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Pycckuu posted:Will we get the autistic,brooding Gosling from Drive or the chatty charming Gosling from all the date movies he's done? The former.
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Dec 25, 2016 16:08
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 02:21 |
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I mostly enjoyed the movie. Found it gripping, well paced, had good visuals, emotionally affecting, etc. However, I did not like the K is not really Deckard's son reveal and the way it affects the rest of the movie. There's been some discussions about that here already. I'd like to believe that this is something that is supposed to have at least *some* degree of ambiguity. If there isn't any ambiguity at all, and it is 100% what happens, then I don't think it really works for me. It's bad enough that it kind of messes up the movie for me. It kind of breaks the movie for me. The first two hours of the movie do a really solid job at putting you in the main character's shoes, getting you to understand the events from his perspective, etc. You follow along the mystery with him, you start realizing what the answer's going to be along with him, you are following the same steps as the character, everything makes perfect sense. It's a slow process of discovery that really connects you with K. However, when he finds out it isn't true, there's a break. He doesn't discover it through a process, he is just told. By someone we've never seen before, who hasn't been relevant to anything so far, and who is probably the least well-drawn character in the entire movie. It's a big change from how the movie had been delivering information, with very little time left for the movie to be over. From a plot mechanics point of view, it doesn't actually seem to change anything. What happens at the end of the movie is that K rescues Deckard and saves his life. That's pretty much what would have happened had he never found out that he wasn't Deckard's son. When Deckard is captured, the momentum of the movie is towards K rescuing him. There is just this weird, too-brief period where he's told 'actually, you should kill Deckard', one scene (iirc) where he's wandering around and there's *maybe* some doubt. It comes across less as if K underwent some change / evolution (that we the audience get to experience with him), and more as if the movie itself had a momentum towards a certain form of climax that just couldn't be stopped. From a plot/logic point of view, I also don't like it because K being Deckard's son is obvious in a good way. It makes sense within the movie's world but also just looking at it as a movie. It's a movie set 30 years after the original. The main character appears to be around 30, has the same type of job as Deckard, and is a replicant. It makes sense (in a movie sort of way) that this would be the person related to Deckard. The coincidence that he would happen to be the one who finds the bones (and ultimately has to find 'himself') is a bit incredible, but it's the kind of incredible *positive* coincidence that you can buy/accept in a movie. The steps he takes to find out that he's the baby are all perfectly reasonable too. If I remember correctly, he searches for babies born in this date, the abnormality he finds are two babies with the same genes, the 'girl' died but the 'boy' survived and was sent to an orphanage (here I don't entirely remember if K finds out the specific orphanage, or he just infers which one it could be). This leads him to corroboration that the memory is based on a real thing that happened. Then he corroborates that the memory is truly real by talking to the memory-maker, who says 'this memory is real'. The conclusion, then, is that K is the baby, which is a conclusion reached in a pretty reasonable way, which tracks well with this being a movie and a sequel. And, from this conclusion, we have ambiguity but not too many unanswered questions: we can just broadly infer that K would have lost his memory and left the orphanage/sweatshop at some point. There's not too many loose ends to tie here: he's a robot with no family, record, etc. But then its the memorymaker who is the bay. That's not so obvious. It means that, to a large extent, K and his characteristics and the things he goes through are constructed specifically to be a red herring. The obviousness of him being the baby is a *negative* coincidence. This 'negative' coincidence is, imo, less easy to accept in a movie than a positive coincidence, because it's about misleading you. The process by which K comes to believe he's the baby is also misleading. K finds out the memory is real because he goes to the orphanage. He gets there because he finds out the two DNA matches, one girl and one boy. The girl is said to be dead, the boy is said to be alive. He is able to use this information to figure out where the boy could have come from. At this point he already suspects the memory is real, because of the horse. But what if the records said the girl was alive and the boy was dead? Why do they say the girl is dead? It's not 'to throw people off the trail' because K was still able to reach the place where the memory came from.... That whole detail of the two DNAs and one dead/one alive really came across as a kind of nonsensical thing that exists entirely so that K, a man, can continue believing that he's the baby even though the baby was a girl. Then, y'know, basically K has confirmed that the memory is real. It has to be