While an interesting idea, I'm not sure why her actual memories being used would somehow unite older-model replicants into a movement, especially when she has no idea that she has that lineage.

@@AndyMatts44 right, especially since the tipping point for Joe was finding the horse. They couldn't have all found that horse.

@@eternalturtl6320 They didn’t all find that horse. It’s implied the replicant movement goes beyond just the memories as the women states that they all thought they were the child, not out of memories, just out of knowing the chicks exist and they all thinking it was them. But they have dates they were created, things would have to line up perfectly. It just so happens that this replicant got fooled into the chase

we could assume that those replicants were encoded with a small part of the girl's memory, like Joe was. Cuz I always questioned how he only had memories of THAT specific moment with the horse and didn't remember anything else, so yeah idk

There's also that moment where Mackenzie Davis' character is in his apartment and notices the horse, before Joi tells her to leave. On second viewing, that moment reads as her having the same implanted memory as K, and is having a WTF moment seeing the horse.

💯👌like Roy Batty saving Deckard at the end ...yep...

I agree completely, and was about to comment with this. That his death in the end was proof of his humanity, regardless of his birth.

@@ninawildr4207 Hell yeah! I love this Parallel! However where Roy was looking for an extension to his life and running away from death, Joe states at the start of the film that "His kind doesn't run" he's not afraid of death. Roy spends his time in the first film looking for a way to extend his life and when he realizes its hopeless, it's his form of humanity to at least save Deckards life. With all his life experience that will die with him there's no reason for Deckard to die as well and Roy sees this. Joe's fight is with belonging. He wishes to belong to something greater than himself. He mentions to be born is to have a soul cause be believes he is souless at the start of the film. It's through him finding meaning in reuniting Deckard and his daughter that he can find true belonging and his "soul." His self sacrifice and mission complete he also allows himself to "presumably" die at the end of that film. ALL OF THIS IN PARALLEL TO ROY BATTY. fuck this film rocks.

Also this whole time we get his AI girlfriend who is the kindest relationship shown to our main character. Once she's free from the apartment she mentions that she has one life "like a real girl" echoing the ideal that we have this one life and how we use it is important. It's also treated as a giddy beautiful romantic moment. Only to be tragically torn away from us later when she gets destroyed. Her last words are "I love you." Joe's closest relationship is with his Alexa effectively. Then later we see the ad where she says that he looks tired "Joe" and we realize even his name was a manufactured part of the AI personality. It then begs the question if she truly grew to love him as an AI or was it a programmed part of her. How much does her developing longing and personality constitute a real person? ALL OF THIS IN PARALLEL TO JOE. as a synthetic individual he questions his own belonging and soul whilst simultaneously having an AI robo girlfriend. GOD THIS MOVIE ROCKS SO HARD.

SORRY LAST POINT where Roy's death is tragic "like tears in rain" Joe's death is peacful like the snow falling around him.

I think he is like Nolan in that he is a popular filmmaker who targets a wide audience, but I think he is better than Nolan because he understands the nuances of the craft a lot more. I don't think Nolan could've made Arrival without seriously increasing the level of action sequences and removing a lot of the subtlety for example. I feel like Villeneuve makes movies as though he thinks the audience is smart enough to "get it", but Nolan usually thinks the audience need it spelt out with an explosion or a monologue.

@@Hooga89 Keep in mind, Nolan is a fan of action films and masters of the genre like John McTiernan and Tony Scott. He doesn't view those as lesser works as he sees the craftsmanship in that space. What makes me a fan of him is his attempt to mix that wide audience spectacle with the arthouse/indie sensiblities. I always viewed Nolan as a lovechild of Michael Bay and Terrence Malick, which works sometimes and not so much other times but there's few like it (especially in the current Hollywood climate).

