Why I Just Can't Quite Like Blade Runner 2049
AfterImage
1,186 views
Despite presenting a refreshing break from predictable narrative structures, Blade Runner 2049 ties itself in thematic knots with a confused third act and increasingly nebulous characterisation that negates the appeal and concepts of it's sci-fi subject matter.
10 Comments
@toss7891 5 years ago
I hate to admit it since I loved parts of 2049, but your analysis made me realize that 2049 is exactly like the Force Awakens in terms of it being both a remake and a sequel. Harrison Ford’s inclusion in 2049 feels exactly how The Force Awakens includes him. Its kinda odd.
@irg17600 1 year ago
Totalment d'acord. A més de tot el que has dit, jo afegiria que tampoc hi ha una autèntica continuïtat amb com es representa el context, és a dir, Los Angeles. A la pel·lícula de Ridley Scott, és una ciutat postmoderna, fosca i opressiva, però amb molta més vida i molt més creïble. En canvi, Villeneuve proposa una ciutat amb una arquitectura molt més brutalista i que bàsicament sembla una funerària. De la mateixa manera, tampoc hi ha personatges secundaris que tinguin personalitat pròpia ni una trama amb sentit. Trobo que Villeneuve és un director que sol tenir aquest problema: fa obres amb premisses molt interessants però, des del meu punt de vista, acaben sent una closca sense fantasma.
@KevinLopez-rl6wq 2 years ago
Overall I like your video and agree with most of your conclusions. It's a good analysis even as I find myself wishing to resist it because I did enjoy the film. To one of your questions: why are they are not interested in re-appropriating the technology for creating more replicants? Well, on first blush it seems easier to control the means of re-production if we just use a biological factory that is localized to many individuals, rather than having to control a whole bio-engineering facility.
@Sytsn_ 2 years ago
I watched this movie about 6 months ago with really high hopes, bc the world intrigued me so much. But the movie felt like a huge disappointment to me, it felt it hit so far below the mark. I wish I knew of more dystopian cyberpunk movies.
@PJKP82 3 months ago
Late to the party, but here's something. In Blade Runner, it was nigh impossible to distinguish replicants from humans, the difference between the two being blurred, and V-K tests required roughly 100 questions to see the difference. In 2049? "Look up and to the right." 😞
@grantponciano9386 1 year ago
The "humans" in the movie were so nihilistic, and the artificial lifeforms lived so emotionally;
@craigthompson6466 3 months ago
Haven't seen the film as I don't think a sequel to Blade Runner should have been made in the first place. Not as strange as making a sequel to Top Gun maybe tho admittedly I didn't mind watching that. Just seems to me more off to have made a sequel to Blade Runner as it was a more artsy fartsy affair than Top Gun which in my estimation was just good old fashioned disposable entertainment. Another issue I had with the decision to make a sequel is the obsession with pandering to fans of Harrison Ford. We just have to see him as a geriatric Han Solo & a geriatric Indiana Jones & even a geriatric Deckard. It's just embarrassing. And after watching your video I get the impression that they didn't handle bringing him back particularly well. There's the thirty year time skip to account for the age of Harrison Ford but it seems they fell into the trap of expecting us to believe that after all that time that he hadn't emotionally moved on at all. That's just not realistic or believable. (Like having a geriatric Han Solo & a geriatric Indy still wearing the same outfit that they were wearing when we last saw em decades ago.) A teenager might be able to accept it or want to accept it but nobody older should. Pretty obvious they were just pandering to the fans of the first film & fans of Harrison Ford. Embarrassing.
@L_Martin 10 months ago (edited)
I finally watched this movie last night and all your points were clamouring in my head. In particular, this idea of sentient AI androids having babies as THE humanising thing, that is how the AI themselves see it, and Rachel dying in childbirth—this was profoundly dumb to me, that an android would die in childbirth. Just instinctively from an intellectual stance.
Surely sentient AIs would conceive of themselves as distinct from humans and not measure their validity as sentient life against human bodily functions… the WHOLE POINT of sentient AI is the creation of “life” (Artificial Intelligence) without man & woman = baby.
