Holy shit this movie is pure art. The visuals and aesthetic are spot on for Cyberpunk and the sound direction is so good. Literally every set had me engaged because how good they looked. The scene with K just going around the city with these big ass logo’s of dead and alive companies was so good. Visually, this movie is a masterpiece.
The whole plot of K finding a purpose and then losing it to then making up one himself is great. Pretty similar to Detroit become human. The plot kept me hooked throughout. The whole section in the ruins of Las Vegas was peak. The pacing was also so much better than the first movie.
And then there is the Ryan Gosling is literally me propaganda which I fully subscribe to. K feels very similar as to his lack of purpose and being stuck in a society that fucking sucks. The AI Girlfriend thing has gained a whole new meaning since ChatGPT dropped. God I love this 
scene.
The ending was great. K did the most human thing possible after breaking his shackles even when he was not HIM hence proving that every single replicant is a living being but lack purpose and memories which shape their personalities.
And Jared Leto somehow gave his best performance in this movie. This is his peak after Paul Allen.
It’s so good, that it actually makes Blade Runner retroactively better.
I really think that one of the best praises of any sequel. Something so good it makes the thing it’s extending even better. I love the original Blade Runner. It was my entry way into “Sci-fi doesn’t need to be robots and laser dragons, it can be some real-ass shit”. I have watched Blade Runner about once a year since high-school. It’s also my reference point for all cyberpunk, and 2049 did nothing but make it better. Love it.
I love both blade runner movies, but I agree 2049 is better. The story is just so good
Jared Leto apparently LARPed as being blind for this movie
He just played himself imo.
Oh but if I was unclear, go look up Villeneuve recounting him surprising everyone with this bit on set…
He played a good tech billionaire sociopath, which is what his personality is like anyway.
I always liked how, despite Deckard being a major part of 2049, whether or not he’s a replicant (which I don’t believe) doesn’t matter at all.
The movie is about the fact that being human or replicant has no difference because both can feel the same thing.
With Deckards dog, K asked if the dog was real or not and deckard told him that he didn’t care about the dog being real or fake.
I believe he is a replicant.
That’s the amazing thing about the film and why I was really hesitant that their was a sequel being made. You can have a favorite cut of the original and view Deckard in a different way than others and yet 2049 will still be true to your version. It’s crazy they pulled that off.
I’ve always thought that the original movie is more meaningful if it takes a synthetic person’s emotions to draw out Deckard’s buried-by-trauma emotions. If a “fake” person can love a “real” person then does it matter they’re “fake”? Doesn’t that make them just as “real”?
I think that interpretation also fits more neatly into 2049’s story. “Real” and “fake” are a matter of intention, not origin.
But I fully agree that it was amazing that 2049 could pull off a sequel that satisfies both of sci-fi-fandom’s legendarily-at-odds camps. An incredible movie. Every time I think that Hollywood is creatively bankrupt, one of these gems manages to slip through into the annals of sci-fi history.
There are absolutely great interpretations of both. The bubbling internal conflict of being a Blade Runner while also being a replicant, the fact that replicants are so indistinguishable from a human that only a replicant could do the job, the mind fuck of meeting a replicant that doesn’t know they’re one. The directors cut was my introduction to the film so I just gravitate towards it.
Easily my favorite movie. The pacing is wonderful for my particular brain, and there are so many layers to it, with fantastic cinematography.
Something I think was clever was the addition of Joi, and her role in the story. By the time this movie came out, the original Blade Runner had kind of percolated through society. Replicants being human isn’t really a mindblowing or challenging premise imo.
So to get a similar feeling and though exploration going, a new level of “fake” life needs to be introduced, one that the audience might not immediately accept. You can see that reflected in the movie where a replicant treats Joi like shit for being “artificial”, reproducing the oppression of replicants, despite the history and material context of the abuser. Seeing the movie explore Joi and her potential development and emergent autonomy was super cool. She was definitely my favorite part of the movie.
