Review Detail

Removing Joi works. In the first scene where we see K in his house, because Joi isn’t there, K gives the impression of being much more of a “lone wolf”; that seems much more adequate to the rest of his personality. Also, as one of the film’s themes is loneliness / isolation, it works very well.

The new transition from Mariette meeting K to Mariette in K’s apartment was nicely done. And it worked well narratively because of what I described in the previous paragraph.
Also, because of this change, we can feel a real connection starting to form between K and Mariette, when she goes wake him up near the end, after she (presumably) helped to mend his wounds. When she says “you can trust us”, it makes sense narratively.

The removal of Luv’s weird “drone missile attack” scene was a great idea.

I like the concept that, because K doesn’t believe he’s the “special” child, the reason why he seems to care so much in finding the child may be because he’s “awakening” as a rebellious Replicant. That way, the scene where he meets Freysa takes a different meaning: the other Replicants know he’s starting to believe in the “miracle”, so it makes sense they decide to recruit him. It’s much better than the original scene, which was just awkward and cringe.

In terms of the narrative changes, the ideas here may be the best I’ve seen for this film. They really work and the story becomes better.

Overall, the “quicker transitions” were well executed and helped the story to move forward, instead of dragging its feet as in the original. Also, the total runtime is now much shorter.

Edit June 29, 2024:
I’ve watched the faneditor’s updated version and all my previous issues were fixed. Also, the improvements done at 0h13m07 (original voice was mingled with the rain sound effect) may be as much as it can be done, without distorting Joshi’s voice. I’ve updated my Review accordingly.