real; he found the horse, where it was supposed to be, from a memory that he shouldn't have. There isn't *really* a need for him to re-confirm that the memory is real, is there? The scene with the memorymaker is kind of misleading too. She basically says "yes, this is real memory. a memory of something that happened". This is a too big of a contrivance imo. It's a contrivance because the movie leads you to believe the only likely options are 'this memory is his' or 'this memory never happened', not 'this memory is someone else's'. K ostensibly has more abilities than the average human and literally works as a detective; you would think that if 'its a real memory, which means whoever put this memory in me is the baby' was a likely option, K would have investigated it. He doesn't, because the plot needs to distract you. Then I guess there's all sorts of questions about what is even going on with the memorymaker. What is her identity? The 'baby girl' with the DNA match was registered as deceased. So what is her citizen number or whatever? She's a civilian who works for a living, who mentions having real parents who set things up for her. How would all this get solved? How much of this is real? I mean obviously all this stuff could have a credible answer within the world of the movie, but it's a ton of missing information. It's too convoluted. You go from a relatively straightforward 'replicants have fake memories; maybe this memory is real b/c this replicant was born' to 'here's a character who makes a living by creating people's memories, who lives in a bubble and thus doesn't really have a lot of experiences to draw memories from, who has fake memories of her real life but who is maybe throwing in real memories into the memories of replicants', I mean c'mon now. I guess the TLDR is that I feel like the twist that K is not Deckard's son doesn't happen organically but instead is something that's just kind of dropped into the movie, makes a lot of the plot less logical and believable, makes a lot of storytelling decisions come across as more contrived, and it makes the plot (in a movie that, although thematically rich and having character development, is almost entirely driven by a straightforward mystery plot) be this kind of pointless thing that didn't amount to anything and was mostly just a bunch of weird coincidences. I really enjoyed the movie except for the twist so I'm more than happy to accept a good defense of it. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Oct 7, 2017 |
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Oct 7, 2017 23:26
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Acebuckeye13 posted:See, it actually worked for me, since the whole time I was thinking "Well wait, if he's Deckard's son, A) that would be one hell of a coincidence, and B) there's a lot of stuff that doesn't add up-after all, if he was born, why does he have a serial number? How did he get hired by the police? Why does he live, work, and identify as a replicant when he would have been born and grown up? All these things seem like they'd be big problems too if the memorymaker is the baby. It seems to me like it would be easier to pass off a replicant who was actually born as 'just another replicant' than as 'a real human'. A real human is supposed to have been born somewhere, is supposed to have a past, is supposed to have some sort of identification number and government registry too, generally has relatives, etc. A replicant doesn't have any of that. We intuitively understand this more because we know what a human life is like; we don't truly know what the life of a replicant looks like from 'start' to 'end'. The blackout can explain some gaps, but not all. The memorymaker is someone who actually seems to have a fake past that would have required money and effort, she seems to have fake memories (or is lying), and instead of being entirely off the grid she is literally a contractor for the company that makes replicants, she's right under everyone's noses. How would someone who is passing as a bubble person be able to do any of this without outside help, which could easily compromise her identity?
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Oct 8, 2017 00:01
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Steve Yun posted:The way I see it, K is special because of his actions, not his identity. He's told that he's the chosen one and that he's special, and then it's all ripped away from him. He no longer has a personal stake in saving Deckard, who is no longer his father, but he does so anyways because it seemed like the right thing to do. He found meaning in his life by dying for a selfless cause, not because of who his parents were Him as being special or 'the chosen one' is not really what most of it is about, though; K as a replicant is fundamentally alone: he has no family, no friends, his girlfriend is an AI. The idea that he was actually born seems to be more about connection to others; he seems to connect to the idea of having a mother, he asks about Rachel in a kind of emotional way. Deckard no longer being his father seems like a big deal because Deckard actually isn't anything to him but his father. They don't bond, they don't have a nice chat, nothing. Without the blood relation, Deckard is a cranky old man who shoots him, punches him a bunch of times, and then gets taken away. He's not dying for a cause either; there is no cause, Deckard wasn't even trying to find his daughter. The only cause we know about is that he should kill Deckard.
