[Severian]

Blade Runner II article on CinemaBlend

Forgive me if this is dead horse topic at this point. I haven't had much time to sit around and read about pop culture lately.

I've been renovating a house in the middle of nowhere for months, and have had limited internet access and no time for entertainment or pop culture. However, with the weather changing, I'm wrapping up exterior projects for the season. This has given me with the time to stumble into an excellent job opportunity, which has allowed me to scale back the teaching I was doing to supplement my income.

So we're finally getting back in the saddle, income and communication-wise, and I've been rewarding myself by binging on news.

And what topic grabbed my interest first? The Democratic debates? No. School shootings? Not really, though solidarity to my Oregon brothers and sisters... It was the shocking realization that Blade Runner II is actually going to fucking happen.

Ridley Scott, Harrison Ford, fucking Ryan Gosling? Man, who needs Star Wars?

I read this CinemaBlend story this morning, and it pumped me right the fuck up.

But as a fan of the PKD source material, and a diehard Blade Runner lover (one of the greatest films of all time, in my opinion), I have more than a few reservations, even though they're ultimately less powerful than my curiosity.

So again, forgive me if this is old news... I know the idea has been tossed about for years, but for all I know the fact that it's a "sure thing" could be talked to death as well by now... But shit, I would really like to gauge the public response here on the SYG.

[!@#$%!]

congrats again on getting back into functional shape-- but about this movie etc--

who needs it?

(i haven't read the article yet)

but seriously, i've seen every other cut and recut of the "first" one, and--what else is there to say about the subject?

anyone? anyone? bueller?

ps- having said that, apparently the mad max reboot worked? i'm slowly rewatching the first 3 before i rent the new one.

[Severian]

Well, thanks SB... I've been functional enough. Where I come from, people don't fix up houses for free - and we're investing in our future as well. But yes, thank you. Feels great to be working hard and getting a bit of recognition for it after years of doing 5th grade math for multinationals.

But in response to your question:

Who needs it? Ah, well. Listen, all I'll say is this... If people "need" Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull... If people "needed" 3 terrible Star Wars films that nearly killed the film franchise, and still feel that they "need" 3 goddamn more so badly that they're willing to accept the ultra modern, edgy vision of a completely new director hired only because of his ability to rejuvenate the franchise's main cinematic nemesis... If people "need" Batman so badly that they're willing to risk sullying not one but TWO franchises by sticking Ben Affleck in a Fucking Bat suit....

If people "need" any of this shit, then the entire idea of need has lost its meaning. Fuck need. I want it. I want to see what Ridley Scott has planned for a continuation of his best film.

And, you know, it's not a reboot. That would be very strange indeed, since part of what makes Blade Runner so brilliant is what the film did with the limited technology of the time. Pulling a "Robo-cop" with such a revered film would such all the life out of the original. (I liked the new Robo-cop actually, but that's neither here nor there)....

It's a fucking sequel! And in some ways in wondering what the hell might be done to make such a thing worth while myself. But if Ford likes it, and Gosling is signed on (he's one of the best actors of his era, dammit. "Hey girl" or no "hey girl") and Ridley's pumped about it, then I'm fucking dying to see why.

Blade Runner was not really a true adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Perhaps this film will tie the story of the book in with the existing film. Perhaps it will act as a Godfather II style ½ prequel ½ sequel. Maybe it will just make shit up. Whatever happens, it seems to be a done deal. If it's gonna happen, I can't imagine not being excited about it.

[dead_battery]

if only there was anything modern about the new star wars. its rehashed shit with the technological imaginary of a bumpkin from the 1970s like most other sci fi today

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by Severian

If people "need" Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull... If people "needed" 3 terrible Star Wars films that nearly killed the film franchise, and still feel that they "need" 3 goddamn more so badly that they're willing to accept the ultra modern, edgy vision of a completely new director hired only because of his ability to rejuvenate the franchise's main cinematic nemesis.

