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No, it was pretty well reported that there are plenty of “retro logos” around the movie, in keeping with the original timeline: Atari, Pan Am… I think there is even a hint at some point that the Soviets helped dealing with the disasters in the interior.
No, they aren’t.
Want to put a bit more weight on your argument?
That’s a misogynistic claim in its own right, women do not reproduce on their own.
What now? I don’t think you’re following the science on this one. With a womb you can grow another person. With a penis you may be able to get your gametes crossed if you squint, however this latter will soon be obsolete (as in, in our real world), and that this is probably why they chose the way they did (as in, the future with genetic engineering). In theory, women can breed more humans completely without male help, thank you very much, so I saw that scene as a timely reminder of this; it’s the opposite of what I think you’re arguing? Or maybe you’re simply reacting to the killing bit?
A sub-plot of all of this is how we were all made to think Deckard was some kind of hero figure, while this movie flips it over showing him as a simple pawn, inconsequential and just a red herring? Everyone is an object. Some objects have more value. And women have more value in this future, even in object form. I thought that was the point of this dystopian narrative.
What doesn’t make sense is why he’s attacking the merchandise
Seems a bit stupid, I know. But I think it’s part of Wallace slipping into full-blown God-mode. And, as always, we don’t know if there are actual reasons for the killing. It’s a brand new model, maybe he hates it? Or … didn’t have the right eye color?
Really? Please explain how we can females can fertilize our own eggs without any donation of sperm cells from a male of our species.
I know some lizards are female and still reproduce without males due to the presence of an extra chromosome in their specific DNA… but that’s a new one on me that human beings are theoretically capable of parthenogenesis or any other kind of asexual reproduction.
Please enlighten us; I’m sure there are many women who would be very interested in the possibility of reproduction without involving dudes in any way shape or form…
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OK so, I’m not gonna get into the middle of you two disagreeing here, just going to comment on this question of parthenogenesis. It’s not happened by itself in nature in humans (to the best of anyone’s knowledge, anyways), but currently in use in research (not cloning, which is banned) is a transfer of a cell nuclei into an ova which then having a full set of chromosomes starts to divide into an embryo. We don’t know how effective this would be for cloning humans, but how parthenogenesis works in animals is that eggs are produced already possessing a full set of chromosomes.
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Excuse me. Fifth element is not so great? Dafuq you say??
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That’s what has me puzzled; it might theoretically be possible in a lab under artificial, explicitly controlled conditions; but as it stands right this very moment, women don’t have eggs that possess a full set of chromosomes. Maybe that can be genetically manipulated, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be test subject zero.
It was the wording that gave me pause; “completely without male help” implies that asexual reproduction could occur naturally, without any outside influence.
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No need to get snarky, human reproduction based on sperm cells from female stem cells is an actual research field. I wasn’t trying to be funny, just pointing out that you can make a baby without a male, but not the other way around.
There’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Humans , but there’s more stuff if you’re actually interested, although my snark-detector is ringing loud …
it might theoretically be possible in a lab under artificial, explicitly controlled conditions
And here I was thinking we were talking about Blade Runner 2049, a SciFi flick about genetically engineered hoomans, giving credence to the concept in fantasy about an alternative timeline, but we’re confused because it doesn’t happen naturally in nature all naturally? 
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Yeah, that’s not possible today. The real question in my mind is with the mastery of biology that this future society has, being able to custom make living automata, why can’t they do this? I mean, in a lab setting, possibly the only reason we can’t clone a human using SCNT today is because the research on its use has been legally curtailed. Governments mostly don’t want people running around cloning people willy-nilly, so we don’t know if can work or not.
But in this hypothetical future they can tailor make at a genetic level living organisms, grown in a lab and then decanted when they are fully grown at an accelerated rate. This seems way harder than getting them to reproduce like natural human beings.
I guess at some point, suspension of disbelief and all that.
ETA: Maybe there’s a theory here about the ability to reproduce was not in their original design (also with the 4 year life span), but the knowledge to accomplish that may have existed. That knowledge may have been lost in the blackout. I guess they didn’t give us enough clues to know this from the new film, and AFAIK it wasn’t mentioned in the original. If this alternate reality corporate culture is anything like ours, they wouldn’t want their customers to have a way of reproducing the product for free, so it sort of makes sense that the ability to reproduce was intentionally removed in the replicant designs, but the knowledge existed to add it back.