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Oct 8, 2017 00:30
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Jedit posted:Yes, the trail to K being the baby is obvious and leads the viewer away from the twist. This is the point. Rachel's baby has been hidden and the tracks covered. K is only able to get as far as he did because of the horse memory, without which he wouldn't have found the ossuary. That memory has probably been implanted into any number of replicants - it's hinted that Mariette has it - and any male ones who got that far in the search would naturally presume that they were the child. When you look for something that is hidden, you don't keep looking after you find it. I'm not entirely making sense of what you are arguing. Are you saying that the trail is supposed to lead you to thinking you're the baby so that you stop looking? I'm not sure that makes sense.
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Oct 8, 2017 01:33
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BumbleChump posted:After seeing the movie, I'm still not understanding why exactly does K think he's the child? Yes, he has a memory of the horse, and he actually found it, but the movie already stated that replicants have human memories implanted into them (or have fake ones). Why does he think that memory is his? The woman in the glass room said "yes, someone experienced this memory". "Someone" did. She didn't say that K did. The three options are 'it's a real memory of something he experienced', 'it's a fake memory', and 'it's a real memory of something someone else experienced'. When he meets the memorymaker, she tells him the story of her life, which does not seem to include the possibility of her having lived in some orphanage and thus being the person with those memories. When he talks to her, he asks her if she ever puts her real memories into replicants. She says that it's illegal. This is meant to make it seem like option 3 is extremely unlikely. Then when she sees the memory, she does not tell him it's option 3, even though it's her memory. So she is also misleading him into thinking option 3 is unlikely. If this were not a movie but 'reality', then yeah, it's likely that K, as a detective, would think it's much more likely that the memory came from a real person who put it in his brain. Then he could narrow it down using the ages of the memorymakers, dig into their private lives, and probably find some inconsistency that would lead to figuring out this girl is the baby. But it's a movie, and it's just kind of contrived so that K believes he's the baby and can also inadvertedly find the real baby at the same time so that the real baby can show up at the end as an adult woman.
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Oct 8, 2017 10:12
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Jedit posted:OK, in detail. Rachel's baby is hidden where she cannot be found until the resistance are ready to reveal her. However, the possibility exists that the trail might be found. I'm not sure this really makes sense or works for me. I can accept the plot contrivance that K coincidentially gets involved, because movies often require some kind of contrivance to get started. I can accept that the path leads him to the baby because the people didn't cover their tracks well enough. This is a bit different, though: its saying that these are not contrivances, but coldly calculated actions. I don't think they hold up to much scrutiny in that case. There doesn't seem to be a need for any kind of trail to exist. The one-eyed rebel woman appears to know where the baby is. She says that if Deckard is captured, he can lead them to her, and she can lead them to the baby. That's why they need to kill Deckard, to prevent the chain from leading them to the baby. That's what I understood from that scene; I don't remember the dialogue 100%, so maybe I am wrong. So the Replicants don't need a trail. If the Replicants don't need a trail to find the baby (which makes sense; you don't want to hide something important so thoroughly that you lose it, but you can't carve a path too obvious that someone else will find it), then the logical and obvious thing to do would be to have no trail at all. K is able to find a baby because he searches for anomalies in babies born on the same date as the one he found inscribed. Why put down the baby as having been born on this date in the first place? That's going to lead people to the baby. The baby was born in some farm, they could have probably said it was born whenever. Probably worth pointing out that there's really two 'trails' here, the paper trail and the memory trail. K is able to match a date he finds at the house to records of babies born and it leads him to the orphanage. Wouldn't this mean that, at many points in the past, anyone who found this date at the house could have searched for records of babies born on that date and then find the orphanage, where the baby might have actually been at that point? The other trail, the 'memory' trail, has nothing to do with the rebels. We don't know what's up with the memory, because we don't know what's up with the memorymaker. It's unclear whether she has fake memories of her life (because her bio does not match the reality) or whether she is intentionally hiding, thus