I just find the existence of this movie to be absurd and grotesque. If any story was to receive a sequel, Blade Runner, the film, makes the least sense. What on earth is the point? Scott's original film, to say nothing of Dick's story, wasn't really about setting up individual characters with independent narratives. Even Scott's Deckard was (overimplied) to be generic, totally meaningless, and even Scott's (vulgarized) story was more about the end of humanity as we know it than the journeys of individual humans. What could be compelling about extending the narratives of these characters, when their whole existence in the narrative is to point out their ultimate replaceability, genericity, redundancy?
More bothersome is the function of time, and this is something we can think about in regards to cyberpunk generally. Dick's story was brilliant because, in 1968, he was writing about a whole bunch of interesting stuff that hadn't really permeated the cultural atmosphere yet. He was writing speculative fiction: he understood well that science fiction should be a "thought-experiment" a la LeGuin, exploring the present through a fantastical imagined future. Science fiction should not be "about the future," as in attempting to predict, or forsee. "The future, in fiction, is a metaphor." The future in science fiction should be fictional first and foremost, and the function of time in science fiction should serve to enrich the fiction.
Fast forward to the 80s. Ridley Scott adapts Dick's story. He reifies some of Dick's fictional elements, written in 1968, on 1982 film stock. In the process he ensconced certain aesthetic qualities and stylistic hallmarks into the cultural atmosphere/superstructure. This is part of the whole cyberpunk thing. What is lost is Dick's relationship with both real and fictional time. Scott is now working on Dick's fictional timeline but he’s already lost most of the metaphor of Dick’s future (some of this is inevitable in the process of adaptation).
The medium of cinema requires a certain literalization to transfer the word to the screen. But Scott and his cyberpunks have a different relationship with the future in general. The science-fictional future is starting to lose the dimension of metaphor. It is becoming merely an extension of the present. Mark Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism (garbled as his understanding is of anything East of Goldsmiths), is well-deployed here. The future is ceasing to be a space of imagination. The metaphor is dying. Scott’s future is an ossification of Dick’s. The only space for imagination, for innovation, is now the aesthetic, the styling of this dead metaphor.
The film Blade Runner has a more mechanical relationship with its fictional future. The fictional future is more of a direct extension of the present. The only space for change is the aesthetic, and that’s what has lasted and influenced following work. This is where we get cyberpunk as a sort of fetishization of a series of superficial motifs. What is Blade Runner remembered for? The “look.” The grimy streetscapes, the smog, the neon, the costumes. It’s the production design. (There’s a reason most big hollywood directors nowadays are special effects and production designers first, writers second, third, or tenth. Scott, James Cameron, Spielberg, Lucas, Nolan, etc.)
This is what makes this Blade Runner production so … spectacularly empty. We are extending the timeline, but not just that. We are extending it year for year in real time. We are marking the time with the body of real actors. Have I mentioned how the future began to cease being metaphorical and start becoming mechanical, a mere extension of the present, with the original film? My God! We now are faced with a future that is an exact, one-to-one function of the present, perfectly mechanical! Have I said that the metaphor was dying? The metaphor is now truly dead and its lifeless corpse lies in cold storage. We have a fictional timeline that is rigidly attached to the present and advances with it year by year. It can no longer even be said to be an imagined future, just an imagined version of our present reality that runs absolutely and strictly parallel to our own. Before we were faced with the horror of being unable to imagine a future without capitalism, now we are denied even the ability to imagine any future at all! \
bels wrote:Blade Runner 2049 is the final act completing the dadification of cyberpunk. From now on you aren't allowed to talk about cyberpunk unless you have a little bundle of joy in your life causing mischief. No more tech-wear fitpics unless your holding a tiny hand. Your 3a should contain moistened wipes and a blankie. Renaming the thread and setting the filter to replace "tech-wear" with "dadcore", "ninja" with "image conscious dad" and "teleports behind you" with "tries to provide a strict value system within a nurturing, caring environment"
What an important critical intervention from bels. We can see how, with the ability to even imagine a future without metaphor, much less the ability to imagine the future as metaphor, reduces the fictional work to direct expression, direct personification of our society’s underlying anxiety and paranoia. In this film, as bels illustrates, the result is just plain goofy, and as others have mentioned, also extremely racist. The modern filmmaker can truly think of nothing more profound than making a movie about the human race’s ability to reproduce and be reproduced, with an emphasis on human *race*. Thus we have this film, which is about a robot who wants to find his dad, and a robot-maker who wants to make his robots fuck and have babies, and all the robot babies and dads, by pure coincidence, are white. We live in a heteronormative, patriarchal society and there is no better example of this than the “dadification” bels describes. We live in a white supremacist society and there is no better proof of that than the fact that you could take the infamous fourteen words of the Nazis and use it verbatim and with perfect accuracy as a tagline for this film.
Of course this film is not alone in this. Most movies today to some extent reveal an underlying obsession with reproduction of society, usually along racial lines (watch any movie by Aronofsky). Of course this is a product not necessarily of the malaise upon the individual souls of the artisans responsible for this particular or those particular movies, but a result of the mode in which movies like this are produced. It's unnecessary to belabor that point. And we don't have to choose between analyzing the problems of this film and analyzing the problems of the genre, the mode of cinematic production, or our society as a whole (@BrokeBoy). We can use this film and other individual works to analyze those things as critics have done for centuries and continue to do.
I think it’s very worth noting that in the genre of “cyberpunk” particularly, there is a well-established tradition of problems, and these are problems that this film generously participates. One of these is misogyny and the objectification/fetishization of women which is fairly obviously (again, metaphor is dead!) shown with the whole holo-girlfriend thing, and the naked robo-woman whose belly Jay Leno cuts open for no reason, and, like, every other characterization of women in the film. One of these is Orientalism which has been discussed in this thread, and this is a particularly noisome and persistent presence in cyberpunk (not even St. Gibson is free of sin in this regard!).
So I think we should take Blade Runner 2049 as an opportunity to take a good hard look at the genres of science-fiction and cyberpunk and think about where these genres are taking us and the function they play in society. Bels says the film “is the final act completing the dadification of cyberpunk” and I would go further and say the film “is the final act that reveals the death of cyberpunk” and that our task is to bury cyberpunk, and whether or not cyberpunk is able to rise from the dead in three days will be proof of its enduring merit.