According to this article there’s been at least 2 toddler shootings a week over the last 10 years on average.

Also, just for fun, you’re about 200 times more likely to be killed by a child shooter than a bear in the United States.

If you’re implying there’s more movies where anthropologists save the day you gotta let me know man

So this is what peak enlightenment feels like.

I think this is actually the last movie I saw in theaters that truly emotionally affected me on a spiritual level. I think there’s something about the ambiguity of how real the replicants are in both movies that is used for great emotional effect, but the way K ultimately rejected the reality that was handed to him and sacrificed himself in pursuit of a deeper humanity within himself is something that just fuckin’ resonates with me man. I still tear up thinking about it.

Was an odd experience seeing that the movie was actually quite polarizing. I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about people’s criticisms, and while I understand their reasoning, I ultimately don’t think there’s a single thing this film could have done differently that would have made its emotional impact any stronger. The biggest criticism seems to be the slow pacing, which I understand, but it irks me the most. The pacing is a staple of thoughtful science fiction, (think the original Blade Runner, 2001, Ghost in the Shell) and absolutely serves the purpose of letting the themes, setting, and underlying philosophical questions posed by the movie to stew in the mind and sink in. In that regard, the pacing in this movie is about fucking perfect. The opening scene establishes everything you need to know about the plot with zero filler. In fact, the only times the movie seems to slow down is when K is going through a psychological transformation of some sort. Trying to understand his perspective, why he changes, why meaning emerges out of the events of the movie, is the meat and bones of the whole experience. If you can’t get on board though, yeah, I can imagine it being a bit of a slog.

Other criticisms like Leto’s performance or the lack of fleshing out Freysa or the resistance also seem kinda silly. They each have like 5 minutes of screen time and ultimately serve their purpose in the story just fine. You don’t really need to know much about them other than their motivations and their importance to the story, which I think they both do just fine. This movie is just simply not about them, and really only serve to remind the viewer that there’s bigger forces at work all vying to control things in their own way.

Another criticism that caught me off guard is the accusations of misogyny in the film. The movie certainly has a lot to say about the commodification of sexuality, which is another strong point of the film imo. There’s quite a lot I can say about how the movie thinks about gender identity and sexuality, and how it either contributes or detracts from our inner humanity, but there’s an excellent youtube video on that topic so I’ll just link that here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=6GsXBh5PGZU

But… yeah, anyway, good film. 10/10. It’s kinda strange because while I like Denis Villeneuve, I feel like a lot of his movies don’t really hit the mark that well. Honestly found Dune kinda boring. Would recommend Arrival and Enemy though, those are solid. But 2049, another level man, another level.

I did too but noped out pretty quickly. It’s shitty because it does seem like there’s genuinely good people over there, but conversations there tend to get derailed and so wrapped up in liberal talking points, you can see the brain rot forming in real time.

I’m feeling a kind of way about it right now. I used to spend a lot of time on Reddit, and I’d usually form an opinion on something by reading a lot of the comments and trying to synthesize my own opinion by creating an amalgamation of it all. I feel like this must have worked to some degree because I actually started my radicalization over there. I’m not sure if Reddit became worse over time, but now I can barely stand it there. Maybe I’ve just gotten better at parsing bullshit and realized just how much of it there actually is, idk.

But I guess I feel two ways about it because if I got radicalized over there, then perhaps others can too. I personally don’t have the patience to wade through the bullshit anymore, but I also kinda hope people keep fighting the good fight over there.

Was just about to post this. Weird sensation having a huge pit in my stomach with a smile on my face.