Best part about her imo was K finding out that everything she said was pre-programmed. She was always designed to speak what K wanted to listen and the
scene is about that. Him realizing his love didn’t mean much but he can save a real relationship by saving Deckard and uniting him with his daughter was so well done.Well, certain linguistics quirks and tendencies were pre-programmed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s all she was
That’s what i love about it. Is she a machine reading a script? Is she a person who has only existed for a few months or a few years trying her best with the extremely limited fake memories and information and vocabulary she was imprinted with?
A big thing with Roy and company is they were, emotionally, toddlers. They’d only had a couple of years to work out emotions and feelings, figure out their identity, make some kind of sense out of who they were. You can kind of see that as they wrestle with strong emotions in the movie, with Roy’s reflections on his life as he plays with Deckard.
And then Joi creates this similar ambiguity. She’s even less “real” than the Replicants, having no body beyond a computer on the wall and a portable hologram emitter. Is she “real”? The society is perfectly capable of building artificial humans that are fully sentient, can they build a digital one? They’ve got no qualms about slavery. And there’s the two opposed characters - Love, who isn’t loved but is unambiguously human, and Joy, who is loved but whose humanity is in question.
The Replicant company “solved” the problem of replicant instability by giving them fake memories to give them emotional grounding and context. K isn’t a thirty year old man, he’s only existed a few years at most, waking up with a full set of memories. Is joi the same kind of being, waking up with a set of memories, a personality and goals fine-tuned for a particular role, and then left to run? Who can say!
Also, the ai/expert system holographically overlaying herself on the “real” replicant prostitute has layers of things to say about the commodification of sexuality like wooooooah.
They don’t really answer the question so it’s upto the viewer about how to perceive it. I personally believe that she’s ChatGPT on the inside. Then again, it’s entirely possible that she became fully sentient and all their relationship actually became real.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I saw it in theaters and was totally blown away. I guess it’s a bit of a polarizing movie because one of the workers at the theater came up to me after the credits and asked me if I liked the film. I told him it was fantastic and then he told me they had a bunch of people walk out of it. Maybe people were expecting something that wasn’t such a slow burn. But it was pretty much a lot of what I wanted in a movie. Great sets that feel futuristic, but super lived-in. Also, a surprising amount of practical effects too. The LA fly through scene in the rain was actually a scale model which is always neat to see these days. Great soundtrack. Great performances. Pure cinema.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I saw this movie shortly before I left home. It was the first movie I’d seen in theaters by myself (at fucking 25 lol), and I went and saw it twice. I loved it.
I’ll never forget David Bautista’s performance. And the baseline test scene was fucking cool.
" Ryan Gosling actually wrote this when trying to understand his character, and used a technique called “dropping in” to analyze writing from Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He approached Villeneuve about it and he added it to the film. "
Saw on reddit
I love that detail and the baseline test may have been my single favorite scene in the movie
Interesting, thanks for sharing this
I was in my late twenties when i finally started to “get” that actors are active, important participants in the process of creation and not just puppets being ordered around on stage. Finding out that Rutger came up with some of Roy’s soliloquy was a big part of that.
Decided to rewatch it because of this post… definitely don’t regret it.
The AI Girlfriend thing has gained a whole new meaning since ChatGPT dropped
Yeah Blade Runner had the audience asking if Deckard was a replicant or not. Now we’re left wondering if Joi is just a large language model or not.
Also nuking Las Vegas was a good bit
I really liked the Joi character. Is she a person? Is she a an LLM? The character does everything you’d expect the female lead in an action movie to do, and then the movie throws a kind of meta-question about the “realness” of that character.
I read Joi as a sentient person, being an extension of the replicants being meat robot people to Joi and equivalent Ais being digital people fulfilling the role replicants played for humans for replicants. Sort of kicking the ball down the line. Two robot people striving to be people together, with ambiguity around their respective “realness”. I thought it was all very smart and slick.
