281–290 of 435 posts
2049 is probably a better film in almost every way and yet the original is better just by virtue of the clarity of vision it had.
But then once the second half starts, it really feels like whole scenes are just omitted from the movie, it’s kind of all over the place (indeed, Ridley Scott says the whole film is over 4 hours).
The visual language Bladerunner invented has virtually defined SciFi for the past 40 years. If you enjoy it's worth digging into the work Syd Mead - the film's concept artist - created: https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5642443624/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5642443252/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5641873923/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_…
I tried to impress my 11 year old with the opening sequence; flames belching over LA, Vangelis, etc. -- which I've always found aesthetically stunning. He was not impressed. This made me sad.
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And I think that's why it flopped initially but has such staying power. Balde Runner is fundamentally film noir and the sci-fi is just the setting. The essential conflicts are human conflicts--not technological ones. You can replace the setting and you still have mostly the same story.
But if you replaced the setting with a mundane one the movie would be a generic film noir. It only works because of the combination of the setting and the story.
Just comparing the two, Deckard's role is to be a witness to Batty's dawning humanity (as well as Rachel's I suppose). I think that's one of the things that gives the movie the feeling of extraordinary redemption at the end. There's no such sense of redemption in Chandler--the Marlowe storylines revolve around the struggle to keep a moral compass in the midst of societal corruption, in line with the common definition of the Noir genre. [0] (I'm thinking particularly of The Long Goodbye but it's common to all the Marlowe stories.)
Just my $0.02. It's definitely fun to think about.
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So what does the ending mean then?
He made it all the way to Jupiter, and figured he might as well check out the monolith despite the disaster of the mission so far. He took the pod to check it out. He was then taken through a portal in the monolith to the home system of the aliens that created the monolith. There, he was put in a simulation as best as could be created based on TV signals from earth. The simulation was of a hotel room in a particular…
If you make the connection that "monolith = jump in tech" then the ending, for all it's surreal imagery, follows as a jump so massive that of course a normal person couldn't understand, and it's all visualized in a super creative manner.
I wouldn't have guessed it was literally the aliens downloading his brain or whatever and that he'd chosen to go back and help earth, but the general gist is more than there. And i love the idea that it basically conveys what you need to understand, while also conveying what it would be like for a human to crash into something so phenomenally beyond what we've ever understood or experienced.
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I first saw BR in a theater the month it originally came out. It's hard to appreciate from today's perspective just how revolutionary it was. The film itself, especially the original cut, is flawed due to the studio making last minute edits which the director, cast and writers were against. Yet, it is still the one science fiction film that has been more visually influential than any other. It changed everything that…
I also saw Blade Runner in its original theatrical release, and it's still the version I prefer. In this case I think the studio heads did Scott a backhand favor by ending the film as they did. Spoilers: If, as depicted in the original release, Deckard is human and Rachael is a replicant, then the movie is a true love story. The message of a true love story is that the Other is as deserving of love and dignity as I a…
It's a really fascinating look at tech that's gone so far we really don't know how to identify the difference, or it's more than possible at that point there isn't one. The sentient AI isn't some super machine that's going to build the singularity. It's "artificial" people forced into short lived slavery in a world that couldn't begin to give a damn about it.
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A quality that makes a film commercially successful is not automatically a quality which makes a film great art. They're two independent concepts. So to weight popular success in any sense when deciding artist merit is a mistake. Popular is popular. Art is art. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
> A quality that makes a film commercially successful is not automatically a quality which makes a film great art. Agreed? Why are you telling me something I completely agree with? >Popular is popular. Art is art. The problem here is that for people like you, most of the time: "Popular is NOT art", it's this elitist attitude that "art" is above what is "popular" that I hate. We divide wealth into classes and now we h…
I'm not art critic enough to know even half of what's been written about the meaning of this painting, but I know that it's considered significant, and I immediately recognized the reference.
Can't speak for him, but I guess the reason for including it may have been as an example of a work that was decidedly not Popular but (after much discussion) very much Art.
The other thing it could be used for is as a reminder to not mistake the map for the territory, but I don't see that fitting into this discussion so it's probably not that.
The visual language Bladerunner invented has virtually defined SciFi for the past 40 years. If you enjoy it's worth digging into the work Syd Mead - the film's concept artist - created: https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5642443624/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5642443252/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5641873923/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_…
I tried to impress my 11 year old with the opening sequence; flames belching over LA, Vangelis, etc. -- which I've always found aesthetically stunning. He was not impressed. This made me sad.
I hated that movie the first to I saw it. I was bored with it. Now I love it. I really enjoy how much time they spend establishing the atmosphere and characters. It all feels very real and has depth. I loath the speedy sci fi that tries to touch on atmosphere and then hurries along with their paper characters and so on. So much sci fi I encounter now feels little more than a long trailer with no idea how to end.
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I thought the story was fine. Blade Runner's story honestly isn't all that good, the concept of the memories and K's self-discovery is arguably better than the original if you imagine that the original barely has a story as per se (but does have a better defined set of plot-beats). 2049 feels like it asks less questions, but wait until we have better AI in 10 years and watch how prescient including Joi rather than a…
I saw 2049 when it came out. I didn't like the original film much but of course was still curious about the sequel since I liked the original novel. One problem I have with both these movies is that the whole "memories" thing doesn't have anything to do with the point the original novel was making. The main point of the original novel is that the replicants are fake human beings which are not only deplorable due to t…
The movie tells you K is a replicants within the first few minutes, it's not ambiguous like deckard (eh), the point of K is that he has meaning handed to him on a plate - he might be human.
The visual language Bladerunner invented has virtually defined SciFi for the past 40 years. If you enjoy it's worth digging into the work Syd Mead - the film's concept artist - created: https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5642443624/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5642443252/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5641873923/in/... https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_…
Can anyone recommend some music that has the same vibe as Blade Runner's synth stuff?
Maurice Jarre (The Witness, Gorillas in the Mist)
Bear McCreary is mostly orchestral, but the "Cult of Baltar" cue, for example, seems to me cut from some of the same corners of the world/ambient universe.
Cliff Martinez has done a ton of great ambient synth stuff (Traffic, The Neon Demon, Drive).
Other synth soundtracks you may already know, but should check out if you haven't: Wendy Carlos's TRON and Daft Punk's TRON: Legacy; Brad Fiedel's Terminator; Tangerine Dream's various soundtracks.