So i finally got around to seeing Blade Runner 2049 yesterday and i think i want to ramble about it for a bit. It's not that it was an awful movie, i actually enjoyed most of it. So before i get into writing a wall of text about what was wrong with this movie besides casting Jared Leto, i want to stress that in many ways that i'll not go into, it's a really beautiful movie. The first half hour had me constantly thinking "wow, this looks and sounds so good, this could have really good worldbuilding, too, what a treat" and i still think the set, technical and costume designers did outstanding work here. Directing and editing where ok as well - even though they took two and a half fucking hours for what's basically a CSI episode that turns out to be about replicant jesus, it didn't drag that much, and when it felt slow, that often seemed very deliberate. I think the cinematography is excellent as well, but that's also were the movie starts to show how over the top fuckoff horny it is. Even Michael Bay doesn't make the camera stare like that, i guess he just doesn't have the time to scroll up from the feet to the tits for that long.

So yeah, once i was an hour into this, it started to get kinda cringy with the lingering shots of teared-up, infantilized women that are programmed for obedience and later get killed for plot points. What made me write up this post was something else, though. I'm usually not the one to start plot hole nitpicking, but this is a movie where everything starts to unravel once you give it too much thought and i think that's due to the fact that they're making the common mistake of writing a movie about the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism without having any theory, any kind of capability to analyze capitalist rulership to back it up.

Like, how the fuck is Wallace's plan even supposed to work? "I need replicants that can give birth, i cannot build enough of them!" makes zero fucking sense. Replicants plop out of a plastic tube like some hyper-processed lunch, fully grown and imprinted with all the professional skills you need. How is human-like reproduction supposed to build your workforce faster than that even if you go for child labor? Are you aware that for millenia, a ton of societies pressured half of their adult population into doing unpaid reproductive labor? Because it takes so fucking long to raise children? I'm not even getting into the idea that if replicant slavery isn't enough for you and you want to go back to actual chattel slavery of humans, you can probably just do that if you are the most powerful man in a hypercapitalist dystopia where to keep thinking, feeling beings for slave labor is something everybody's fine with already. But let's say that Wallace wants slaves that cannot revolt - if it takes too long to grow replicants, just build some fucking tin can robots and have them operated by an AI. You've got AI that can work as a housekeeper and waifu, how hard can it be to put a construction worker persona into a bulldozer, or a soldier persona into a drone? Noooo, we need to find replicant jesus instead. Because that's what you do when you're the biggest entrepreneur in slave keeper gigacapitalism, but do not understand realpolitik and economics somehow and operate on movie brain instead: You start to believe that the christian allegory you just discovered is the most important thing ever.

And that's just how the replicant vanguard sees it as well! Yes, the revolutionaries and the ruling class in this movie want the same thing. I think that's the highest dose of capitalist realism i've ever ingested. Or maybe it isn't capitalist realism, but christian propaganda, because accepting replicant jesus as your lord and savior is both the "i win" button for gigacapitalism and replicant vanguardism.

But here's the next problem: If you radicalize replicants by showing them compelling evidence of replicant jesus, it becomes super fucking obvious. Because they have daily checkups where they sit down in front of the beepy machine and have to say "within cells interlinked" a lot and when you're "not at baseline at all", it's super fucking noticeable and an immediate death sentence. I guess that explains why LAPD still has full-time blade runners, but isn't the entire premise of your setting and your plot that the new replicants do not rebel anymore? And didn't your replicant vanguard include members that we've seen being employed before, which means they undergo regular checkups and it would be highly sus if they're not at baseline? So either you're bullshitting us about the premise that the new replicants can be kept in line effectively or you're bullshitting us about there still being a need for blade runners.

Like i said, once you start thinking about this, it unravels more and more. It's a pitty. This movie could have been so much more than eye candy, just by writing in a convincing revolutionary framework and making it about a slave uprising instead of making it the horny gospel.