TLDR: they just took the aesthetic 😔 After watching it frame by frame and giving it more thought, I genuinely think they just took the aesthetic. All those questions the LIs ask with the “Yes” don’t align with the film’s themes. The most telling scene is with Zayne and MC lying in the snow. It recreates the final minutes of the movie, when K is about to die but is finally free. He accomplishes something truly selfless. He saves Deckard (a human) and helps him reunite with his daughter, who was born from a Replicant mother, while he himself ends up completely alone. Throughout the movie, K believes he might be the chosen one. The one who was born from a human and a replicant. Instead, he discovers that he is just another nobody and his memories were implanted in his mind. Everything in his world was manufactured : his home, his love, even his body but in those final moments, he can simply be. He can feel the snowflakes on his face. They are real and he is creating a real memory of his own as he dies. He has no program telling him where to go, what to think. He is—but just for a couple minutes. That is tragedy and not a grand bittersweet victory ending. Turning this scene into a romantic moment loses the entire point 🤦🏻‍♀️ K wanted to believe he was a special child, that his love for JOI was real, that he was destined for something greater and in the end, he has no family, no community and no social recognition. As far as we know, only Deckard and Ana will remember him and K seems okay with that. He doesn’t need to be the chosen one anymore. He has done something meaningful simply because he chose to do it. So how is Zayne and MC lying in the snow anything other than an aesthetic parody of that scene ? Is MC not special ? Of course she is. She is the cosmos, the main character whose power the villainous corporation (EVER Group) seeks to awaken. Is Zayne not special ? He is the Emissary of the Divine, the Master of Fate, the God of Annihilation. Even if you take Dawnbreaker after Death and Rebirth, he is not as alone and his connection with MC is real in that universe. Their circumstances and identities are fundamentally different from K’s. The original scene derives its meaning from K discovering that he isn’t exceptional, yet choose to act with humanity anyway so you cannot just transplant that imagery into a romance between two extraordinary beings and expect a similar meaningful depth 🤦🏻‍♀️ I think we genuinely need to accept that they took Villeneuve’s beautiful cinematography and plastered their own ideas of love that transcends our phone screen onto it—even when those ideas become completely hollow and uncomfortable when juxtaposed with the movie. Even if Valko had been included, this collaboration would still have rubbed me the wrong way. His absence makes it terribly worse. I think this is why some Ryan Gosling fans and especially fans of Blade Runner itself, in general, seem uncomfortable with the collaboration. It’s no longer a tragic reflection on loneliness, what makes us human, the danger of capitalism coupled with AI and the freedom to define oneself beyond one’s supposed purpose. It’s just a collection of pretty shots. I could make the same argument about Rafayel and MC literally walking inside the Wallace Corporation, the villain’s company, as though they were visiting some fancy art gallery. That place is grim as hell, it represents the industrial commodification of life. The same with Caleb where the only thing you can hold is his merch (the necklace). But i already typed a lot.