In terms of their outcome, I agree, but the franchises you mentioned were at least built on original films that anticipated serials. Blade Runner didn't and to try and justify a sequel, Ridley Scott has simply pretended that the original's perfectly acceptable enigmatic ending was actually just a cliffhanger all along. The beauty (and point) of that ending was that we were never meant to know.

[evollove]

I just paid ten bucks to see MP and the Holy Grail on the big screen, at my local blah multiplex. Happened all over the US, if I understood correctly. I wonder how much was made that day?

If there's a story that desperately needs to be told w/ BRII, who are we to stand in the way? But if it's just money, re-release the original, I say. People will go and pay, particularly people like me who live in a place where the same company or two owns all the theaters which play the same predictable fifteen or so movies.

Just a wild guess with nothing to back it up: more people would've paid to see a re-release of the original Vacation on the big screen than the remake. Same idea.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Severian

Who needs it? Ah, well. Listen, all I'll say is this... If people "need" Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull... If people "needed" 3 terrible Star Wars films that nearly killed the film franchise, and still feel that they "need" 3 goddamn more so badly that they're willing to accept the ultra modern, edgy vision of a completely new director hired only because of his ability to rejuvenate the franchise's main cinematic nemesis... If people "need" Batman so badly that they're willing to risk sullying not one but TWO franchises by sticking Ben Affleck in a Fucking Bat suit....

If people "need" any of this shit, then the entire idea of need has lost its meaning. Fuck need. I want it. I want to see what Ridley Scott has planned for a continuation of his best film.

And, you know, it's not a reboot. That would be very strange indeed, since part of what makes Blade Runner so brilliant is what the film did with the limited technology of the time. Pulling a "Robo-cop" with such a revered film would such all the life out of the original. (I liked the new Robo-cop actually, but that's neither here nor there)....

It's a fucking sequel! And in some ways in wondering what the hell might be done to make such a thing worth while myself. But if Ford likes it, and Gosling is signed on (he's one of the best actors of his era, dammit. "Hey girl" or no "hey girl") and Ridley's pumped about it, then I'm fucking dying to see why.

Blade Runner was not really a true adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Perhaps this film will tie the story of the book in with the existing film. Perhaps it will act as a Godfather II style ½ prequel ½ sequel. Maybe it will just make shit up. Whatever happens, it seems to be a done deal. If it's gonna happen, I can't imagine not being excited about it.

i'm not cynical or anything, but i try to not get excited in advance of anything if i can help it. i'm not saying it's going to be shit, but i'm not saying it's going to be great either. i'll just wait patiently doing something else rather than exert myself in expectations. i'll save my energy for the actual watching.

i had no idea robocop had been refried! detroit is still in ashes 500 years later.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

if only there was anything modern about the new star wars. its rehashed shit with the technological imaginary of a bumpkin from the 1970s like most other sci fi today

star wars was never about thechnology, it's a religious text. but you're right that the cyberpunk imaginarium hasn't been superseded-- at least not in film. we're stuck at the post-apocalyptic bullshit because our minds haven't yet comprehended the reality created by total networking. terminator sees it as the enemy and advocated techno-regression-- that's a fucking old trope. the matrix is a metaphor for that connectivity but it remains broad and metaphoric and it also gets religious in the end (hinduism). i don't know anybody yet who's working out the kinks of the new emerging hive mind- it's all "de macheen weel keel usss". boring.

Originally Posted by demonrail666

In terms of their outcome, I agree, but the franchises you mentioned were at least built on original films that anticipated serials. Blade Runner didn't and to try and justify a sequel, Ridley Scott has simply pretended that the original's perfectly acceptable enigmatic ending was actually just a cliffhanger all along. The beauty (and point) of that ending was that we were never meant to know.

exactly. after 20 recuts it's done & overdone. let it rest.

but you know, if something good comes out, i'l be happy. AFTERWARDS.

Originally Posted by evollove

I just paid ten bucks to see MP and the Holy Grail on the big screen, at my local blah multiplex. Happened all over the US, if I understood correctly. I wonder how much was made that day?