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But it’s my first language.
That’s all I’m saying, and getting back on topic, reproductive capability or the lack thereof is no excuse for that scene; like Mags said it’s misogyny just for misogyny’s sake.
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I enjoyed the film - but yeah - some things made no sense.
Leto’s blindness in an “eyeball factory”. A trope of the blind visionary going all the way back to Teiresias that just seems out of place here.
That you can genetically engineer every complex body part - livers, brains etc - but not some parts of reproductive organs? What?
That you need replicants to breed so new places can be populated. Humans seem quite able to fill up every available space. Perhaps too well.
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Well, that at least was explained. They need a slave labor force (some speech about every great leap of civilization was on the backs of a subjugated workforce), and that’s no longer viable because all humans have rights.
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N[quote=“ActuallyARegular, post:97, topic:110120”]
Well, that at least was explained. They need a slave labor force (some speech about every great leap of civilization was on the backs of a subjugated workforce), and that’s no longer viable because all humans have rights.
[/quote]
Uh-oh. Don’t let Elon Musk see this. Doesn’t bode well.
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I still got the distinct impression that nearly all of the foreground characters were replicants pantomiming out their idea of humanity without realizing they were replicants.
I loved the movie ‘Her’. But it was a well-worked out trope of the singularity mixed with erotic/social AI. Done many, many times before in SF: ‘human falls in love with AI’ and ‘AI goes through singularity’ are OLD tropes by now.
‘Her’ mixed them very well and the movie was very well done.
BR2049 does it differently, though. It does NOT deal with the singularity. It extends the question the original BR asked. The original BR asked how a built object, meant to emulate human … is that different from human? BR2049 asked that and went one further: does actual physical existence even matter to that question? Can’t even software be equivalent? Can’t even purpose-built software be good enough that it just doesn’t matter?
There are three things which just piss me off and I really do not like about the movie:
1 - Ryan Gosling putting down the gun at the beginning when he knew he’d be facing off with a replicant.; this just made no sense at all and was just screenplay-logic to have a nice fistfight.
2 - yeah, the killing by disembowelment of the newly hatched infertile replicant. Gratuitious and non-sensical. Either the Leto character wouldn’t have even let it be bourne, or he would have had to run checks and be disappointed that it wasn’t fertile … it was just a gratuitous violent scene which made no fucking sense! Either from a pure economic/corporate sense or a personal, character sense. Leto’s character should be smarter/more sophisticated.
3 - near the end when the ‘army’ appears when talking to the leader of the resistance. Just a Hollywood trope right ther.
And despite all that?
Great movie destined to be a cult classic.
The music, the photography, the views/graphics, the themes. Beautifully shot, written, sounding. New questions asked, new thoughts about technology. The acting, too, was well done by EVERYONE. Even Harrison Ford looked like he finally was in a movie where he wanted to act, and thus acted instead of ‘just was there to read his lines’ (as opposed to The Force Awakens) and Gosling had some Pacino-esque minimalism going on with some Hugh Jackman-a-la-Prisoners-esque outbursts.
But it isn’t. Even the maybe-heavyhanded-Joi is not what you think it is if you think about it (yeah, yeah, I’m so into Rick & Morty 'cause I’m so intelligent you wouldn’t get it). The Leto-disemboweling scene is heavy handed. But the Robin Wright/captain relationship to Gosling to Joi triangle is more subtle, even with the final hologram scene. The way replicant/child-slave-labour is worked in is not. Human/AI/Software tri-chotomy.
Thought provoking, beautifully shot with amazing visuals and sound, great acting … and three scenes which should have been done different.
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Have you checked to see if you have any ‘smug pride’ on your glasses, or possibly monitor?
That could be a cause. I don’t know. Also, you might be listening to puerile assholes, preferentially, and not even realize it. If so, I recommend you stop. Clears the smug right up. 3rd option is they’re prius drivers?
