Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
I wanted to like this movie. I’m all for homage sequels that elevate the original art! I liked the first Blade Runner when I watched it. All the technical skill and high-quality effects in the world couldn’t make up for a weak and ponderous plot. Like many, I’m of the school of thought that Science Fiction comments on the present—often with smarter commentary than books set in the present because of the different setting. I say all this because I feel the need to prove myself as a SciFi nerd.
Ryan Gosling plays K, a new kind of Blade Runner who knows he is a replicant but kills old model replicants because he follows orders. While on a case, K discovers a replicant that dies in childbirth—which would destroy the world’s logic justifying slavery. K is told to destroy all the evidence, but while on his journey he takes on his own questions of identity and memory. That’s all a perfectly fine premise and the cinematography is truly beautiful. Denis Villeneuve was true to the vision of the world and didn’t try to do a revisionist history of a past future.
But despite the huge budget and great acting, Blade Runner 2049 is the perfect example of why we need diversity in filmmaking. The sexism in this movie was so bad that about halfway through I exclaimed, “I fucking hate men.” And it’s not like the first one was a paragon of feminist ideas.....
K has a holographic girlfriend named Joi. Much like replicants are servants to humans, Joi is a servant to K. Except, she changes her clothes to be sexy, pretends to be a 50′s housewife, and literally “says what you want to hear.” Unlike replicants in the original and this movie, she has no interior life that could be anything other than people pleasing.
This character is pretty unforgivable however you spin it, but it’s not like there was any other complex female character to make you think someone in this movie saw women as people. There was the prostitute replicant who was comforting; there was the replicant who just killed people. Lutenient Joshi was less extremely bad, but she wasn’t multifaceted either, her only quality was that she trusted K. There are sexist ads everywhere in the world-- gigantic naked women projections; not naked women still posing in designs meant to be alluring for random products (or sex), the world is just dripping in misogyny everywhere you look.
I’m not done.
Replicant mogul Niander Wallace (Jared Letto) wants to create replicants that can reproduce and just casually makes a female presenting replicant, gropes her genitals while she’s still naked in womb-like fluid, decides she’s not fertile and stabs her to death. That’s all. It doesn’t really expand his character, or plot, he just assaulted and killed her because he could.
I’ve mentioned a lot about birth and wombs, and that’s because, in this version, it couldn’t be more clear that’s what questions of morality are based on. A random woman replicant explains towards the end of the movie, “wait, if we can give birth then maybe we ARE people.”
THERE HAVE NOT OVER A HUNDRED YEARS OF WOMEN’S ACTIVISM TO SUDDENLY HAVE THE EPIPHANY OF A FUTURISTIC WOLD THAT GIVING BIRTH IS HOW WE’RE GOING TO DEFINE PERSONHOOD BECAUSE OF THE VALUE OF THE SPAWN.
Not only is this idea less nuanced than the original’s moral dilemma regarding killing, guilt, empathy, and choice through the existence of memories, it’s just so blatantly inconsiderate it pulled me out of a well-crafted movie like little else before it.
This movie also briefly and fleetingly tries to address the issue of racial prejudice. We hear “skin-job” thrown around a couple times and negative stereotypes about replicants. It was almost an interesting racial allegory. Except this ambiguous “Asian” land was labeled as LA, and had no Asians, but spoke and un-identified Asian language in addition to Engish. If this definitively a “post-racial society” that had been made all white because of a mass ethnic cleansing during the data purge or something, the obsession with tagging replicants as other would have been a very interesting statement on white fragility. But we didn’t get that. Instead, we get a loose floating reference to discrimination presumably because it seems topical when the filmmakers can’t see their own discrimination in casting a very large all-white cast.
This movie is also very long. I’m all for contemplative, but two hours and forty-three minutes is a long time for a movie to be contemplative when so much of the plot rests on convenient discoveries and has a weak moral question overall. I like taking the time to world-build and sit with the majesty of a previously un-depicted world aesthetic. I even like watching people make decisions more than I enjoy explosions. But it was too long, and the length was made more noticeable by a weak third act, which sucks because Harrison Ford did a good job reprising his role!
There was much that was good in this movie, and all I can say is what a waste of acting talent, and film craft talent. I think Denis Villeneuve is a talented director. I have respected everything he’s worked on up until now.
If this is the future of science fiction I have to put up with. Burn it all down (but take a cool radioactive pic like Las Vegas in act III).