If there's a story that desperately needs to be told w/ BRII, who are we to stand in the way? But if it's just money, re-release the original, I say. People will go and pay, particularly people like me who live in a place where the same company or two owns all the theaters which play the same predictable fifteen or so movies.

Just a wild guess with nothing to back it up: more people would've paid to see a re-release of the original Vacation on the big screen than the remake. Same idea.

i didn't know about this but i'd expect that holy grail would be more of a nerd social event than an actual movie release. would have loved to attend one! preferably in keg party form. yes?

i did first watch BR as one of its many recuts/re-releases (which one i couldn't tell you, there have been so many), but that was before plasma tvs and blurays made theatres such a chore.

nowadays you need 3D to mobilize the suckers. hence the refries.

[Severian]

There is an excellent point in here about the ending of the BR director's cut.

It's the opposite of a cliffhanger.
The audience is not supposed to know where the line between replicant and "human" is actually drawn. It would kind of ruin the mystique if we found out "Oh, yep, he's totally a replicant" or "nope- turns out there was nothing to wonder about for all these years.

That would be terrible.

But what about a prequel? What about Ryan Gosling picking up the Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer role? What about a narrative about the androids revolting in space and commandeering the vessel and returning to Earth?

That might be worth seeing.

But yeah, now that I think about it, it would be disastrous to answer the unasked question at the end of the original film. The question that makes the film so unforgettable and haunting.. With a simple "yep, and then" or "nope, and then"

Still. I love the film, and I'm excited to find out what the hell is going to happen with the story.

[demonrail666]

It wasnt the plot that made BR what it was, it was its overall style. A perfect marriage of syd mead's designs, Doug Trumbull's fx, Vangelis's score. Rutgar Hauer was great but most of the other cast were more functional than great. The story was interesting enough but nothing special. It was the grounbreaking style that the sequel will somehow have to match.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

It wasnt the plot that made BR what it was, it was its overall style. A perfect marriage of syd mead's designs, Doug Trumbull's fx, Vangelis's score. Rutgar Hauer was great but most of the other cast were more functional than great. The story was interesting enough but nothing special. It was the grounbreaking style that the sequel will somehow have to match.

and the cinematography! "neon-noir" (lol).

but you know, famously william gibson went to watch the movie and had to walk out of it because he felt it was too close to what he was working on and didn't want to be influenced.

the thing though, while the style was amazing, there were philosophical issues where i think BR was groundbreaking-- mainly, the question of whether deckard is a replicant or a human.

before that (and afterwards too, e.g., matrix, inception) the "philosophical" question was: "is this real?" (all the way to zhuangzhi and the butterfly)

see: https://philosophynow.org/issues/76/...oody_Butterfly

^^ hilarious title and good succint article. [eta: the first time i clicked that link it gave me the full piece but now it's asking for login/subscription. so read it on first click if you can.]

the thing is, as the article points out nobody takes the butterfly part seriously. it's the nature of dreams/reality that gets questioned. our "humanity" always remains pretty much, you know, central.

but BR puts that upside down! it says-- hey! this is real sure but-- am I really human? maybe i'm a machine tat dreams! bhaaa haaa haaaa haaaaa. and it does it in such a delicate way. it takes it beyond where pkd took it.

in the 80s already we have a notion that maybe we are machines, that the difference between the real and the synthetic is... well, artificial, ha ha ha ha ha. it questions our bodies, not just our minds. cyberpunk fiction ultimately blends machine and human, making humans "uploadable." we're all replicants-- we're code. (but when code dies, pigeons fly and the "soul" escapes!) we're all dr. frankenstein AND frankenstein's monster.

i think we haven't gone past that point yet in our imaginations. decades that followed have actually pulled back from that edge.

so yeah i think philosophically BR was more groundbreaking even than in style. whether this was voluntary or not is of no consequence. what matters is that it happened. it's all in that little origami unicorn and the end that so impressed us-- the unknown reality that blows zhuangzhi's doubt out of the water because it's a more immediate and practical question.

and that i think is going to be impossible to top off in a sequel. epoch-making shifts like that can't be easily achived, much less repeated.

