The Blade Runner 2049 Review
The story of Blade Runner 2049 is set in Los Angeles in (you guessed it) the year 2049 in a world where artificial humans, referred to as “replicants,” live among us. These beings are generally used for slave labor, including the protagonist K. K is a Blade Runner, a sort of police officer whose job is to hunt down and kill malfunctioning members of his own kind. If this sounds like your run of the mill “are robots people” story to you, it is, but it’s also a poetic rumination on the very idea of humanity with some of the best visuals I’ve seen in years (the camerawork and all forms of design in the film are beyond exceptional). It’s by almost all accounts a great film, which only makes its shortcomings more disappointing.
Director Denis Villeneuve uses his vision of the future the way all of the best science fiction authors do- as a mirror through which to critique our own society. He constructs a dense backdrop of thoughts on every “-ism” from capitalism and consumerism to fascism and colonialism (although rest assured, there are enough explosions and fist fights to keep the focus of viewers less interested in unpacking all of that).
The problem, though, lies in how he chooses to present this world. It’s an exaggerated version of our own, where totalitarian corporations rule and the bodies of women are even more objectified and marketed than they are now. He shows a future in which the only women we see at first glance are being controlled, but he also shows a future where women have great power beneath this exterior, and that the future of this future will belong to them. The mistake in this approach is that in satirizing industrial misogyny, Villeneuve comes dangerously close to perpetuating it.
For more than half of the film, almost all (of the very few) female characters are bizarre machines meant only to serve the plot of the male characters. While the argument could be made that Sylvia Hoeks’ character Luv is a well-developed primary antagonist, she is literally a servant of another character we are meant to interpret as our main villain (a barely-trying Jared Leto). When we are actually introduced to women with some form of three-dimensionality, they aren’t present for longer than ten minutes before K goes to heroically save them.
Blade Runner 2049 is a pretty long film (two hours and forty-four minutes, plan on taking a break), featuring excellent visuals, good story, (mostly) great performances, and slight sexism. I recommend it mainly for the purpose of forming your own opinion. I think this film will be remembered solely for what it does right, but it’s also important for us to remember what it did wrong.
