loobkoob

Tom Cruise is an odd one for me. The idea I have of Tom Cruise is that he always plays the same character, is just a generic action star, etc. And then whenever I actually watch Tom Cruise in a film, I'm always really impressed by just how good an actor he is. But I still can't shake the idea I have of Tom Cruise.

I have a similar issue with Brad Pitt, where my idea of him is that he's just a generic leading man, despite him almost always putting in a really strong, nuanced and varied performance.

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting "soft answers", but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

The big difference between the two for me is how much feeling of gameplay expression there is. In Fallout, my options feel like melee, shooting enemies with shotguns, shooting enemies with automatic rifles, shooting enemies with long-range rifles, shooting enemies with lasers, shooting enemies with miniguns, and so on. And the shooting mechanics don't feel strong enough to really differentiate those different weapons as different playstyles for the most part. If I play a game like Titanfall, Battlefield, etc, then changing weapons can feel drastically different - they handle differently, you navigate combat arenas differently, you prioritise targets differently, you use cover differently. But that doesn't really feel like the case with Fallout for me without any of the moment-to-moment decision making that tends to allow for gameplay expression in shooters.

Whereas Skyrim feels like there are a lot more playstyles available. Destruction magic feels very different to conjuration which feels very different to illusion which feels very different to being a stealth archer which feels very different to using a dagger which feels very different to using a huge, two-handed melee weapon. They're not just visually different; how you approach and navigate combat encounters will be significantly different depending on what kind of build you have. It just feels like there's so much more gameplay depth.

I've been separating Chris Brown's music from his personality for a long time. I hated his music long before I know how terrible his personality is.

I feel like no amount of trailers or reviews are going to give me an idea of what to expect from this film, and it feels like I'll probably not know what I think about it until several days after the credits have rolled.

I'm not convinced it will be a good film, but it absolutely seems like a must-see for me.

Of course, take your time! I think Blade Runner 2049 is such a deep and complex film that you have to let all the ideas percolate anyway.

PS, @Blaze, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, especially with the film being so fresh in your mind!

I think it's a film where most people are being objectified and in some cases pretty senselessly murdered! Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista's character) is senselessly murdered. Joe/K attempts to senselessly murder Deckard. Joe/K is left to die on the steps at the end of the film. Ultimately, I think it's less about any kind of gender divide and more that almost everyone is just a victim of extreme capitalism. Everyone is dehumanised in the name of profits. Everyone is made to compete with everyone else for what scarce resources remain. And that's especially true for the "secondary citizens" the film largely spends its time with - replicants, women, orphans, poor people. Slaves.

If patriarchy and violence against women weren’t a problem or if the film were about those issues, then all good.

I'd go so far as to say that patriarchy, violence against women and fertility are major themes of the film. With replicants existing, we see a world where women aren't needed to create life. With overpopulation and resource scarcity, we see a world where having children is less desirable anyway. The film's larger narrative focuses on Wallace, who is very much patriarchal himself and also representative of the patriarchal ruling class in the setting, wanting to discover how to make replicants reproduce because breeding replicants would be cheaper, quicker and easier for him than building them from scratch.

Wallace is cruel, power-hungry, sadistic, and dreams of electric wombs - of a world where women aren't necessary (because he only sees them in terms of their "function") and he can play god. He's very much painted as the villain - one gory scene shows him quite literally see him cutting into where the wombs of female replicants would be because he sees their infertility as a failure and something that makes them worthless to him.

Blade Runner 2049 goes far beyond using the sad prostitute and the destitute brothel to signify dystopia; it fully integrates them into its plot and takes a deeply anti-patriarchal stance.

It feels like other options were available and, TBH, using female objectification/ownership/subordination/violence as a vehicle and marker for dystopia is perhaps lazy and trope-ish.

I don't feel like it leans into them so much that they become tropes, personally, and I don't think men fare much better either. But while women's sex appeal is commodified - quite literally with pleasure models, the most clinical, corporate name possible for sex robots - we also see combat models and blade runners commodifying violence. Some of these roles are filled by humans doing what they can to survive in a capitalist system trying to crush them; others are replicants or AI literally designed and manufactured for those roles. I don't think any of them were used as markers for a dystopia so much as being part of the fabric of the world, the story and the themes.

For me, as much as I like the film, I don’t think it’s story and point quite get to the point of making what happens to women in it feel justified in our current era.

I really don't think what happens to men in the film is much better. The film is miserable for everyone in it - it's an equal-opportunity dystopia. The only person not being crushed by the world and the system is Wallace, and not only is he the oppressor (so, y'know, not much sympathy there...) but he also doesn't come across as too happy either.

Perhaps a bit more like the story of the protagonist in BR 2049 (who’s of course male).

Joe/K might be the main character of the film but he's not special, and that's the point. His entire character arc is that he starts off feeling like any other replicant - ie, not feeling much at all because of all the emotional suppression - before daring to hope that he might be special and becoming more and more in touch with his humanity as a result. As the story progresses, he becomes convinced that he is indeed special. And then it turns out he's not, and he decides to give up his life to help someone - a woman - and that is when he really becomes special.