--

eta- and on a related note! how very timely. must be read till the very end.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/m...s-in-the-face/

[demonrail666]

Couldn't read the link you posted.

you're probably right about the philosophical side of the plot. I'm not a big fan of that kind of sf - for my sins I'm more into the stuff with big fuck off space battles, ray guns, captured princesses. Flash Gordon, Edgar Rice Burroughs, EE Doc Smith, etc.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

it's all in that little origami unicorn and the end that so impressed us-- the unknown reality that blows zhuangzhi's doubt out of the water because it's a more immediate and practical question.

Exactly. I completely agree.

It's not as if that's the only element of the film that makes it a classic. The cinematography has been mentioned. The excellent use of available technologies. The performance of Ruther Haur, which is really up there with some of the greats in the classic villain canon. The story itself and the pacing, the imagery, the blending of styles... The fact that its appeal is extends far beyond genre, even though the blending of genres is one of its most spectacular achievements..

All these things make it a classic.

But none of these qualities explains why it's a staple of university Psychology department film festivals. It doesn't explain why it continues to find new audiences in each new generation. It's a great great movie, but it's an important and endlessly thought provoking movie because of the last few seconds.

But the answer is irrelevant. The uncertainty is what makes it a question worth considering. I really think that's the film's main intellectual legacy.

[Rob Instigator]

the fact that the handcrafted every single thing on the sets from the power plugs to the vehicles.

The new movie is a pointless cashgrab. The people who it will be "tailored" for are the ones that have never seen Blade Runner but that have heard of Blade Runner. it is a brand they want to capitalize on. It is gonna SUCK SHIT

[dead_battery]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

star wars was never about thechnology, it's a religious text. but you're right that the cyberpunk imaginarium hasn't been superseded-- at least not in film. we're stuck at the post-apocalyptic bullshit because our minds haven't yet comprehended the reality created by total networking. terminator sees it as the enemy and advocated techno-regression-- that's a fucking old trope. the matrix is a metaphor for that connectivity but it remains broad and metaphoric and it also gets religious in the end (hinduism). i don't know anybody yet who's working out the kinks of the new emerging hive mind- it's all "de macheen weel keel usss". boring.

right.

at least in terminator the default setting is to use machines to war against the machines (going to war against them at all is bad enough)

but things get worse as time goes on

the matrix is very explicitly about a race war against digital post humans/machines. in fact the matrix KILLED cyberpunk because the vision put forth as a respite from the supposedly evil matrix is if you poke at it closely enough some sort of hippie communitarianism, regressive and one step away from primitivism and agrarianism - i know that that is not ever spelt out directly in the films but it is imo what's lurking in their unconscious and the next logical step that the zionists (lol) in that film want to take.

in oblivion it's got even worse and tom cruise goes psychotic in the face of his own simulacra and murders what is essentially a bossy female ipod to restore his post apocalyptic heterosexual primacy.

i wish i could point to examples that defied the trend but i just can't. it just got worse and worse.

noone could even MATCH the aesthetic of blade runner.

imo the epitome of this shitstorm was the star trek remakes, which is SCIENCE FICTION WHICH GIVES US A VISION OF THE FUTURE THAT HAS BEEN OUT OF DATE SINCE THE 60'S. this is the biggest betrayal of what star trek was about but whats even worse is that it seems to have gone unnoticed. like - people in 2010 accepted a science fiction movie that was 50 years out of date, nevermind DEALING WITH THE FUCKING TECHNOLOGICAL FUTURE WHICH IS WHAT SCI FI IS SUPPOSED TO DO!

