He has that dream in the original as he falls asleep at the piano, doesn’t he? I don’t remember any other dreams in the movie so the addition/subtraction of that single shot changes whether you are supposed to think he is a replicant or not. Olmos could still give him the unicorn at the end and it wouldn’t have any particular significance without that shot. I think that was the exact intention of that shot, to change your view on him, and it only took one shot.
The other thing they did was add/remove all the overdubbed narration. With the narration Ford is explaining the whole movie to you in a rather pedantic way, without it the movie gains so much atmosphere, like the silent scene set to Vangelis where he walks around his empty dim apartment and goes out on his balcony with a drink and looks at the city while it’s raining and dripping, one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
Well, sure. At what stage of production was the workprint? The footage wasn’t used because of changes mandated by the studio. According to multiple sources, unused unicorn footage shot during the production of Blade Runner, contrary to Granath’s comment:
Bolding mine. We don’t all know that. And I’m still waiting for a source for his comment. I’ve shown my sources. And really, how is it even relevant? It’s a stupid argument to have. Because what if guys like Andy Bates (and I presume Soma and Granath) are right and Ridley Scott is lying. Let’s say there was no studio interference and the hundreds of people involved in the production are complicit in the lie. Let’s say Ridley Scott just thought up the director’s cut years later and it’s the product of a retconning conspiracy.
So what? It doesn’t change the fact that the later director’s cut is a movie about a guy who’s a replicant.
I saw and liked this movie, and thought it was at minumum a worthy sequel to the colossus that is Blade Runner, which is an accomplishment in itself!
However, I had serious problems getting past the main conceit of the movie, that replicants can give birth. This really really bothered me. If replicants needed to reproduce, they certainly wouldn’t bother with sex, gestation, and birth to get there – it’s freaking ridiculous. I dunno, that one thing made the whole proceedings feel completely ridiculous to me. Like a damn clown nose on the whole package that I couldn’t stop seeing. 🤡
Oh one final aside that didn’t even occur to me when watching the original Blade Runner multiple times: why would you send a single human out to kill androids when androids are far more powerful than humans? Bit of a death wish, innit? It’s the first thing I thought of in 2049 and then the rest of it made sense: you wouldn’t! So if Deckard was / is a replicant in the original movie, maybe that’s why. No sane human would want to go out and hunt androids, and certainly not alone.
Well, you’ve hit on one of the main points of the original idea that Deckard was a replicant. As they say in the Fast and Furious movies, it takes a wolf to hunt a wolf! It also explains why Gaff is sort of hovering around him the whole time. Gaff is keeping an eye on him because Gaff knows he’s a replicant.
That said, the idea of a lone detective working a case fits pretty well with noir, so I don’t have any problem with that in the theatrical release where he’s human. I think the title card also sets up this idea that he’s a special type of cop known as a blade runner. You might also figure guys like him and Holden need some sort of special training to administer Voight-Kompf tests. But, yeah, he does manage to get his ass kicked well and truly. Good thing Roy Batty had learned a bit of empathy.
Or you could argue the earlier model Replicants weren’t as dangerous, and they got more powerful and dangerous as new models were released. So back then it was less crazytown to send out one lone human to chase androids?
Still, we can easily build a (very bad) robot today that could trivially pound a human into mush – brute power isn’t the problem, intelligence is.
(incidentally the above is why the Black Mirror episode “metalhead” is one of the best in that season, the tech is no more than 30 years out to do what you see there.)
We have to go deeper. Harrison Ford was never told he was playing a replicant in a movie where the character doesn’t know he’s a replicant. Only Ridley Scott knows the truth!
Anyway, I’m sympathetic to the replicant angle, but I always thought it was silly the director could just declare that. He’s not the sole owner of that. There are other stakeholders in the project that think differently.
Nor sure I understand the complaint. They’re synthetic humans. Absent expertise in bioengineering, how else are they going to reproduce? They spent the whole first movie just trying not to die. And even with that expertise, it’s not going to be the same psychologically as having children. They want personhood, and the inability to reproduce is a powerful symbol of their lack of it in human society (of course, Wallace sees it in very different terms).
And for Wallace the idea, surely, is that nature has come up with a pretty efficient way of getting things to reproduce “automatically”, so why not go for it. It’s a lot cheaper to just let your slaves go forth and multiply than it is to build them from scratch each time.
Dude the replicants could simply build their own factories to mass produce themselves. Or they could reproduce by splitting like bacteria. So many ways that are simpler and more reliable than sex plus gestation plus birth (and birth that incurs death risk for the mother, wtf).
Like I said, ultra annoying plot MacGuffin with zero technical sensibility.
The movie does imply how difficult manufacturing is, and how frustrated Wallace is at its lack of adequate availability. The setting’s lore has also been consistent in showing how the inventors capable of creating replicants have been almost unique geniuses who have amassed tremendous power as a result.
Exactly. Movie making is a massive collaborative effort. Sometimes having different voices challenging the director will make a movie better. The late career Ridley Scott doing Alien: Convenant sounds like a person given too much creative freedom and not being given enough constructive criticism.
Why are they synthetic humans? The creation of such complex machines for the purpose of using them to do heavy lifting or fight wars is absurd. A properly equipped army of drones not too different from the one in the film would massacre an army of replicants, they would never see what hit them. Why would anyone create supersoldiers and then give them feelings? The human body is highly inefficient in terms of productivity, which why none of the machines we now use look like humans.
The whole premise makes no sense whatsoever, it’s obviously just a plot tool.
I listened to a StarTalk Radio show the other day, where an astrophysicist made a very common statement (paraphrased): “The reason we want humans on Mars is because what takes a robot a week to do, a human geologist can do in three minutes”.
There’s no way Frodo would have made it to Mt. Doom. The neophyte pilot Luke Skywalker would have had his X-Wing blown out from under him long before he got to the trench. Of course it’s a plot tool. It’s science fiction, which is all about asking “what if” questions. In this case, it’s “what if humans built meta-humans that are better than their creators in every way?” It’s not “this is is stupid, because drones are obviously superior”.
If we can replicate the main functions of the human body, we don’t need to make an actual human to do certain jobs. I’m not making a complicated point here, google car factories or something, look at the robots which replaced human workers in the past 30 years, they look nothing like us and for very good reasons. Tools are made to do their jobs efficiently not to start crying on the job like Luv in Blade Runner 2049.
It’s possible to integrate androids in a sci-fi world in a way that doesn’t affect the suspension of disbelief. You mentioned Star Trek so Data is one example. Even in this film, sex workers or other forms of human companions are much more believable than super-soldiers.
Now, see, that’s the wobbly bit. What affects your suspension of disbelief may not affect mine. Obviously, I have no problems with superhuman biological androids instead of Wall-E and the robots from Herbie Hancock’s “RockIt” video. You do. YMMV.
Why were the Blade Runners on Earth humans? It tells you in the opening text of the original movie:
After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-world colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth - under penalty of death.
So the illegal Replicants were always overpowered. Gaff hanging around is also explained by the fact that Deckard isn’t on the force anymore, explained when Bryant calls him back to the job after Holden’s near-deadly encounter with Leon.
I will forever think that “Deckard is a Replicant” is more a preview of M.Night or of Scott’s later career than the masterpiece that the original theatrical release was, minus the Shining drive in the mountains.
Some of the best movies have come from an internal tension/conflict, or with multiple voices. Just look what Marsha Lucas did as an editor for Star Wars: ANH. vs. some of the decisions made in the prequels.
