oh yes – the scene in his apartment, she’s drinking, and she clearly comes on to him saying, “what happens if i finish that bottle of vodka?” and he dodges the situation by saying something about how maybe he needs to get back to work, ma’am, or something like that.
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Yawn. When every 3rd thing that’s complained about is that it was done in another move, I stopped reading. So what? All the best movies reference/get inspiration from/pay homage to all the best movies that came before them. “It was done in another movie” is a lazy, pointless criticism.
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Yeah, it was definitely weird to posit a futuristic version of Los Angeles that was less diverse than real-life Los Angeles is today. They had some multilingual signage around but few characters who looked like they could read it.
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I so agree with you guys… This “article” just proves that there are way too many people who have never been outside of the hand-holding-comfort-zone of hollywood blockbusters. No woinder a REALLY good movie like 2049 didn’t met the money-people’s financial expectations (and, yes, I want to stress it in that way, because it didn’t “fail” to “make money”… it’s more about the surreal expectations of people who only are willing to look at the first week in one country to cheack their boxes).
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THANK YOU!
I’ve been waiting for someone here with a penis to say it; since that’s the only time such a criticism is valid, according to some people.
O_o
Is that why I was bored out of my mind when I went to see it? Because my expectations of a even simple narrative arc with a clear beginning, middle and end were too high?
Duly noted.
I’m not a fan of style over substance, and maybe that’s why films like BR2049 and Prometheus leave me so underwhelmed - they are gorgeous to look at from a cinematographic perspective, but the stories being told don’t resonate with me at all. I felt no emotional investment with either one, and even if every single character in either movie had died horribly, I simply couldn’t have cared less.
That’s not a sign of good storytelling, there…
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And did you notice that the CCCP was still a thing? I thought “Looks like Putin did get the band back together.”
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I enjoyed the new film, but I agree with pretty much all of these criticisms. I would add that one of the reasons this sequel is a less powerful film (albeit a visually stimulating one) is that the original BR (all the versions) was an explicit criticism of capitalism run amok. It showed a world in which the quest for profit had destroyed the earth and the villains were the rich people that had profited from it all. This sequel, while existing in a similarly dystopian future, lacks that clarity.
The villain in Bladerunner isn’t Tyrell, it’s the relentless seeking of profit (hence all the advertisements). Tyrell is bad, not because he’s a twisted sadist like the Leto character, but because he has put the profit of his company ahead of any moral responsibility for the replicants he has created. Tyrell’s actual behaviour is not repugnant in the film; he’s a three dimensional character. Beattie isn’t the villain either, the audience realizes by the end of the film.
The sequel adopts the imagery of the original film, but not the message. It lacks a heart, and it fails to actually speak truth to contemporary power. But it is pretty.
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Ah. He looked really robotic in that scene. I didn’t get a mutual sense of sexual tension, just her having a drink and him staring blankly at her, disinterested.
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I dunno, the eye thing seems pretty fixable. Sebastian’s genetic problem would take… well genetic engineering to fix, and the first film did establish that’s hard enough on even a replicant once it’s been created. Gaff probably couldn’t afford a replacement limb, and I’d probably opt to use a cane before I went with having someone lop off my leg and stitch a new one on even if I could afford it.
Leto’s character has a ton of money, however, and access to custom grown eyes. It certainly seems like just having his eyes replaced would be a lot simpler than having a USB drive installed in his head so he can plug into a fleet of camerabots.
That being said, it’s still not a plot hole. I’m getting really tired of how the definition of “plot hole” has been expanded to “Anything I think doesn’t make sense” instead of just being something that actually breaks the plot.
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I think the really creepy undertone in that scene was that K would have been literally unable to say “no” had his boss pursued the idea more aggressively. Expressing disinterest was as far as he could go.
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Right. There was no mutual tension. It was very one-sided, but present. It was an interesting twist too, the woman being for a few reasons in a position of power (boss, also he’s not legally a person…), and so being the aggressor and creeper. I wouldn’t go so far as to label it “feminist” (oy ve, can of worms when people do that), but at least it in some way defied convention.
ETA:
Yes! You beat me to it.
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yeah, that’s it exactly. it was tense, but not super sexual from our (the viewer’s) standpoint.
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The biggest plothole of all was the premise of the original story: Why create a whole special division of police to identify replicants via complex personality test instead of just legally mandating that all replicants get marked with an implanted tracking chip or a highly visible tattoo?
(The real answer of course is “PKD was always more interested in writing stories exploring what makes us human than in writing stories that made logical sense.”)
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I disagree slightly that it served no purpose other than misogyny. My earlier post mentions it showing his own feelings of feeling like a God. But yes, absolutely, a misogynistic and callous god. There is other ways they could have accomplished that exposition in that scene, without murdering a naked woman. I doubt that occurred to them.
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Thanks Cory this is awesome, though I’m also finding the defensive responses here equally funny.
Bwaa bwaa bwaa bwaaaaan!
That’s a weak rationale at best; killing ‘just because you can’ is hardly a demonstration of “godlike” ability - that’s just the worst of mankind’s primal impulses in a nutshell.
(Which is probably why whenever there’s a fictional version of “god” depicted it’s usually male and kind of an asshole; we project our own flaws onto our myths.)
I tend to doubt that any semblance of original thought occurred to them at all while this film was being made.
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Not just the killing, but the entire arc we witnessed:
- The creation of life (her “birthing”)
- The “rearing”, the speech where he tells her of the destiny of her kind
- The killing, the taking of her life, which he “gifted” her to begin with
Am I reading too much into it? Could be.
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It’s not a buggy film. It’s a feature film.
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I think you are, unfortunately.
I saw a demonstration of the power that this Not-Tyrell wields over the replicants; a visual threat to make his point clear to his assassin replicant (I don’t remember her name, or anyone else’s, for that matter) as to what her fate would be if she didn’t produce the results he wanted.
Now maybe you’re right, and that scene was supposed to make Leto’s character feel ‘godlike…’ but like everything else in the movie, it fell flat and just seemed gratuitous.
Here’s the rub; even that needlessly callous death in the name of misogyny didn’t move me, as nonchalantly gruesome as it was. Again, I didn’t care about any of the characters in this film, not even Deckard.
And that ain’t good…
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My problem with the premise of the original story is “Why make replicants at all?” If they’re for dangerous jobs off-world, there are other kinds of robot designs that would be much better. The only reason I can see for making replicants at all would be as ‘un-exploitable’ sex workers.
