Long, funny list of the many flaws in Blade Runner 2049

boing
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Especially considering that he already knew she wasn’t capable of procreating, because none of the replicants except Rachel were; that was supposedly the entire point of finding her and Deckard’s offspring.

Dammit, now this post looks weird because you deleted what I was responding to.

It was still a valid point;

For a woman, being unable to reproduce has historically been equated to being worthless, in many societies & cultures. Because why else do females exist, if not solely to act as incubators for the offspring of men?

/S

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44

Sorry about that! I worried that it might have been read as disagreeing, but I meant it as a supporting point.

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to decorate the arms of wealthy and powerful men?

to do the housework and cooking?

because god decided adam needed a companion?

so kings/sultans/emperors etc. could have concubines with no danger of interference with the main line of succession?

so we could have singers in a higher register without all that nasty castration?

because without women how could men use mansplaining to assert their superiority?

so teachers can make boy/girl/boy/girl seating charts?

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46

MacGuffin shot a hole in the plot with Chekhov’s gun! :wink:

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47

Yeah, holy crap this piece of musical history is not well known. They started castrating young boys around the time they banned women from singing in Church. (Although the exact causal relationship is not 100% clear, from what I read; the practice may have existed prior to the ban and just taken on a new life after the ban)

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No worries; I grokked that it was a supporting statement.

It immediately brought to mind the Handmaid’s Tale and Atwood’s ‘Unwomen;’ devalued as human beings simply because they were infertile.

Getting back to the subject of misogyny for misogyny’s sake; Not-Tyrell (I honestly can’t recall the name of the character off the top of my head, and simply don’t care enough to google it) could have easily sliced open a freshly awakened male replicant to make his point to not Not-Pris.*

But he didn’t.

*It also really says something that I genuinely cannot recall any characters’ names, aside from ‘K’ and Deckard; and only those two because one is a mere initial and the other is a longstanding movie icon.

I’d laugh, if it wasn’t so damn depressing.

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49

Maybe the real reason Edward James Olmos decided to sit most of the movie out is because he already endured four years of disappointing “the bioengineered robots can get pregnant now!” subplots in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

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50

Ironically enough, the approach of “explaining everything” is what made the initial theatrical Blade Runner so comparatively substandard, with the narration.

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51

I don’t blame the man; his cameo was almost non-existent - not just for its brevity, but for how it basically did nothing to advance the sluggish plot.

And yes, I know the original BR was slow-paced, but at least there were interesting bits along the way to keep me invested in the overall narrative.

The original had Pris and Roy Batty. This one had no relatable characters for me, let alone memorable ones.

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52

Somebody could purchase and resurrect the Pan Am brand. Of course, they would probably use the brand to sell random junk. Like those crappy Chinese lanterns marketed by Bell and Howell. The original company built the lens that allowed us to see the first live pictures of man on the moon.

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No you’re spot on.

I maintain that what he is interested in is in the total ownership of this new species- total control.

He kills her because he is impressing on Love just how important getting the child is. She is moved by it, and performs at the level he asks for.

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54

Leon “was used as a 180 kg/400 lb nuclear-head loader in the outer space colonies as well as a front-line soldier”

Pris “was a basic pleasure model incepted on Valentine’s Day, 2016,”

Zora was “a replicant with an A Physical Level (super-human endurance) and a B Mental Level (intelligence equal to that of Pris), and has been used in murder squads.”

Roy was "a combat model, used off-world for military service. "

Two others were killed trying to enter Tyrell corporation, prior to the events of the first film.

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55

I disagree with everything the author is saying- but I admit that most of my disagreement with them is rooted in my somewhat unscientific emotional ‘personal’ reading of the film. My more ‘scientific’ rational side defends this though- films don’t need to make concrete sense to be successful, and if you are depending on narrative sense to enjoy a movie, you might be missing out on a lot of good stuff.

To me a plot hole is when I notice something that takes me out of the dream of the movie, and none of the points the original author raises did(to me).

What I did notice was more of Scott’s meditations on god, creation, copying, recreating, loneliness, authenticity, film, pop culture and above all else- the question of whether or not the warm individual narratives that we are constantly searching for- love, place, family, myth, purpose- have any place in the catastrophic cold world that we have actually made.

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56

Wallace’s sole focus on replicant women essentially becoming living incubators is an evil plot, but not one person (human or replicant), ever questions the idea itself. There’s no outlying perspective, no clarification of how this is a horrific mistreatment of women’s bodies (engineered or not). In fact, even the supposed good guys are only interested in how they can obtain this information for their own needs, rather than because using women as incubators is objectionable.

