The Horrors of Replication: Blade Runner 2049 review
In 1982, Blade Runner gave us dystopian future long before dystopian future sci-fi became commonplace, used as backdrop to make us ponder what it means to be human. It was a bold, arthouse style film with a questionably sympathetic protagonist and a surprisingly sympathetic villain, sporting a slow moving plot that wasn’t really the point, dressed in amazing special effects that still hold up surprisingly well today. It’s one of my favorite films of all time and I always shudder in our present era of re-treads when Hollywood revisits and revises the worlds of these classics.
I am pleased to say that my worries in this case were unfounded. Blade Runner 2049 does an excellent (and highly disturbing, which is part of what makes it so excellent) job of continuing the “what does it mean to be human” theme, updated for our present era. I loved the “retro-futurism” … this 2049 clearly grew out of a 2019 that was envisioned in the 1980s. No internet, no cell phones, lots of analog stuff, the USSR is still around (not to mention Atari…sadly, I was literally the only person in the theater who laughed when I saw the giant logo)…but at the same time, we see little bits and pieces of the technology that evolved in our own reality, like drones, or appleTV remotes, which increases our ability as viewers to accept it. The synthesis is well done.
Just as the future Los Angeles of the original Blade Runner (set in the then far-off year 2019!) reflected the anxieties of its era — fear of growing corporate hegemony over our lives, fear of urban chaos butting up against fear of a heavy-handed police response (you know, the exact same themes from other era-films like Robocop or Escape from New York) — the Blade Runner of our era preys upon our fear of a blurred line between reality and fiction. This movie puts front and center the dilemma of fake news, of increasingly intelligent AI, of our ever-growing emotional relationship with/dependence on interactive technology and our ever-shrinking connection to real people. Deckard’s defiant declaration to the villain Wallace: “I know what’s real” — is the battle cry of our (losing?) war today, made all the more poignant coming in a scene where neither he, nor we as the audience, do know what is real (as Wallace has just raised the question, much as the first film did, of whether Deckard is himself a replicant, programmed for a task…and still doesn’t answer it. Which was awesome).
Our protagonist, Ryan Gosling as “K” (it was hard for me to work past the Men-in-Black association with that name, but I did), is on the front lines of that battle, and we’re never quite sure whether to cheer or pity him. His romantic relationship with AI stepford-girlfriend “Joi” (Joy) is disturbing — we’re never quite sure just how sentient she is, how much her devotion and love for him is genuine, or just reflective of the fact that she is a made-to-please product (something the sub-villain, the ironically named “Luv”, reminds him, and us, frequently)…and worse, we’re never sure how much K buys into the illusion. He may not be sure at times. He’s that lonely guy who falls in love with Siri. Everything Joi does is an overlay, an augmented reality curtain over a depressing world; can we blame him for trying to let himself believe it, even if he simultaneously knows it’s just a drug?
Joi’s most disturbing scene of all, of course, is when she overlays herself over the body of a prostitute (who is herself a replicant, named “Mariette,” like “Marionette”) to make love to him…the layering of falsehoods is almost ridiculous: a synthetic woman programmed to fake love overlaying herself over another synthetic woman who is paid to fake love, making love that may-or-may-not-be-real to a synthetic man looking to feel simulated companionship. It makes the head spin. And just in case you’re tempted to let yourself buy into the romantic illusion, the scene pans to an advertisement outside for the Joi AI, letting anyone who sees it know that she exists to please anyone, however they want. It’s hard to walk away from that scene feeling anything but depressed.
But even that scene pales compared to the subtext when Wallace presents Deckard with a re-created Rachel…who is not even played by an actor, but one of those freaky Grand Moff Tarkin style CGI re-animates of an actress who can no longer play the part. Even as Deckard has to face the mind-f*ck of the recreation, so too do we. When he defiantly says “her eyes were green,” I went back and checked the original — her eyes are brown, just like in the re-creation. Deckard has to lie (or, at the very least, reveal the fallability of his memory, and which is worse?) to try and disprove a lie. How can this fail to resonate in so many ways with our present “reality is up for grabs” era?
The characters can’t trust their “natural” memories, and certainly can’t trust their digital ones … either they belong to someone else, with the replicants, or they were lost in the “blackout” that destroyed so many digital records. The archivist mentions how his mom cried when she lost all his baby photos in the blackout — we can’t trust our minds and we can’t trust our tools to help us remember even the things that should be most important to us.
Even the villain is a victim of this world, despite all his power, much like Tyrell was in the original. Wallace is literally blind, only able to see through mediating technologies. What makes him so sinister, perhaps, is how much he doesn’t seem to be bothered in the slightest by it. When he bemoans how humans “lost their taste for slavery,” it’s ironic as hell, because everyone in this movie, him included, has become a slave, a slave to the technology we supposedly created to empower us. Old scifi trope, yet particularly powerful today.
What is the alternative? K’s hard-nosed police boss, Joshi (played by “Claire” from House of Cards), is a tragic figure in that her whole raison d’être, by her own admission, is to try and freeze change, to hold on to the past social order. When Luv declares, in the middle of murdering Joshi, that you can’t hold back the tide with a broom, she’s absolutely right…you can’t solve this problem by going back to some past world. We have to find some way to live in the world we’ve got and still be human.
So what, according to the film, makes us human? K believes it is the act of being born, of being wanted, of having an authentic past…and that doesn’t work out so well for him. Joi believes that being able to die is the mark of being a “real girl,” but in death she seems no more real than she ever did. The replicant resistance fighters say choosing to die for a purpose (as opposed to, say, Joi’s random death, which serves no purpose and over which she has no power but to say “I love you”) is the hallmark of being real, and the implication is that, in doing so at the end (perhaps…it’s ambiguous), K has done just that. So the way you prove you’re alive is to give up that life for the sake of someone else…in contrast to Wallace’s evil, which is that he creates life that he forces to die, either for the sake of building the colonies, or even just to suit his whim, like when he randomly kills that replicant woman right after her “birth”).
The film sported so many nice homages, and so many of them with a twist: Joi’s rapture at “feeling” rain was a strange, simulated perversion of the genuine moment of apotheosis that Roy (is the name rhyme coincidence?) experiences at the end of the original Blade Runner. For him, it is a moment of redemption…for Joi, it is just one more simulated illusion/lie. But then at the end, when the snow falls on K, it does seem redemptive again. There is the fight between Deckard and K in Las Vegas, choreographed with so many echoes of the fight between Deckard and Roy in the original, except this time Deckard is in many ways in Roy’s position. Even cooler is when K comes to Deckard expecting his “creator” to make his existence make sense to him, just as Roy tried with Tyrell…and it’s just as failed an endeavor.
But of course the movie was self-conscious…it was a re-creation (of Blade Runner) that was all about re-creations (from Elvis holograms to K’s memories, from the “memory factory” to Rachel re-replicated)…so freaking meta it blows the mind. Harrison Ford has seemingly become typecast as the absent dad resented by his abandoned children, just as he was as Old Han in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You can keep the meta-thing going here: these films are all the “children” of 1980s classics, long absent and now back to face our questions: “What do we do now, in this world that you gave to us but which now no longer follows your rules…can we still look to you any longer for wisdom?”
The important questions, indeed. Questions asked, art’s mission accomplished.
Now it’s our turn to do something.
Grade: A
Originally published at http://wombatzone.blogspot.com on October 22, 2017.
