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

That scene’s misogyny serves no purpose except as misogyny.

Was it, though? It’s hard to talk about fertility and the reproduction of a specie (ie. pregnancy and birth) without a female capable of doing so.

unable to reproduce one of their signature models with the correct eye color?

The eye color is not important; it may just have been Deckard saying that not to have to re-live a life of Rachel. The eyes are, in this case, a red herring.

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This movie is obsessed with the idea of women

The original movie laid down the tone of this. Watch it again if don’t remember the same kind of objectification there.

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

Everyone were objects in this movie, not just the women.

Throughout the nearly three-hour philosophy lesson

Oh, come now, more like a 2 hour tablau of art deco, with a 5 minute philosophy reminder at the end. AJoking aside, there are some underlying interesting things going on that I think a lot of folks have missed (ie. not “what does it mean to be human” like the first movie, but more “what can we call a being with human memories?”, or the apocalyptic nature of societies, or the concept of value, or even more so, the notion of free will in a manufactured and constructed technological society. I could go on. :slight_smile: ), but I love to remind people that the more human the character, the more artificial it was in essence.



Ridley Scott is, and always has been, all about style. Alien was hardly plot-heavy. Even the original Blade Runner was a stylistic exercise over a short story by Philip Dick that was itself little more than a style exercise. The original Blade Runner was long and slow and a bit contrived; It became a masterpiece when the sci-fi mainstream adopted its aesthetic, even while it dropped most of Dick’s worries about the essence of self that had doggedly survived Hollywood’s “rise of the machines” treatment.

BR2049 continued in this path and did so fairly well: stylistic choices are an integral part of the operation and are both derivative and original at the same time. After all, there was no need to go post-apocalyptic when following up on a noir, and still Villeneuve and Scott decided to go there. The plot is often an excuse to show you a wonderfully-designed set, like a lot of sci-fi books are an excuse to riff on world-building; your mind is supposed to do the rest, and if it doesn’t it’s not Scott’s fault.

Also, I find the criticism of casting quite racist, tbh. Dave Bautista is Greek-Filipino. Ana de Armas is Spanish and was born and bred in Cuba. Hiam Abbass is Israeli. The cast was very diverse, within the story constraints. Calling for standard Hollywood quotas circa 2017 is just rabble-rousing of the lowest level.


Well, that’s certainly the thing that struck me the most. It’s all about men. Other than Luv, there’s few women in important roles. K’s boss is probably the biggest. And the rebel leader. Then there’s the girl who’s needed for the identical DNA gender confusion thing. All other women exist to be pretty, pleasing and available. Even Rachel’s rape in the original got presented as if it was consensual.

In all other aspects it’s a brilliant movie, but I found this very jarring. Admittedly it’s a dystopian future, but if this is part of your dystopia, shouldn’t the movie address it? As it’s now, you almost get the impression that the movie is okay with the objectification of women. Yet at the same time, women can still hold important jobs, like K’s boss.


I enjoyed the new movie.

All this call of misogyny in the new movie? Yes, absolutely, the only good thing that could possibly be argued is that it didn’t try to hide it, pretend it wasn’t there; it is our world writ large, and it is horrible.

But hey, remember in the original where probably-robot Deckard goes on a slave hunt from his racist old boss, kills a stripper replicant woman, sexually assaults a confused posh female replicant, then breaks into a man’s house and kills a homeless gymnast replicant woman?
Deckard is not a fucking hero.

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They would have been if they’d known. This is not a plot hole, the movie did this on purpose. A lot of information has been lost in the Blackout, so they probably didn’t know her correct eye colour, and reproduced her as best they could.

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Welcome to BoingBoing!

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Well, they could have shown an infertile man getting his balls cut off, rather than a woman having her uterus sliced open.


I noticed that too. I thought maybe a company was using that name to use nostalgia for marketing.

That’s something I really appreciated about 2049. It doesn’t force feed you the story, you get to figure it out on your own. And it provides plenty of time to think about it, consider what all the clues mean, and come to your own conclusions.

I love that at some point, I realised that K was the missing child and killed his own dad at the start of the movie. Then, when that conclusion seemed unavoidable, K was upset that his life was not the lie that he always thought it was (which is an interesting inversion of that trope, but simultaneously an example of that trope). And by the time something started gnawing at me that this didn’t add up, K was also slowly started coming to that conclusion.

It’s almost as if they tested this movie to see how quickly people came to various conclusions and adapted the speed of the movie to suit.


I liked the snow.

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That’s certainly a big difference with the new movie. Deckard was simply doing his horrible job. K leaves his job, lies about killing the child, and goes on a quest to uncover the truth and ends up joining the resistance.


why can’t we have nice things? Is it not possible to just enjoy a flick without nit picking and criticizing it to death?


Woe to those who stick around for the double feature, Blade Runner Mansplained.


No, they aren’t. From the plotline, to the imagery, to the character storylines, your claim is wholly unsupportable.


That’s a misogynistic claim in its own right, women do not reproduce on their own.



Actually that’s one of the few bits that makes sense from that scene. Being a replicant obviously they know she can’t reproduce, because they manufactured her.

What doesn’t make sense is why he’s attacking the merchandise, replicants are expensive to produce right? Did the screenwriters think the audience would be too thick to know he’s evil without that scene??


OK Young’ins. Blade Runner (in any of it’s versions, but chiefly US and rest-of-word versions) was an originating film, along w/Space Odyssey (2001! is the future imagined), original Star Trek, heck even Lost in Space and later Fifth Element (in the not-as-great arena), and Dick’s vision, and Asimov’s and their predecessors in writing. So measuring the latest Blade Runner against some recent artificial intelligence movie takes on the theme, not as compelling (oh Westworld, and that one about ideal women robots taking replacing originals); the plot grew out of the first Blade Runner…I would find plot holes that diverged from it more interesting if they are there… I thought the steady pace (no sequence dragged on for me, and I have ADD…often find myself going out for popcorn during the slow parts), colors, sound track, plot and actors were all great. A worthy addition. Leto certainly was a god figure, and in his Eden he kills a failed attempt at an Eve. Joseph K (anyone read The Trial?) is actually finding purpose. Women run the police, at least above K, the resistance, and Luv is certainly a strong character, as are the two women (Joi and the replicant sex-worker) in K’s life. The slide down the computer/artificial intelligence chain with Joi, esp inspired; gradations of what is real, what has value. It was though incredibly white; I’m taken a bit by the commentator who thought that having a slave white looking class to white owners was interesting, but probably unintentional. And world building, such as Las Vegas…you can ask that of any story set in the future. How did the Empire arise would have been an equally valid question (or not) after the first Star Wars movie. I thought Blade Runner was an exception to a sort of boring film season. But then again, I enjoyed all the summer films such as Valerian.


Okay, comrade; you like film so much, you join site too?