Wake Me When Its Over

"Blade Runner - 2049" directed by Denis Villeneuve, 2017

You may ask yourself, "Why a sequel?"  The original 'Blade Runner' film was hugely influential to a whole generation of dystopian film.  After sitting through this overly long film, you may have the answer.  The story is not enough to hold up the heralded wide-screen visuals, which are being carried by a tiny narrative that collapses at the end, dead.  Like some hollow Star Wars film that has at its heart a tired Harrison Ford, a wooden Ryan Gosling and an android-human baby - all surrounded by debris, rain and neon, you wonder.  Is that all there is? 

Flying Cars in Dystopia

And by crikey there is a lot to work with here, if it was ever used.  But it is not.  We have killer drones, virtual girlfriends, slave androids, an underground rebel movement, environmental collapse, constant rain, radioactive wastelands, a fascistic LAPD intent on genetic homogeneity, sexual exploitation circa the early 1970s, a one-man police hit squad, terrible humans, a dominant Wallace Corporation and human-android cross-breeding.  It sounds like now!  This complex of problems is actually the real message of the film.  Does capital want non-human slaves now? It is a goddamn warning.

But to its creators, memory issues and human identity take center stage.  Is the blade runner "K" - a Kafkesque name if there ever was one - a replicant android or a human - or both? No.  Yes?  No?  Yes?  No...  At one point you go, who cares, as they are almost identical to the viewer.  (Humanness is a political construct...)  The key issue for the LAPD is to destroy any idea that replicant slaves and humans can interact, thus preserving human dominance, while the Wallace Corporation wants to breed replicants and humans for more slaves.  This seems to be a sidelight.  The other key issue for the filmmakers is memory - does K have real memories or are they implanted in his virtual brain?  Yes, the Big One, is reality real?  Even this film is an attempt to 'implant' memories into the viewer.  As you navigate this film's wrecked or run-down Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas, you might also later wonder, 'did it happen?' 

Ultimately the film is a film about family, and one man's search for his possible mother or father.  That is American film-making - turning dystopia into a family story.

The movie is based on Philip Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," which was reviewed below. The book was different than the first film, but the mood carried over.  In essence it felt sympathy for the androids and their abject slave-like conditions.  This film also deviates from the first film and the book.  It concentrates on K's individual story, and a hopeless, depressing one at that.  As you might say, Hollywood does with Dick what they want.

The barely-noticed rebels here in 2049 are replicant slaves who are going to overthrow the slave system and the wretched human rulers who rule over this dystopia.  (The next sequel?) Of course do the replicants really represent soft machines - or do they represent real brutalized proletarians across our present world?  The answer seems to be obvious - it is the latter.  One scene shows poor orphans in a waste zone disassembling PC boards for the metals - just like now!  Others have scavengers on waste piles; female sex workers and marginal protein farmers.  But to culture mavens who prefer to wonder if Siri is a better girlfriend than a real one, this is a mind-fuck that will generate many sophomore college papers.  What is real? Where do humans end and cyborgs begin? 

The essence of bourgeois thinking is idealism - not in the sense of 'having ideals' - but in the sense of thinking reality is not based on material, scientific facts, but only on what you think.  So wondering what is real is essential to disordering the population - in religion, in miracles, in real-world fantasies, in factless conspiracies, in ghosts, in new age mysticism, in science fiction - its endless really.  Better to concentrate on family issues. This is not what Dick was solely concerned with, but the director and writers of this film thought to place their major emphasis on it, thus undermining their own somewhat surreal and beautiful construction.   Visually, this is a beautiful film, reminiscent of Soviet science fiction films.  That is its real value.

Prior review of Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" below.

Red Frog

October 9, 2017