@@Hooga89 Agree. I LOVE Nolan films. Like... a lot a lot a lot. I have him ranked very high on my personal list of all time great filmmakers. But... I can't deny that there's this dynamic with his movies where the more I see them, the more filled with holes they become and the more I kind of ... fall out of love with them. In some cases, the more I've seen of a particular film of his, the more dumb it kind of seems. I don't have that with Villeneuve's films. ...at least not yet. So for me, they are very similar in a lot of ways, but I have Denis ranked slightly higher. Not like it matters, obviously. Rankings are so dumb when you get down to it. haha

I have seen all of Villeneuve's movies since Polytechnique and every single one of them are either really bloody very good or masterpieces. The man's talent is just too much!

This movie was so much better than it had any right to be, and Villeneuve was the perfect director for it. This and Arrival are amazing films.

She wasn't sentient at all, just repeating his thoughts and expectations back to him. They could never have a fight, for example.

I think that's the thing the writers and director are toying with, and I think us dismissing her as sentient is too easy, and this is where he really tests the lines we draw about what makes something human. Arguably Joi, a "product", did a lot of things that would not likely be part of the programming, like hiring a prostitute, like telling Joe to erase her from the apartment hardware which isn't exactly what a data-mining company would program its holograms to do. That she doesn't fully escape her confines(none of us escape the programming of our upbringing anyway) and that she pulls from her programming to call him Joe, is a brilliant choice because it undermines her humanity to the audience, and to Joe, but does it make her any less sentient in the end, really?

Overanalyzing

@@MrBrax You can't overanalyze this film.

@@annaclarafenyo8185 i don't really see any bigger meaning in any movie. She was just programmed to call everyone Joe and his realisation was that she was just a generic template that tons of people also had, she was nothing special.

and the movie opens and ends with scenes in white. loved the dried seasalt on his coat, such a cool detail.

What a piece of music Vangelis conjured up 40 years ago! Of course, Zimmer carried his share of the weight in this movie as well...absolutely stunning score.

Yep...i cried when i heard the theme start....i was wrecked for days.

It was such a powerful choice to have the original come in there, at that point. Big Vangelis fan, loved how Zimmer was inspired throughout by the original soundtrack. And yes: that scene gets me every time, together with Deckard simply saying 'here eyes were green'.

Both of the Blade Runner movies have Biblical references, and this one plays with that theme by making Joe think he's the Savior, only to find out he's actually a John The Baptist figure, meant to pave the way for the real Savior. Which means he still has great value in the scheme of things, but it's an awfully bitter pill to swallow.

Very good writing. Joe is the decoy - so is he going by the program laid out for him by Decard, or did he exercise agency over his own fate, i.e. choosing his own end? The fact that HUMANS haven't arrived at consensus on this argument lends weight to Joe's humanity regardless of whether his end was the result of design or choice.

I don't think K was intended to be a decoy. He, like a lot of other replicants, just happened to have Dr. Stelline's childhood memory. It was only a coincidence that he got mixed up in this particular case.

Joe was not a decoy. Joe was one random replucant that by chance got a piece of memory from the real hybrid baby, as she had the habit of inserting personal memories in some of the replicants she was contracted to by Wallace. The replicant resistence tried to turn Joe into their pawn but Joe had none of that and made his own choice. Joe was the wrong man at the right place at the right time.

@@rocketdave719 that's how I always took it.

typically a movie needs to double its budget to break even.

ah that sucks bad. I didn't know it did so poorly and I thought it was a well received film with all the buzz going around.

Breaking even is not enough. This type of movie needs to make significant money, so the studio can make more movies.

@@1183newman That's self-contradictory. What do you mean?

@@pvanukoff Look up Hollywood Accounting. The sum of it is that studios use "creative" accounting methods to record profits and losses from films so that even if it made more than the budget it can still lose money overall.

The Billboard scene also implies that although he sees 'Joi', it isn't HIS 'Joi', so that not only weren't his experiences any less real but neither were hers. This asks the question that the first film and the original short story asks; 'What actually IS a human?'. Where do you stop just being the sum of your parts and start being something more?

