good ol’ Ridley “Put the Mom in the Box” Scott
I only made it 45 minutes into this movie last night before getting sleepy but it has a lot more problems with women than I was in the mood to overlook …
there were at least three different instances of me silently begging them to genderswap the character dynamics so it’d be less egregious in the first hour!
maybe it’ll turn out to have something to say about men but I really doubt it
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i don’t think it ends up being a total fart in that sense but it could definitely have done a little more
this movie doesn’t have anything to say tbh
Oh on the contrary, my dear Sykel, the movie very explicitly states that slavery is a necessary prerequisite for our preferred mode of civilization. This might be the only thing of any substance the movie says.
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Wallace admits that the reason he wants to figure out breeding for replicants is because he can’t meet demand by just making them and thus needs to create a permanent and prolifically propagating slave caste.
Which honestly is far more interesting and damning than a miracle birth inspiring a resistance movement, and less well trodden ground to boot.
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the duellists and black rain are also all about AI now. Yusaku Matsuda was a replicant
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I like the read that The Duellists and Alien were Ridley watching Barry Lyndon and 2001 and going “these are cool and all, but I wish they moved more”.
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I know the miracle baby is dumb but tbh I think it suits the movie. What works for me in 2049 is how it shows oppression as founded on arbitrary, self-serving distinctions between people. Replicants don’t have souls! They can’t reproduce! And so it makes sense that the oppressed find hope in something that breaks down those distinctions, even if it’s probably ill-fated, even if in doing so they reify the validity of those distinctions. I like it as a movie about people looking for humanity in all the wrong places.
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I’ve never seen anything this expensive and studio-backed this unsure of its very existence. The constant winking nods to Blade Runner and the retro billboards and the Harrison Ford-ing were all very interested in discussing the movie as product and I can intimately relate. I will always have a soft spot for something so handsome with such an uncertain soul.
When K thinks of himself as a tool, when he wonders if that tool is necessary, if he can be more, if he can have a soul – these aren’t uncommon themes but I can’t separate it from Blade Runner 2049, the work, examining itself.
I love how the movie navigates the relationship with the holo-girlfriend, skirting on outright criticism (because c’mon) but pulling back from it, investigating the value of the feelings he invested in it. I don’t think it’s playing with misogyny as much as solipsism (like you said, Felix, that might feel better in this moment genderswapped).
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Yeah, I think it’s delivered fine but it’s one of those pop sci-fi tropes that feels immediately dated to me, something that seemed to keep cropping up in most any of these sorts of things in the 90s. It’s a major plot point in Armitage III, for God’s sake.
yeah the holo-girlfriend thing actually felt sufficiently thoughtful and critical, it was that being sandwiched between [whatever ryan gosling’s relationship with robin wright was] and the genius inventor man callously and brutally killing a newborn(?) adult lady replicant with a nominally perfect body while the camera leered at her that was just like, come on
I really wish they’d genderswapped that last one
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I believe the leer/murder replicant scene was supposed to comment on a male-dominated corporate society but it wasn’t a thread this movie was capable of picking up in the midst of everything else.
Wallace was fine and weird enough to give purple EVIL GENIUS speeches but he really would have been better served with much shorter scenes; the menace and impact of his operatic scale drains after a couple minutes on camera and you realize he’s just a windbag with a violent turn.
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I am also not convinced that whoever’s idea it was to have pale fire in ryan gosling’s apartment has actually read pale fire, because only the most surface-level reading (as in, literally the cover of the book) of pale fire has anything to do with blade runner
narrative throughline with commentary by others casting the reality of the first into doubt; again reflecting my read of metatextual uncertainty.
For the characters, the ability of people to take over another’s story and K’s uncertainty if that’s what he’s doing or if he needs to watch others for it
Isn’t his emotion suppression mantra also Nabokov
wish his emotion suppression room played this in the background
It’s from Pale Fire, yeah.
still seems overly literal to my tastes but I stand corrected!
I’ve been thinking about Ridley as the source of the Morel-fanfic and he really does strike me as someone who would watch Last Year At Marienbad while choosing to ignore that the lead dude is probably a gaslighting creep
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