Almost everything that happens to Joe/K in the film is at the direction of women. His boss - the police chief - is a woman. The person who implanted his memories - and who is responsible for implanting all replicant memories - is a woman. The person who leads the replicant resistance is a woman. His direct antagonist in the film - Luv - is a woman. A lot of his emotional development comes from being prompted by Joi, a female AI. Almost everything that happens to Joe/K ultimately happens because of a woman, because they are the ones who are really playing the game around him.

I think Blade Runner 2049 is a deeply, deeply feminist film. It doesn't shy away from depictions of female objectification/ownership/subordination/violence - they are important for telling its story and getting across its themes - but it sure as hell doesn't endorse them either.

When I saw the film I had some female friends tell me they felt uncomfortable with objectification and portrayal of women in the film. And I can’t disagree. But I always felt that there was an underlying truth to the dystopia of the film that explained that objectification, though perhaps does not justify it.

I think the film does justify the objectification, although it does still make me uncomfortable.

Joi is sold as an object / product in the film. We see her advertised all over the place, and I think we are supposed to see her as an AI girlfriend and feel a little sorry for Joe, at least initially - he's replacing a real relationship with an object pretending/programmed to love him.

And then we start to realise that that's not really the case. "Our" Joi has memories with him, and her personality with him is clearly different to the default personality we see in the advertisements. And so what if she's programmed anyway? - that doesn't make the feelings Joe has any less real.

The main theme in the first Blade Runner, and still a major theme in 2049, is having the audience ask themselves "is a replicant really any different to a human, really?". The clearly have feelings and are defined by both those and their memories (implanted or real) in the same way "real" humans are, even if replicants were constructed. I can't help but feel that Joi, and AI in general, is the logical progression of that line of thinking - if an AI is bringing up memories, emulating feelings, etc, then should you treat them any differently to a human? And does the influence the AI has on humans' (or replicants', which I think we already established to essentially be the same as humans) feelings not mean that AI can have just as much value to humans?

I think Joi being not just treated as an object in the story but objectified is kind of key to having people consider that. The first Blade Runner very much did the same thing but with replicants, and we've seen other media do similar with gender/race/sexuality/etc. It can be much more powerful to belittle/objectify/discriminate against a character and then tear that down and ask the audience to consider why it was wrong, than to just never bring it up in the first place.

I also just think the dystopia is kind of the point and objectifying women is a part of that dystopia. The film doesn't revel in objectifying women but rather women being objectified is yet another thing about the film that highlights how dystopian it is. The film doesn't try to normalise it in real life or make you feel comfortable with it; it just presents it to you as something that's normal in the setting, similar to the huge amount of garbage, similar to the capitalist hellscape, similar to Las Vegas being an irradiated wasteland, similar to replicants being hunted down, similar to Joe being a replicant... Very little about the film is meant to be aspirational or comfortable - the opposite, in fact - and singling out the objectification and portrayal of women just feels a little odd to me.

You can just say “well they’re stupid that’s what you get” or you can ask yourself why aren’t we getting these people on board while some greasy billionaire can?

I don't necessarily like to just dismiss people as stupid, but a lack of education and the ability to understand complex issues is both a big issue for these people and a reason why the greasy billionaires can get them on board. Convincing someone that them paying some of their money into a union will actually result in better working conditions and more money for them - rather than just being poorer - is a lot harder and takes more understanding on their part than someone convincing them there's less money to go around because there are more immigrants, for instance.

On top of that, people like to be able to absolve themselves of personal responsibility if they are given the option to. That's not exclusive to right-wing people, but when that's coupled with people wanting simple "explanations" because they don't understand more complex systems with all their consequences, knock-on effects, etc, it makes it easy for right-wing politicians and media to offer simple scapegoats and get people on board.

To use the immigrants example again: not only is it not your average right-wing voter's fault in any way - it's the immigrants' fault - but also, they don't personally need to do anything to fix the issue, they just need to let the right-wing politicians get into power and it'll all be solved for them. It's all very comforting for them - much more so than being told it's going to take ten years and some work on their part to improve things.

I'm definitely a little confused about Tango - I'm hoping we'll at least get more details come out about why Microsoft shuttered them. I mean, Ghostwire Tokyo was... whatever, and I could understand Microsoft not wanting to have them working on that kind of scale again any time soon. It wasn't bad by any means, but it was fairly expensive and perhaps didn't do as well as they hoped. But I'm surprised they didn't want to just downsize the studio and aim for another HI-FI Rush-esque game (or sequel).

But Arkane Austin being closed definitely makes sense. Not only was Redfall a disaster, but by the time Redfall released, 70% of the people who'd worked on Prey had left the studio. (Largely because the studio's president had left the studio just after Prey, I believe, rather than because of the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda.) All that was really left was the name.

Those underlying issues are what left-wing people are trying to resolve already, though - wealth inequality, poor mental health, too much power in the hands of corporations and the mega-rich, removing outrage politics, etc.