we don't know if these memories she's putting into people are a coincidence, or if they're part of a plan. I mean ultimately K does find the orphanage, the horse, the baby (inadvertedly), he gets Deckard captured, etc... and they tell him he's not the baby (which is incredibly risky if he ends up getting captured in the mission that they just him off to). I mean, if there was a master plan to throw people off the trail of the baby it failed miserably. The only reason that baby isn't dead in the end is because the bad guys ludicrously decide not to kill K when they take Deckard; if they had, it'd be game over. The misdirection works from the 'movie is misdirecting the audience' point of view, but (for me) it doesn't work as well from the 'characters are trying to misdirect other characters' point of view. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Oct 8, 2017 |
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Oct 8, 2017 10:34
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David Heinrich posted:Yeah, I thought K thinking himself to be the baby was silly until I realized that it being an utterly nonsensical assumption was kind of the point. At least, in my eyes. There are many reasons why he couldn't be the baby; firstly, this is a world where the prostitutes and ditch diggers are custom ordered, and a replicant without a job is one that's going to be retired, and I also sort of doubt every single random Replicant is as utterly superhuman as the military or police models. Serf posted:K thinks he is Rachel's child because Stelline tells him that the the memory is real. She clearly uses an ambiguous wording, but only if you think she is attempting to misdirect him. I believe she just says "it's real, this happened", which is true, but she doesn't specifically say that the memory is K's. After all, before that she is seen constructing memories from whole cloth and says it is illegal to use actual memories, and K takes her at face value on that. He does this in spite of his usual meticulous nature as a detective because he wants to believe that he's special. I think Stelline knows exactly what she is and what she's doing as part of the resistance. Also, if she is aware of who she is, admitting the memory is real is risky. If the blade runner believed the memory was real but not his/her, then that would lead them to think the memorymaker is the baby. So going there and asking her if the memory is real would be basically asking for a confession. Jedit posted:The replicant resistance plot wasn't fleshed out quite enough, but it was clear that Stelline's importance is that she is the child of a replicant and that this being revealed would help the resistance. That means they did plan to reveal her at some point, when they were ready. However, they would need an evidence trail in order to prove that she really was what they said she was. The obfuscation was to stop that trail being taken to the end too soon. It also seems like you could prove she's who they say she is in a much less risky way. It's also a misdirection that wouldn't even really work if the blade runner chasing after her was female. Are blade runners only men? I mean, it is an explanation that makes a little sense, it is just poorly executed if that's what we were meant to understand. quote:The other thing people seem to be overlooking is that Rachel's child is natural born and so doesn't have fake memories. Her memories of falling sick just before her parents took her off-world thus have to be real, unless she's lying about having them in the first place - which doesn't seem likely. So there was originally intended to be another level of protection where the child was adopted by the Stellines and they would take her off-world, which failed when she developed her immunodeficiency. There's too much we have to assume just to make a late twist make sense. Not saying those assumptions aren't right, but I just don't think that's the best storytelling. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Oct 8, 2017 |
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Oct 8, 2017 17:03
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 02:21 |
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Yak of Wrath posted:The "Pony Memory" I believe was implanted into a portion of replicants to recruit to the slave rebellion. Those that had the memory were told of the "miracle" and inducted. The prostitutes were initially sent to look into K as a Blade Runner hunting the child, but the one in the apartment recognised the pony, so they approached K to recruit him. Would that even work well? The memory is just an unremarkable memory. It doesn't suggest anything about a miracle or would prime anyone to believe it. K only believes in the miracle because he finds the evidence that the memory is a real one and he's found the bones and knows from physical evidence that a replicant gave birth and seen the date scribbled near where the bones were found. Without the bones and the date scribbled at the burial site, though, it's just a random memory that was based in fact. Only thing you could tell people is 'I know a memory you have', which just means you're a replicant.
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Oct 9, 2017 22:09
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