[Severian]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

right.

at least in terminator the default setting is to use machines to war against the machines (going to war against them at all is bad enough)

but things get worse as time goes on

the matrix is very explicitly about a race war against digital post humans/machines. in fact the matrix KILLED cyberpunk because the vision put forth as a respite from the supposedly evil matrix is if you poke at it closely enough some sort of hippie communitarianism, regressive and one step away from primitivism and agrarianism - i know that that is not ever spelt out directly in the films but it is imo what's lurking in their unconscious and the next logical step that the zionists (lol) in that film want to take.

in oblivion it's got even worse and tom cruise goes psychotic in the face of his own simulacra and murders what is essentially a bossy female ipod to restore his post apocalyptic heterosexual primacy.

i wish i could point to examples that defied the trend but i just can't. it just got worse and worse.

noone could even MATCH the aesthetic of blade runner.

imo the epitome of this shitstorm was the star trek remakes, which is SCIENCE FICTION WHICH GIVES US A VISION OF THE FUTURE THAT HAS BEEN OUT OF DATE SINCE THE 60'S. this is the biggest betrayal of what star trek was about but whats even worse is that it seems to have gone unnoticed. like - people in 2010 accepted a science fiction movie that was 50 years out of date, nevermind DEALING WITH THE FUCKING TECHNOLOGICAL FUTURE WHICH IS WHAT SCI FI IS SUPPOSED TO DO!

Hmm... I don't know that I agree about Star Trek. I liked the "remakes" ... which are actually not remakes but a chronicle of how the events of the original films occurred in an alternate timeline... but I don't know that Star Trek is even really about technology, or ever has been.

to me it's more about the persistence and re-emergence of humanity's imperfections in a utopian setting where conflict shouldn't exist,but still somehow does. I know that storyline was largely abandoned after the original series, but I think the franchise still focuses on the faulty ideal of perfection. Violence begets violence... The fact that, even if humanity and other closely related species have evolved beyond the need for violence, they only REACHED that stage of evolution after centuries and centuries of... what? Violence. Which is then mirrored back to them as their influence and periphery expands. It's almost a karma story.

Honestly, I don't feel that technology has ever been the point of Star Trek... aside from certain storylines and characters in the TNG era... the original series is about humanity and friendship, with a lot of military and economic microcosm shit going on in the background.

It's not cyberpunk... Star Trek is space opera. Sci Fi is more multifaceted than your giving it credit for.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

I don't think the Terminator franchise was initially or necessarily anti-tech so much as a morality play about human responsibility and the inevitability of consequences which humans use technology to tried and somehow avoid. Judgement Day is inevitable..

I think the first one didn't even think it through that much, instead just wanted to be a total mind fuck about a future apocalypse which created itself and be this horror style thriller. That the Terminator was a machine in a way just made it a more frightening monster. T2 emphasized the deeper aspects of the morality play by emphasizing the conspiracy aspect

[dead_battery]

That's theology.

The right reading of terminator is not that the humans need to be more responsible with their toys but that they never were responsible in the first place and it's a neuro-mechanics own ignorant delusions about itself that thinks this.

You'll notice if you look at that thing you're in called humanity that it's nothing but violent atrocity in perpetuity with no justice or redemption other than death.

Your argument implies that we were better off the way we killed before the new toys or could be better off the way we'll kill as they develop.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by pepper_green

I've always liked the PK dick book better. I read it again early this year along with We Can Build You and Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said. the part about the dream devices or whatever about some dude is some psychedelic shit!! that should be included in the movie right!!

I still think A Scanner Darkly is the best thing I've read by him and the one I felt close and related too the most. like I understood every sentence. only read four of his novels.

speaking of cyberpunk. I've read Pattern Recognition but nothing else by William Gibson. really enjoyed that one. I know it wasn't cyberpunk but.

you know that sf is fiction. there's modern essays about our future being written everyday, it's just not disguised as sf.

Dude, read Neuromancer and then read the Difference Engine. The 'Engine is more steampunk oriented, but it addresses an alternate evolution of nanotechnology, and in the end things get pretty goddamn cyber.

Neuromancer is just Gibson's his greatest achievement. A must read for anyone even remotely interested in SF.