I saw that scene as the moment that he finally realized that his whole life was based on a lie and he decided to do something real and aid the resistance by saving Deckard. The director did an amazing job with the design choices in the film and I think his choice to bathe the entire scene in magenta is more than just an aesthetic choice. All colors have specific wavelengths which distinguish them from one another on the color wheel, but magenta doesn’t and nor does it exist on the light spectrum. When we see magenta, our brains can’t make sense of it so it comes off as a purple-ish, pinkish hue. I think the director’s choice to use this color on this scene was to illustrate that the entire relationship was fake.

@@Perfectly_Cromulent351 because the billboard also called him joe

according to the screenplay K does die on those steps btw

@@Perfectly_Cromulent351 your piont about that his relationship is fake is what most people think, im assuming this about other youtube comments. but i prefer Tyler Foster's opinion more. i like to think that calling him Joe at that moment was a sing of that her soul lived on and called out for him, so he went on sacraficing himself so they can be together. i base this idea also on one more moment, when they have "real" sex, the billboard Joi smiles.

Yes. A movie to be watched more than once and then debated forever. And that's fun!

Every time I watch this, I like it more than the time before. Really a brilliant film.

If George were more familiar with Star Trek, we could compare it to Khan being a modified human, not an android.

Yes this. I feel like most people think if you open one up you’d see metal and wires but that’s not correct. They have organs and bones too.

Techinically an organic artificial creature IS a robot. A robot is an umbrella term the same way like primates. Replicants, androids, automated machinery are all robots the same way humans, gorillas and chimps are all primates. Matter of fact the term robot came from the theater play R.U.R. where the robots were organic humans grown in vats. The metalic humanoid robot that we most associate with - like the android like C-3PO - had its genesis with the movie Metropolis made afterward - and even then in that movie the metalic robot was a mere endoskelleton covered in humanlike skin and hair). The very name robot cames from a common slavic language word for work or to be more exact and indented servant, a serf. One clever touch of the Blade Runner movies that took from the original novel is that the replicants are variations of the model Nexus. A Nexus in ancient rome was a legal definition given to a particular type of slave. By model name alone the replicants are slaves, in purpose and name both.

@@TheYakusoku android simply means an artificial autonomous object - a robot - made in human form and shape imitating at the very least the humans in look and dislocation - walking bipedal. That's what android really means. As such, replucants ARE a subsect of androids.

Yes thank you! Opening text calls them “bioengineered humans” and also what would the point of a V-K test be if you could just pin-prick their fingertips to see if motor oil, wires, or Bishop From Aliens Milk comes out?

Oh, there's no wondering, she's definitely just clever/advanced programming. Everything she says and does is exactly what Joe wants to hear and do, she's just a "robot" who's meant to affirm his every whim. It tragic.

@@thubelihlezondi5822 There is some ambiguity, though, since this is a film with programmable replicants. Being programmed for certain experiences doesn't make the experience any less real. Y'know, like we're programmed to feel a deep love for our children, is that fake? Of course, it depends on how advanced her AI is, but it's a fascinating subject in a movie about artificial humanity. In the same movie we get Harrison Ford telling us to "ask him" when questioned if the dog is real, we get an AI that might tell you it's real but actually isn't. Imo some of the most fascinating scenes in the movie are the brief moments when JOI is alone or separated from K.

@@michaelhenry3234 - I choose to believe it was real. The alternative is just too damn depressing.

So, like real human beings.

And maybe also wondering, what is "real"?

Hans Zimmer is todays Beethoven.

@@thegunslinger1363 Absolute legend. Was gutted I had to give my tickets to see him here in Dublin. I get to one of his gigs one day

Paled in comparison to Vangelis.

I believe it's this: "Weta Workshop - Blade Runner 2049 Miniatures" kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qbKoq8WX2NCceYE.html

Within the space of a month I watched Sicario, Arrival and then Blade Runner 2049. When they announced he was doing Dune I was sold.

Sicario is another masterpiece. His French language film Incendies, from 2010 is also great.

Yup Aaronofsky is another favorite of mine that people somehow seem to not talk about at all.

"Prisoners" is amazing. So incredibly tense and my favorite Hugh Jackman performance (sorry Wolverine).

He also directed Sicario, which is pretty intense.