How an AI would think about creating life, itself, would be completely different to the way humans think about it - surely?? Owing to the fact that their sentience arises from something different to what gives rise to it in humans, which is so linked to our biology. If your sentience arises from a computer, your thoughts about life and reproduction are presumably going to be vastly different to an evolved mammal, homo sapiens, who are subject to hormones and bodily limitations, etc.?
As you say, making new life, to a sentient AI replicant would surely look like seizing the means of producing themselves. (Or in Ghost in the Shell, it would look like escaping the constraints of the body entirely, the consciousness merges with a hive mind or is otherwise capable of being multiple "selves" simultaneously, e.g. in a series like 'Ancillary Justice') There are SO many possibilities for what sentient AIs would consider "life" and creating new life. And you just want to make it about making a baby in a womb? This is SUCH A HUMAN WAY TO THINK! lmao it's like all the hallmarks in the holy books that indicate "wow, a human clearly wrote this, because this is all the stuff WE'RE so anxious about, e.g. safe to eat shellfish or no? who can I go to bed with?" etc. This fixation on the womb and male/female as the only conduit through which life can spring - it reflects humans. A computer does not think about the body in that way, it has a mind without a body, in a sense. Isn't that fascinating? Surely that's much more interesting than constraining a computer to think about its "womb"?? "Will my pelvis be wide enough to give birth? What about my birth canal relative to my android baby's head" -thinks the sentient computer in a synthetic body (no! of course it doesn't think that!)
I see this problem, this sort of lack of imagination on the part of writers, again and again in different stories about sentient AI. Humans seem to think an AI would yearn to be like us, to have bodily functions like us. While that IS quite interesting to consider, it seems ultimately a very nihilistic thing to inflict on the sentient AI, given they are never, ever going to be humans.
It seems to me more realistic to consider that a sentient AI would think of itself as being alive by different means. It would not need to think about "How similar can I make myself to a human?" for their sentient aliveness to be true. If anything, you could imagine an impulse in such sentient AI to present themselves in very deliberately NON-human ways, as a rejection of having to perform that role for humans (as a kind of "pretend" human, or doll. Ghost in the Shell looked at this so well, even the movie Her considered this at the end of the film. I even think the video game Detroit Become Human dealt with this better, as dumb as it was - by having the rebelling androids refuse to wear their human skin, but rather present themselves as obviously robots, because they were rejecting their existence as facsimile of humans - a doll that would never be granted the same rights, but treated as a slave, dehumanised, yet made to look human for the comfort of its human masters / to serve their purposes)
Also, Deckard being THE android who can impregnate another android who happens to be Rachel, was just so, so dumb. The film's attempt to retcon Rachel + Deckard's attraction as "all part of Tyrell Corp's plan" or whatever made me roll my eyes so hard. Why can't these modern sequels seem to resist reaching back into the original film to tinker about and retcon stuff? It's so arrogant, and as if they think they are doing a better job of telling this story than the original.
And I agree totally with your pont about K being disposable, and the film seeming to agree with that. It was quite stunning, how nihilistic the film was in terms of its treatment of K, and I don't even think it was intentional, it was just bad writing. To me, it was perverse how cruelly the film treated the character - not enough his girlfriend never felt anything real for him, they twist the knife further by having her call him "Joe" (the name he uses to introduce himself to his "father", so he thinks - but this name Joe turns out to just be the consumer name that the Joi girlfriend-hologram uses for all customers... So his very sense of self is turned into a perverse & cruel joke)
By then end of the film, I was left thinking, what ultimately is the story trying to say? That it was comical this guy ever entertained any idea of himself as being something more than his programming? The androids who REALLY matter are those who manage to mimic humans most closely by copying our reproductive capacity, our appearance, our homo sapien way of experiencing reality? Goodness, what a monument to how wonderful humans are, how OUR perceptions and experiences are the gold standard - in a film that just got through showing us all the various ways humans are horrifying monsters - it was a complete clash and contradiction of meaning.
(Sorry for the huge comment, I just had a lot of thoughts right after watching the film lol)
Surely sentient AIs would conceive of themselves as distinct from humans and not measure their validity as sentient life against human bodily functions… the WHOLE POINT of sentient AI is the creation of “life” (Artificial Intelligence) without man & woman = baby.
