Blade Runner 2049 Quotes

Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their own fall as a preventative measure to ensure that the white race will never fall.

[from 'Blade Runner 2049' review in 'Cut The Kink'] Here, in a reversal of 'The Force Awakens,' Harrison Ford survives and Gosling, his surrogate son, dies. The last shot of the film shows baby-boomer Ford creepily watching his daughter, a maker of memory implants, through a glass partition. Somehow, this generic version of the female has become the creator and repository of false memories, a scrapbooker of all the unnecessary backstories that have been weighing down screenplays since the original 'Blade Runner' came out. At one point we meet some official Hollywood-movie Tribal Scavengers, followed later by some official Hollywood-movie Meaningless Revolutionaries. Since at least the Matrix movies, such figures have heralded a revolution that never comes, though President Donald Sutherland did get trampled to death by rebels in 'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2.

If we then think of the apartment system and the emanator as something akin to bodies, then Joi actually swaps bodies several times. So, what at first blush might appear to distance Joi from humans and even replicants—the fact that Joi doesn’t have a proper physical body—really brings her closer to the Cartesian idea of what is most essentially human: Joi is pure, disembodied “soul.