Actually the film that completely transported me to a new world was from the very same directors very next film. Villeneuve knows his shit

@@alexmacdougall5700 I thought the exact same

Same, yeah it was like you were seeing through a window into another universe. It's a shame it didn't do better at the box office but then these sort of films never do anymore.

@@alexmacdougall5700 Dune is so damn good. I can't wait for part 2. He's also planning on adapting Rendezvous with Rama into a movie, which I trust he would do justice.

Everything you want to hear. Everything you want to see.

Yes! That's one of the important gut punches... The movie explores the question what is life and who is a real person in multiple ways. Joi seems like a real person, but in the end she's just a piece of software sold to many different people. I guess a clever AI doesn't make a real person.

Eh, that hit him in that moment but you can argue both ways. She wasn't programmed to activate every time he was around another woman. Even when he told her to stop getting sappy over him, she never held back. She definitely wasn't programmed to order another replicant over so that she could simulate sex with him.

@@kennethbryant5819 Wouldn't she be programmed to do that though? Didn't K/Joe express sadness that they couldn't actually touch and feel each other? That would have been like showing dissatisfaction with a phone app because of a, b, c, and then using the app the next day and those features being there.

@@kennethbryant5819 ....? how do you know she wasn't programmed to do those things?

Deckard is not a replicant, Scott was only screwing with the fans with the unicorn dream. The original book said Deckard was not a replicant, and the screen writers also said he wasn't and Ford was told he wasn't.

Yep. I think Villeneuve was poking fun at that in the scene when K goes to Vegas and is talking with Deckart. He points at the dog and says "is it real?" mirroring the audience's own question about Deckard. Deckard just says "does it matter?" George in this reaction seems 100% convinced that Deckard isn't a replicant and I'm not sure why haha, if anything the unicorn origami in the original movie implied that he was a replicant. But like you said, it doesn't ultimately make a difference.

Thats strictly a matter of interpretation.

@@faded1to3black uhh, nope

@@milling321 Uhh yup.

@@milling321 uhh, yep. Joi's whole existence and the question of whether or not she's sentient mirror's that of the replicants in the first movie; i.e. is there more to her than her artificial origins. Personally I think the answer is yes, but of course, we have no way of resolving that question.

@@boop4801 I don't know... After seeing it so many times and reading/watching some other opinions, I'm leaning more towards Joy being really good programming. Everything that she is is about serving Joe, didn't you find it curious that she only ever wants to do exactly what Joe needs?

I second that recommendation! Worth watching for the soundtrack alone, and the film itself is great too.

I made a 3 hours drive to see it in an IMAX theater. Worth it. Totally.

I remember that I meant to go and see it but got so tied up with work that I forgot. Watched it the next year on small screen and it was like watching a Greek tragedy. Utter catharsis.

Definately a cinema experience

Was worth seeing in the cinema for the sound alone. The soundtrack shook my body at times and transported me to another place.

Just like the original. It was planned that way. The prequel got very low views and STILL has low views due to a number of things. Most people who have seen the 2049 one has seen the original. Most who has not the original would almost never hear about 2049. I like it that way. It makes the cult classic extend to the 2049.

I think it was intentionally spelled JOI after the acronym for a certain sexual activity to further drive the fact that it's meant to be a sexual product.

You make me sad.

he realizes it after the joi billboard also calls him joe

How do you know JOI isn't sentient? I think, much like the question of Deckard being a replicant, JOI is portrayed in a way that one could argue both sides; that she's just a product or that she's transcended her programming. I think the arguments that she has gone beyond her programming is the fact that everything she encourages K to do does not serve the company but opposes it. To die for the right cause is the most human thing of all, and JOI essentially sacrifices herself to save K. If she hadn't appeared when she did, Love would have killed K. Instead Love killed JOI and left K alive to suffer the loss.