How an AI would think about creating life, itself, would be completely different to the way humans think about it - surely?? Owing to the fact that their sentience arises from something different to what gives rise to it in humans, which is so linked to our biology. If your sentience arises from a computer, your thoughts about life and reproduction are presumably going to be vastly different to an evolved mammal, homo sapiens, who are subject to hormones and bodily limitations, etc.?
As you say, making new life, to a sentient AI replicant would surely look like seizing the means of producing themselves. (Or in Ghost in the Shell, it would look like escaping the constraints of the body entirely, the consciousness merges with a hive mind or is otherwise capable of being multiple "selves" simultaneously, e.g. in a series like 'Ancillary Justice') There are SO many possibilities for what sentient AIs would consider "life" and creating new life. And you just want to make it about making a baby in a womb? This is SUCH A HUMAN WAY TO THINK! lmao it's like all the hallmarks in the holy books that indicate "wow, a human clearly wrote this, because this is all the stuff WE'RE so anxious about, e.g. safe to eat shellfish or no? who can I go to bed with?" etc. This fixation on the womb and male/female as the only conduit through which life can spring - it reflects humans. A computer does not think about the body in that way, it has a mind without a body, in a sense. Isn't that fascinating? Surely that's much more interesting than constraining a computer to think about its "womb"?? "Will my pelvis be wide enough to give birth? What about my birth canal relative to my android baby's head" -thinks the sentient computer in a synthetic body (no! of course it doesn't think that!)
I see this problem, this sort of lack of imagination on the part of writers, again and again in different stories about sentient AI. Humans seem to think an AI would yearn to be like us, to have bodily functions like us. While that IS quite interesting to consider, it seems ultimately a very nihilistic thing to inflict on the sentient AI, given they are never, ever going to be humans.
It seems to me more realistic to consider that a sentient AI would think of itself as being alive by different means. It would not need to think about "How similar can I make myself to a human?" for their sentient aliveness to be true. If anything, you could imagine an impulse in such sentient AI to present themselves in very deliberately NON-human ways, as a rejection of having to perform that role for humans (as a kind of "pretend" human, or doll. Ghost in the Shell looked at this so well, even the movie Her considered this at the end of the film. I even think the video game Detroit Become Human dealt with this better, as dumb as it was - by having the rebelling androids refuse to wear their human skin, but rather present themselves as obviously robots, because they were rejecting their existence as facsimile of humans - a doll that would never be granted the same rights, but treated as a slave, dehumanised, yet made to look human for the comfort of its human masters / to serve their purposes)
Also, Deckard being THE android who can impregnate another android who happens to be Rachel, was just so, so dumb. The film's attempt to retcon Rachel + Deckard's attraction as "all part of Tyrell Corp's plan" or whatever made me roll my eyes so hard. Why can't these modern sequels seem to resist reaching back into the original film to tinker about and retcon stuff? It's so arrogant, and as if they think they are doing a better job of telling this story than the original.
And I agree totally with your pont about K being disposable, and the film seeming to agree with that. It was quite stunning, how nihilistic the film was in terms of its treatment of K, and I don't even think it was intentional, it was just bad writing. To me, it was perverse how cruelly the film treated the character - not enough his girlfriend never felt anything real for him, they twist the knife further by having her call him "Joe" (the name he uses to introduce himself to his "father", so he thinks - but this name Joe turns out to just be the consumer name that the Joi girlfriend-hologram uses for all customers... So his very sense of self is turned into a perverse & cruel joke)
By then end of the film, I was left thinking, what ultimately is the story trying to say? That it was comical this guy ever entertained any idea of himself as being something more than his programming? The androids who REALLY matter are those who manage to mimic humans most closely by copying our reproductive capacity, our appearance, our homo sapien way of experiencing reality? Goodness, what a monument to how wonderful humans are, how OUR perceptions and experiences are the gold standard - in a film that just got through showing us all the various ways humans are horrifying monsters - it was a complete clash and contradiction of meaning.
(Sorry for the huge comment, I just had a lot of thoughts right after watching the film lol)
Why I Just Can't Quite Like Blade Runner 2049
AfterImage
1,186 views
Despite presenting a refreshing break from predictable narrative structures, Blade Runner 2049 ties itself in thematic knots with a confused third act and increasingly nebulous characterisation that negates the appeal and concepts of it's sci-fi subject matter.