This movie is obsessed with the idea of women, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Women adorn every piece of the setting. From giant, neon billboard ads, to crumbling giant stone statues of submissive women in sexualized positions, who are completely nude save for high heels, to naked (replicants) being used for sex in the not-quite-foggy-enough-to-obscure-their-bodies windows of a brothel. The female form, often naked or sexualized in a heightened manner, is inescapable.

A questionable plot and uncomfortable setting is one thing. Bad representation is a bigger hurdle, and one this film crashed into headfirst. Throughout the nearly three-hour philosophy lesson, we are presented with the idea that women are only there to help move the story of men forward, rather than act as protagonists in their own right in a story very much about oppression against them. And while women are sidelined in favor of male protagonists, people of color and LGBTQIA individuals are ignored altogether. The white male savior narrative is firmly in place.

I’ve seen the reviews and thinkpieces that say anyone who hated the movie just didn’t “get it.” And they’re right.

I don’t get it.

I don’t get why we keep allowing films to portray women as nothing more than objects in the stories of men.

We do not create media in a vacuum, just as we do not consume it in one. The excuse that this film is a continuation of an older original, so of course it doesn’t have today’s viewpoints, does not cut it. There is no excuse in this day and age for filmmakers to continue using an entire gender as objects with zero repercussions or acknowledgement of why that is—as well as ignoring the existence of people of color and LGBTQIA.

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57

Completely agree with this perspective.

While I diverge a little bit from @Melz2 on the scene where the replicant woman is killed to make a point, fundamentally it doesn’t seem to enter the filmmaker’s calculus that the misogyny of the scene and the reproductive plot itself is self evidently what makes the bad guy the bad guy. Put another way, it doesn’t seem at all like calling out the misogyny of the killer was in any way the point of the scene.

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58

Everyone’s an object in BR2049! all of them are getting used- all of them are inauthentic!

During the one actual scene of ‘sex’ between the hologram, the robot girl and the robot boy- the camera pulls away - a movie that wanted to make cheap porn would have lingered on all of the wet details of the situation.

  • the movie is NOT a celebration of mercantilistic sexualization- it talks about it- it talks about meaningless saturation, usury, exploitation but it’s not a rapturous encouragement of it.

The Vegas statues are not meant to be admired- they are horrible! Chincy, degrading, tawdry.

The giant hologram woman is not meant to be lovable, desirable. It is as pained and as artificial as anything in a old shopping mall- and the feeling that K has- and many in the audience, but obvs not all- the feeling that they convey is sadness, and dismay over the general crumminess of everything, but especially his own inauthenticity and the inauthenticity of his hologram girlfriend.

I could go on- I’m sure you could to- but I just want to say I oppose the idea of artwork made to satisfy the Morals Comittee- whatever flavor the morals might be.

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59

there’s an odd sort of racism in the story i think.

they want the pkd story about the confusion of identity and the meaning of self but it means they have to avoid the story of race.

basically, they have to make everyone white because otherwise they would have to decide the race of the replicants.

there’s literally no way an all white upper class would make all all white lowerclass. but that story would be so horrific and so uncomfortable for the audience, it literally cannot be touched.

it’s also, i think, part of why women are given so little agency. because seeing that world through women’s eyes would also be incredibly painful. and they simply didn’t want to deal with those stories.

they wanted a story where white men do cool white men things in a difficult white man world so we can all talk about high-minded, theoretical, navel-gazing psychology.

it’s case in point of why for truly new and meaningful stories there needs to be more diversity at the top: in writing, directing, and producing.

i love that about the original.

there was no evil bady who was the cause of all bad things™. the world was broken and the system was the cause.

if tyrell was dead or died nothing would have changed about the situation everyone was in.

this new not-tyrell* however? if he was dead or died, the story would have ended.

it’s fundamentally much more boring.

[* edit: proper hat tip to @Melz2. i also couldn’t remember the character’s name even seconds after seeing the movie. i kept calling him jared, which given the behavior of the character seems appropriate if the rumours about the actor’s sexual assaults are true. ]

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60

Tyrell’s reproduction of Rachael had the wrong color eyes. (Which itself is another plot hole: the company that cornered the market on producing picture-perfect humans is unable to reproduce one of their signature models with the correct eye color?)

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I’d suggest that was due to them not knowing because of the blackout, but the memory sphere that Luv showed K had footage from the Voight-Kampff with Rachael’s eye in focus.

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62

This.

All that pain is never once touched on or felt through any other perspective than the white men, nor are any of the other characters developed enough to move beyond acting as props for the same white men.

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