Blade runner 2049 sexist12/28/2022 ![]() To be sure, many of the critiques that emerged both from trusted colleagues on social media and in private conversations and among popular critics in venues such as Vox, Slate, Vice, Los Angeles Review of Books. Critics seemed split, however, almost all impressed by the visual phenomenon of 2049 but most finding it a shallow, overlong parade of problematic scenes. 2049 certainly 'failed' at the box office, netting barely 60 per cent of its production cost. But in the intervening years between its release and my first viewing, I followed the critical conversation with interest, curious how Denis Villeneuve, an often impressive filmmaker, had handled the sequel to a classic sf movie and how it fared as a blockbuster successor to a film that had initially been poorly received by popular audiences but had grown in stature through later re-evaluations and releases of multiple recuts. It took me two years to see 2049, despite being impressed by the visuals in the trailer I have never liked Blade Runner, and I am bored by the reboots and sequels spewing out of Hollywood. If the general tenor of critics' responses tells us anything, it is that 2049 is pure dystopia-bleak yet beautiful, maybe even brilliant (at least cinemato-graphically) and definitely problematic. What is emancipatory in all of this what thin vapours cling to the hopes for something better? And within this even more circumscribed capitalist-realist landscape, a detective yet again stalks representatives of the android underclass, questions his ontological status as android and/or human, and explores uneven power relationships with women. The nostalgic remnants of the past-a grizzled Han Sol-, I mean, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), emerging not to hoots and cheers as the nudge-nudge-wink-wink fulfilment of fan desire but as its antithesis, an acerbic old man uninterested in his legacy-are obscured or obliterated by terrible but beautiful sandstorms, massive ocean swells and even more neon. After all, if Blade Runner delivered on the urban grit of the hardboiled detective's dark alleys lit by neon signs imported from Japan (along with half the sartorial and set design), 2049 promised vast landscapes of urban decay wrought by capitalist expansion and climate catastrophe. Disclaimer: I have never seen the original Blade Runner so my view of the gender issues in the film are based on Blade Runner 2049 as a standalone film and are not influenced by any gender-related storylines previous to this. Surely there is nothing positive in the Blade Runner (dare I say it) franchise, no glimmer of better worlds promised by Utopian thinking. SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details and descriptions of the plot. We have arrived here because 2049 and its predecessor, Blade Runner (Scott US 1982), not to mention that film's literary progenitor, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, are all overwhelmingly seen as expressions of a neoliberal dystopianism that symptomatises itself through pseudo-cyberpunk aesthetics: gritty urban design, bleak lighting, bleaker narrative trajectories and a noir sense of futility in the face of humanity's injustices against those it oppresses (minus the women, who are not really people in either Blade Runner or its sequel). A short symposium piece on Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve US/UK/Hungary/Canada/Spain 2017) is hardly the place to rehash the question that concerns many in sf studies, Utopian studies and political activism-what is Utopia?-and yet here we are.
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