Both are artificial-creations who meet their maker (hell, David even meets the maker of his maker) and turn out to be singularly unimpressed by them. They can't grant David/Roy what they want and are driven by petty egos instead of highminded pursuits. Roy and David break off as a result of it.

Weyland was petty for wanting immortality from his creators (who had coded aging into his DNA) while Batty was not? I smell a double standard here.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

It’s nice to have an excuse to act ignorant.
Goldie11

I for one appreciate you learning what English American you have. I sure ain't smart enough to learn learning whatever you speak.






Suddenly I'm reminded of how good this was back in the day.





Even that E.T. dude knows what's up.

 

[Yotsuya]

I for one appreciate you learning what English American you have. I sure ain't smart enough to learn learning whatever you speak.






Suddenly I'm reminded of how good this was back in the day.





Even that E.T. dude knows what's up.

Writing English is pretty easy when you can google for words. Weighing if an expsession sounds silly coming from you is harder.