I also recently saw it for the first time. It’s solid, loved how oppressive the atmosphere felt and how the audio took over the entire experience when K was driving around. It felt so immersive, like we really were just seeing one small thread in this horrible reality full of other tragic stories. I guess that’s just successful worldbuilding. I didn’t love some of the Joss Whedon tier quips (especially in the Las Vegas part, shounen level fan service
) but otherwise, everything from the dialogue to the set design and VFX was top notch.this is one of my favorite action movies of all time. I was lucky enough in 2017 to catch it in the theaters and i couldn’t stop thinking about it for like 2 years. However, it’s very easy to see why fascists incels like to use K’s face as their profile pictures.
K is a handsome, quiet, intelligent physically fit, capable loser who everyone hates on because they’re secretly jealous. This is exactly how fascists see themselves and how they see their own persecution complex. He goes home to his AI girlfriend because this is the only option he has. The world around him is in an advanced state of decay (which fascists routinely blame on the ‘fall of western civilization’ and not capitalism) but he holds onto the hope that he can become a hero through violence (mass shooting).
Anyways i dont want to shit on this movie too much. Obviously I enjoy it for the correct reasons
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Villanueve is so good
Im gonna watch Incendies now
I think this is actually the last movie I saw in theaters that truly emotionally affected me on a spiritual level. I think there’s something about the ambiguity of how real the replicants are in both movies that is used for great emotional effect, but the way K ultimately rejected the reality that was handed to him and sacrificed himself in pursuit of a deeper humanity within himself is something that just fuckin’ resonates with me man. I still tear up thinking about it.
Was an odd experience seeing that the movie was actually quite polarizing. I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about people’s criticisms, and while I understand their reasoning, I ultimately don’t think there’s a single thing this film could have done differently that would have made its emotional impact any stronger. The biggest criticism seems to be the slow pacing, which I understand, but it irks me the most. The pacing is a staple of thoughtful science fiction, (think the original Blade Runner, 2001, Ghost in the Shell) and absolutely serves the purpose of letting the themes, setting, and underlying philosophical questions posed by the movie to stew in the mind and sink in. In that regard, the pacing in this movie is about fucking perfect. The opening scene establishes everything you need to know about the plot with zero filler. In fact, the only times the movie seems to slow down is when K is going through a psychological transformation of some sort. Trying to understand his perspective, why he changes, why meaning emerges out of the events of the movie, is the meat and bones of the whole experience. If you can’t get on board though, yeah, I can imagine it being a bit of a slog.
Other criticisms like Leto’s performance or the lack of fleshing out Freysa or the resistance also seem kinda silly. They each have like 5 minutes of screen time and ultimately serve their purpose in the story just fine. You don’t really need to know much about them other than their motivations and their importance to the story, which I think they both do just fine. This movie is just simply not about them, and really only serve to remind the viewer that there’s bigger forces at work all vying to control things in their own way.
Another criticism that caught me off guard is the accusations of misogyny in the film. The movie certainly has a lot to say about the commodification of sexuality, which is another strong point of the film imo. There’s quite a lot I can say about how the movie thinks about gender identity and sexuality, and how it either contributes or detracts from our inner humanity, but there’s an excellent youtube video on that topic so I’ll just link that here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=6GsXBh5PGZU
But… yeah, anyway, good film. 10/10. It’s kinda strange because while I like Denis Villeneuve, I feel like a lot of his movies don’t really hit the mark that well. Honestly found Dune kinda boring. Would recommend Arrival and Enemy though, those are solid. But 2049, another level man, another level.
I loved Arrival. I am an absolute sucker for any movie where anthropologists or related fields save the day.
If you’re implying there’s more movies where anthropologists save the day you gotta let me know man
No I think that’s the only one. : (
I honestly thought it was long and boring lol sorry (and I also love long boring movies but not this one)
Yeah, I thought it was terrible. The plot was 100% predictable and unimaginative, Jared Leto’s character was boing and miscast, and the world building is laughable compared to the original.
Props for predicting that he had implanted memories or whatever it was. Calling the movie terrible is wild but yeah Jared Leto’s whole deal wasn’t good.
I’ll have to watch it again sometime, but I genuinely thought it was a bad movie. I didn’t know people actually liked it until I looked up reviews after watching it.
Jared Leto’s character was originally going to be played by David Bowie which would have been better because then Jared Leto wouldn’t be in it.
