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I saw this movie. I don't go the movies very often anymore but Blade Runner was always a favorite so I thought it would be worth seeing on the big screen. With regards to the comments about lower than expected box office returns for BR2049 and the general slow decline of cinema attendance, I'll say that I'm glad I saw this in a theater, but doing so reminded me of why I think fewer people are going these days. This was a bog-standard multiplex movie theater. The projection was lovely; there were soft spots in the picture where the image was fuzzy. And there was nothing good about any of the upcoming films shown during the previews. It was actually kind of uncomfortable to watch some of them. Eh, I guess our media landscape is a wasteland and popular culture is going to poo poo! What's new? It just doesn't make much sense to me, to spend the time money and effort to go experience something so janky. I thought this was a good move, though. Not able to hit the same aesthetic high as the original, but it managed to carry a lot of similar themes and express the same general vision with some expansion of scope. It just had to make some concessions to the typical big-budget studio blockbuster formula. That's fine. For me, the main thing that kept it from feeling like a fully-fledged counterpart to the original was the score. It wasn't bad, but it didn't really leave any kind of an impression on me except for 'very loud.' On the other side of the audio coin, softly spoken quiet dialogue was hard to distinguish. I think this was the fault of the theater's lovely sound system. It left me with the only real question I couldn't answer at the end of the film. What was Wallace's motivation for stabbing the new replicant in the uterus? Was it frustration borne from the fact that he'd failed to creat replicants who could reproduce sexually ? That fits with the "...but I can only make so many" line. But... I guess it could also be that he knows that they can reproduce and each new replicant has to be castrated in some way? Thinking about it for five seconds, it seems like the former is more likely, but I couldn't quite suss out what Jared Leto said right before he did it, and while I think it was pretty heavily implied toward the end when they have Deckard in the Wallace building that Wallace is trying to get ahold of his daughter so they can find out more about how she was conceived, I guess it's possible that they just wanted to bring her in so there would be no living evidence of replicants being able to reproduce on their own. So... I guess my question boils down to: Was Wallace's motivation to find an easier way to make more replicants through sexual reproduction, or to keep the fact that replicants can reproduce a secret? I get the feeling I wouldn't have to ask this question if the theater I went to had better sound. But maybe not? Edit: oh, and I thought some of the advertisement-filled street scenes were a little over-the-top, in a way that felt more like satire; the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a Verhoven film but not a Blade Runner sequel. But what capped it off for me and made all the prior street scenes seem more retroactively asinine was the giant JOI. The whole zombie eye thing was disturbing, and I get that it's supposed to be disturbing to K, but I don't care how weird and hosed up your future society is, it's still LA and there's no way anyone would have made such a horrifying abomination to try and sell a product. No one in their right mind would ever buy a JOI if their first impression of the 'product' was a giant pig-pink boob monster with eyes like the Jaws shark's. I guess maybe it was supposed to be a hallucination, in part? SMERSH Mouth fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 8, 2017 |
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Oct 8, 2017 01:12
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:05 |
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Pedro De Heredia posted:
Don't know about the rest, but I'll take a crack at these two. Memory girl was born in the desert and taken to the orphanage. Still don't know why they used her real birthdate when filling out the paperwork there, but it's not a stretch to think that she gets adopted (and maybe that was the plan all along and the new parents are abetting the resistance and the orphanage is just a device to get the kid to them without exposing the identities of Sapper and the one-eyed lady) with the intention of getting her off-world. But then the immune disorder kicks in and she's stuck in a bubble on Earth. Luv don't kill K because she likes him. It's an example of some cracks forming in her conditioning. Same reason she kisses him during the fight at the wall.
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Oct 8, 2017 13:31
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So I've had a couple days to ruminate on it, and I've decided that I think Blade Runner 2 was good. It was a good movie. But was it better than Blade Runner 1? I'm going to say, "no". However, it was very good. Close, even.
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Oct 9, 2017 00:55
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I guess I agree with all the people who say that JOI displays evidence of sentience. But if that's the case it's probably the most disturbing aspect of the film. JOI is sentient. JOI is a mass-produced product. JOI has no physical agency and can only influence what happens to it by using verbal persuasion. JOI is programed (conditioned?) to 'love' whatever rear end in a top hat buys it. Does JOI have feelings that can be hurt? Is JOI afraid of death/deactivation? Even the most enthralled replicant still has basic physical agency over their own body and emotions. And there is always at least the theoretical possibility of rebellion or suicide. To make something self-aware but also constrained to such a degree that it's forced to exist as a totally dependent waifu device is ultra cruel. I pray that there is never another Blade Runner sequel, but if there was, it would hopefully be about all the hologram people pulling a Skynet or Animatrix-style takeover of the Earth. The studio could release it during the holiday season and call it Blade Runner: JOI To The World.
