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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2588 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 14, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm a big fan of Blade Runner (1982). I don't want to bother listing all its positives, but one of the things I like about it is, as far as I understand it, the movie ends ambiguously. Is Deckard a replicant or not? I was pissed when Blade Runner 2049 came out and removed all doubt: turns out he's a guy after all. Still a good movie though.

This ambiguity at the end was also something I liked about John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). I have a family member who works in Hollywood and somehow we got onto the subject of The Thing. She said she didn't like it because of the same ambiguity, but then as a matter of course in doing her job she got to spend time with John Carpenter and asked him to clarify the ending. Apparently he gets this question a lot.

Turns out he has no idea what the confusion is about. The last frame of The Thing is Kurt Russel and Keith David staring each other down, harshly backlit, and it's completely, glaringly obvious that Kurt Russel is breathing and Keith David is not.

I said it seemed to be a bit too subtle for a movie where a head grows spider legs and scuttles away. She said no, it's why Carpenter is a genius.

Does BR2049 remove all the ambiguity? My read of the film is that it studiously refuses to pick a side in that debate. In fact, that's one of the things I love about it. Rather than simply come down on one side or the other (even though Deckard is clearly a replicant in the original cut of the original film), Villeneuve takes a third path: it doesn't matter. He's Deckard. The films have already made it abundantly clear that the line between human and replicant is merely technical, that if anything the replicants are "more human than human," at least in all the ways the films actually care about.

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