Spoiler Space: Blade Runner 2049

This opinion is bad and you should feel bad.

It's obvious that he was disappointed to learn he wasn't born. The reason he wasn't ecstatic when he found the horse was because he was experiencing existential horror. He spent his whole life thinking he was one thing and that horse was a refutal of that.

Ryan Gosling was fucking great in the movie.

I dragged myself out to see this last night, concerned that it wouldn't be in theaters much longer. There was still a decent crowd on a Saturday for its third week; while its opening weekend may have been a disappointment, hopefully it's got good word of mouth.

Edward James Olmos was a pleasant surprise, didn't read too much going in and didn't know he'd be in there. Killing off Rachel can side-step some of the discrepancies between cuts- Gaff's "It's too bad she won't live" gives the impression she's got a built-in short lifespan like the other replicants, though I thought one of the studio cuts with the voiceover had Deckard give narration explaining she had an open-ended lifespan and they could live happily ever after. If she died a couple years later in childbirth, they can avoid answering which of those was correct.

Random concern I had thinking over it again this morning was Deckard's (?) bees. I'm assuming bee colonies collapsed in their timeline when the rest of their ecosystems did, so I feel like the existence of the thriving bees in Las Vegas should come as a minor miracle to these characters. There's no one else around, so we're left to conclude it's Deckard's work, presumably in reference to another famous retired detective. And now I'm left worried that, with running back to Los Angeles and reuniting with his daughter and perhaps meeting up with the replicant underground, no one will come back to tend to the bees.

Brief thoughts since I’ve been away from the convo for a while and I should have written up something nice after I saw it last week:

—I saw it in 3D and it was fine for me.

—In addition to the thing with “Joe” being the sort of in-programmed name Joi has for guys, I think “K” just works better as the guy’s name. It’s hard-edged, can serve as a Kafka reference, and I was that one person to giggle in the theater when Joi suggested “Joe” because I thought it was kind of a joke because it’s such a banal name. I actually did think it was kind of a joke, which is part of why the “Hey, Joe” scene later on probably hit me like it did.

—The scene with giant holo-Joi was crushing because it definitely plants a big fat seed of doubt to how real Joi’s development really was. Of course, we all work with what we’re born with an experience, and Joi didn’t experience much prior to getting her little mobile emitter thing, so it’s no surprise she reaches for that. The “Was Joi really self-aware?” thing seems unanswerable to me.

—If I were to say the film had a big theme it was replaceability and self-determination. K gets lurched from replaceable status and then finds out there’s nothing inherently special about him. He makes his own choice, defying Wallace and the other replicants, in favor of reuniting Deckard and his daughter. Who knows what the larger repercussions are, and it may end up destroying K, but it’s his choice (much like leaving the apartment completely was Joi’s, perhaps). It’s only through making choices we are who we are and all that existential stuff, and it’s only by making his own choice that K is able to know that he is someone, and someone unique (that it happens to tie into his one big memory is a nice touch).

—I tend towards K’s memory being Deckard’s daughter’s actual memory being a coincidence—she was given the brief for the sort of man K (or K’s series?) would be, a way to express something she can’t express otherwise, much as many of her dreams are things she can’t otherwise experience.

—I wonder if her immune system thing is an actual immune system thing or just a ruse to keep doctors away from her (and it’s clever hiding her in the belly of the corporate beast). The replicants were rather more human than I thought—I’d assumed they were a bit more biomechanical than all bio, but they couldn’t even tell Rachel was a replicant until they saw her serial number—I guess the main advantages would be quicker gestation time, a higher degree of customizability and a loophole in the philosophy of natural rights? Of course if Rachel was so human it wouldn’t be much of a problem of her to have a child with a human Deckard.

—The whole Deckard-was-programmed-to-fall-for-Rachel was another thing that was meant to be another ground-falling-out-from-underneath-you moment, even if it’s still ambiguous (few records from that time and such, wrong eyes, &c.). It’s such a repulsive possibility because it cuts away at the specialness of two individuals falling in love, the human aspect of it as opposed to just being some programmed-in drive. More doubts about the characters, and doubts about ourselves and how “human” we actually are.

—I don’t think it was very well executed, though—I’d go further than moimoi and say not only was Leto miscast but the role of Wallace was misconceived. Tyrell is much more ambiguous; Wallace is simply evil—if he were evil in a lower-key, profit-maximizing way it would be one thing but he monologues. Honestly I’m not sure how necessary it was to give Wallace, the corporation, a face. And the stuff with Deckard and nu-Rachel happens so quickly it doesn’t have any of the effect it’s aiming for, beyond another bit of cruelty (I think it would have been stronger had we only seen Rachel in that photograph and that skeleton, but it wouldn’t have driven home that replaceability that Wallace aims for).

—The degree to which Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel surprised me—I don’t only mean in terms of story, but in terms of revisiting old stuff from the past film and even going through the same narrative steps to some degree: the headquarters—they were the old Tyrell ones repurposed, right?—and the city’s aesthetic’s broadly similar despite the time jump (with added Korean and Soviet—we’re clearly in the future of the early eighties future—influence). There’s also Luv as a sort of twisted Rachel, the love story with someone less human than our protagonist, encountering the lonely eccentric in an opulent setting, the wet final fight.

—One disadvantage of this is that it does set up direct comparisons and it’s hard to avoid the palette’s blah and monochrome (which which might be a Villeneuve problem since I had a similar issue with Arrival)—even if there were dominant colors the palette was always diverse and subtle in a way this film’s look was not.

—The film felt exactly the right length to me.

—Yes we get some Euro-car spotting: K’s flying car’s a Peugeot! I get why Peugeot wanted to put their own name on the flying car, but really if any brand’s right for the role it’s their wholly-owned subsidiary Citroën, which famously advertised its midcentury top-of-the-line model like this.

What is this, 1989 usenet?  The unicorn dream / origami and the scenes with the red 'replicant' reflective glow in the original movie all pretty well establish Deckard's replicant status.  And sure, Wallace could be lying about Deckard being 'programmed' to fall in love with Rachel, but if Tyrell was trying to develop replicating replicants and Wallace had the files, what's the point?