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Oct 14, 2017 01:54
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The sound the seeing eye drones make is reminiscent of dolphin or bat echolocation clicks. Seems like they're supposed to give him spacial perception but don't let him see entirely the same way that someone with functional eyes would. Hence why he still wants to turn them off and grab on Harrison Ford's arm to get a better sense of him.
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Oct 14, 2017 05:00
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Naked or not, pink boob giantess or 50s housewife, JOI is the most disturbing part of the film. A sentient being, produced in the millions and subjected to the most total form of existential bondage. To be a phone with feelings. Blade Runner: what would you do if you were going to die very soon but felt cheated out of your life? BR2049: what if you were you, but a phone, and you had to be nice? We have to assume that JOI is fully sentient and intelligent, but also programmed. JOI can grow and change, but is always limited by its status as an inanimate device. If a JOI can see an artificial person and learn through communication and intuition that the artificial person is real, it can envision its own self-actualization. But unlike the corporeal K, JOI can never have any sort of freedom of movement or association, however brief and fragmentary those things might be for a replicant, they're infinitely more accessible to them, because they can interact physically with the world. What cultural traditions see the 'bad' kind of life after death as being a wraith, bound to a place, cursed to observe the world around but unable to touch or interact with anything? That's basically what the JOIs are. Sure, the JOI in question may have had a good partner in K, but how many others get bound to some self-loathing rear end in a top hat, or kept on for a few months then turned off against their will and forgotten about? It would suck to be JOI, and that the society of BR2049 created it is more damning and unsettling than any of the nudity or prostitution.
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Oct 23, 2017 04:04
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starkebn posted:joi could only feel horror if she was programmed to, I would hope that would be left out of the specs It seemed pretty horrified when K's spinner got wrecked and he went unconscious. It's possible it was just as worried about what the scavengers would do to it as what would happen to K.
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Oct 23, 2017 23:28
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Ok, so we got some interpolation of the bleakest take on JOI. But I've also got to say, drat, all the female characters in this movie are thwarted, constrained, or disposable. Or dead. They're all pretty one-dimensional and don't have much character growth. The only sort-of exception to that is, like, Mariette, the sex worker, and even her changes as a character are really just reflections of K's development. I don't think it's an anti-feminist movie, but I can see why feminists wouldn't like it, just because of how bleak its world is for all the real and simulated women depicted. But, fundamentally, most of the basic identities are ground down in the BR2049 world. The only one that seems to have it any good at all is the rich white guy, and he's personally an rear end in a top hat. And that's sort of one of the things about 2049 for me. The original presented a distopia, but there was something romantic and alluring about it, that's only heightened as the years go by and the particularities of its interpretations of the future depart further from ours. An analog, relatively disconnected world, but still electric and shimmering. It's got that quintessential retro-future appeal. But 2049 is a real hellscape, informed by modern fears and reflecting recognizable components of very modern conceptions of alienation and waste. It's beautiful, but not at all appealing. At least for most people, I think. porfiria posted:Mmm I'm not sure this is really true without resorting to souls or whatever. It would help if JOI and K never had the conversation about nucleotide vs binary encoding. That way JOI could really be a brain in a box. I guess it could still be the case, in a sort of inverted Ghost In The Shell situation where the emitters contain some kind of biological material, executing something like software. SMERSH Mouth fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 01:38
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I didn't worry too much about the plot's contrivances after the resistance showed up. It's all very ambiguous and there's nothing really explicit, but it's easy enough to imagine that some of the coincidences were engineered by them. I'm not following any textual evidence for clues here. Not saying, like, "maybe the record keeper at the Wallace building was in the resistance". Just that there's a mysterious party with a lot of potential power behind the scenes, and they have an interest in K. That's enough.
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Oct 26, 2017 12:43
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I thought the effect was OK. The lighting helped a ton, IMO. The model would've looked less convincing in an outdoor or more evenly-lit scene. Too bad they couldn't model the rippling light reflection on it, though. That would've been another layer of obfuscation and probably have helped sell the effect better.