@@CSeraphym while there is nothing concrete, I think there are more signs that JOI isn't sentient. First of all JOI is a product made by Wallace Corp. It's a mainstream product to the point it's openly being advertised. I dont think it makes sense for Wallace Corp. to invest in trying to create a sentient A.I (JOI is an A.I in the form of holographic imagery). It would make more sense and easier for them to create a programme to emulate love rather than create a sentient AI and have it go rogue and therefore create security risk. It makes more sense for Wallace to invest in replicant technology, which is what we see Wallace doimg in the movie with him witnessing the birth of a new replicant then dispatching it because its not advanced enough (can't birth). Also when JOI gets destroyed by LUV, there's that whole scene with K staring up at the giant JOI hologram which is a clear indication of him realising that she was a product all along and that if he wanted to be a real human, the closest thing he could do was to make his own decision (I think the replicant group leader actually says something like that too).

Hardly underrated. I think this is pretty much universally praised as a masterpiece. And it did the unthinkable. It surpassed the original.

@@nightfall902 I agree with you. And I avoid books that are a part of a series. But. Sometimes. They wow us. Like this film.

Deckard is not a replicant, Scott was only screwing with the fans with the unicorn dream. The original book said Deckard was not a replicant, and the screen writers also said he wasn't and Ford was told he wasn't.

yep this

Agreed

how long did it take to copy that from the bladerunner wiki?

@@laserpanda94 I'm 51 so did see it back in the day, it changed cinema forever and the visual style has been copied ever since. 2049 was a worthy sequel and gets the Neo-noir Cyberpunk vibe perfectly.

Jesus, Hurley, they mineral!

I like that for 2049, you can interpret it either way or retain your head canon. It makes no commentary whether or not he is. If he is a replicant, a double miracle in that he and Rachel could conceive. If human, also a miracle.

Yeah, I personally like to think Deckard is human, because that means they transcended the human/machine boundary. And that's even more meaningful to that thing Sci-Fi has always been about, i. e. hold a mirror up to humanity and question what human nature is, in the first place ... but that's just my personal take.

Wasn't the unicorn stuff added in post-production because of studio notes or the beginning of Scott's descent into the blithering idiot who made Prometheus?

@@korganrocks3995 I don't remember it in the cinema when it came out but it was on my directors cut and I wasn't aware of it's relevance for at least ten years after that so I couldn't say for sure whether it was post production or post release, would be interested to know though so if you or anyone knows I'm here to learn

well he definitely was a replicant in the first movie

​@@somthingbrutal The first movie left It ambiguous if Deckard was a replicant, so no, not definitely. Even Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott disagreed on it. This movie tends more 'definitely' into that only Rachael was a replicant. Her pregnancy wasn't planned for or expected and it gets even more improbable when both parents were not be 'natural'.

@@nullunit But Wallace said (paraphrased)"...almost like you were made for each other...". This is seriously meant to make you think that her pregnancy WAS planned by Tyrell. I don't know how you determine the opposite conclusion.

Was wondering if anyone else noticed that

@Shasi iishi Not TOOK. Companies no longer needed to hire you. They had a workforce, so you were out of a job. This isn't an argument about immigration.

@Shasi iishi dont even bother arguing with him, the problem with talking to stupid people is they already believe they are right.

@Shasi iishi this guys probably mad cause his job at mcdonalds at the age of 40 got replaced by a kiosk but hes too dense and stubborn to actually try to learn a meaningful skill so instead he blames everyone and everything else. including inanimate objects. hes no different than people who tried to burn down factories cause no one wants to wait a year for a loom to make 1 shirt.

@Shasi iishi that's fair, I think I may have misread. People having time to adapt to changing job markets, while possible, are still often met with anger. For example miners being put out of their trade by changes in where we get our energy. They are resisting and not too happy.

I still like the original more. But this was definitely a worthy sequel.

At least Wrath of Khan.

Agree on skipping 1 and yes @cinebinge

@@joegreene7619 yeah. But it's till just a dum movie.

@@joegreene7619 I'll check out the paramount version I guess, but I always fall asleep when they reach... no spoilers

@@flcl666flcl I wouldn't call it dumb, but it just doesn't feel like a star trek movie at all. It feels closer in pace and scope to 2001 than Star Trek. I also need to state I'm not saying it is anywhere close to 2001 in quality though.