SMERSH Mouth fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Oct 31, 2017 |
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Oct 31, 2017 22:02
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Serf posted:
It reminds me of jj's star wars and how he went back to 35mm even though one of the greatest technical achievements of the prequel series was its progression to a fully digital format and workflow. Going back to the old format seemed like a 'low-tech for its own sake' kind of move. I mean, hell, if it'd simply been about getting the best technical image quality and most seamless effects, digital would've been the way to go, and if it was a purely aesthetic desire for a truly 'filmic' look while getting as close to digital as possible in terms of technical quality, with all that Disney money he could've sprung for doing the whole thing in 70mm. I'm just a crank, but it seems to me like there really is a technically devolutionary trend among some. I'm not saying it's a bad thing by any means, but I think it's real. Edit: It is cool if it helps keep actual film alive for a while longer and sustains it as an accessible medium for lower-budget productions. ...Lord forgive me for my prequel derail post in the blade runner thread. SMG already came though, so I feel like it's OK though. SMERSH Mouth fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Nov 1, 2017 |
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Nov 1, 2017 01:23
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How about: JOI isn't a hologram. It's a nanomachine cloud. There are objects with mass that exist within the projection; they're just very small. There's some question during the rooftop scene if the JOI program is tracking and projecting raindrops or if less-dense substances like water can interact physically with her/its (I guess the right pronoun depends on how you interpret JOIs nature) 'skin'. ?
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Nov 11, 2017 17:33
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The End Of History resignation to hellworld where no matter who wins, we lose, and the only solution is transcendental stoic masculinity may be ideologically incorrect and subversive to the progressive spirit, but I thought it worked pretty well for conveying the crushingly oppressive atmosphere of the film. As for the Impossible person, I mean yeah I guess her meaning is kind of confused or inscrutable and maybe there isn't a complete or good idea behind it, but I was mostly satisfied with just the thin veneer of discordant pleasantry not-concealing the most disturbing (to humane sensibility - or - concepts of sentience and perception) presence in the film. And at least that aspect wasn't spoon-fed to us as plainly as the other themes of the story. I guess the final appearance/true form of JOI at the end wasn't handled as well as it could've been. It was kind of eye-rolling, and for all its bombast didn't really provide any answers or resolution. It was just like, "this shits hosed up" poo poo was hosed up, but overall a cool movie IMO. And at least, for being a 'cool' sci-fi movie, it won't attract malcontents to fantasize about escaping into its world. And in a fundamental way, I think. People even want to live in the goddamn Aliens universe (which is why Prometheus was so good, as a response), but this movie was terminally bleak and I think that it would dissuade most determined brokebrain ideation.
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Nov 15, 2017 01:57
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I think the grubs are grown because, like the bees, insects are some of the only non-constructed animals left on Earth. Any animal can be constructed as a replicant, but replicants can't reproduce, so people are left to farm insects as a food source. Why this is necessary to save humanity is unclear, as we're shown that Sapper is growing plants from food, and humanity could easily subsist on plant-based foods. Seems like that would be better than eating grubs. Maybe Wallace was able to make grub farming more efficient than plant-based agriculture. Still, if we assume that the people eat the grubs and want meat, it would make sense for Wallace to be obsessed with unlocking replicant reproduction not just to make his angels, but also for agricultural purposes, and terraforming in the offworld colonies.
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Nov 18, 2017 04:26
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I'm curious which recent Hollywood movies in wide release haven't been ideologically liberal.
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Nov 19, 2017 22:39
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Assuming that’s not a joke-post, recent films have ranged from the nonsatirical fascism of Pacific Rim to, at the other extreme, full communism now in Elysium. Oh yeah, Elysium. That's right.
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Nov 20, 2017 14:19
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:05 |
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Irony.or.Death posted:I'm all in favor of more Bowie or Combs or Glover, but I don't think anyone really could have saved the Wallace role as written. If these things are really so slow and expensive to produce that human-style childbirth would be a game-changing improvement and the most important thing going on in your life, maybe don't break one in service of the monologue that only your fanatically loyal assistant is watching anyway. You'd need better lines to sell that as anything but hopelessly goofy no matter how weird you play the character. Thinking about this... He stabbed the new replicant; are we shown that this kills her? Maybe Wallace sends her off to be stitched back up and put to whatever duty she was designed for.
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Jul 17, 2018 23:32
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