Exactly why I went to see it at the movie theater. In support of anything else that isn't just mindless epic explosions and destruction. Will buy the DVD as well. And i too supported John Carter in the same way and do the same with most war/westerns and mysteries. I like mindless silly fun as much as the next person but also crave and desire more intellectual stimulation to even it all out. 

For those who have already seen it...

I learned this today:

"Cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played" is from the book Pale Fire, by Nabokov... the one Joi wants to read to K.

Now that's one high brow Easter egg!!!!

I enjoyed the film greatly as an experience. It's a European art movie, de-emphasizing plot for cinematography, sound design, set design, and mood. So, like all such movies, it was doomed to bomb domestically.

Plotwise, it was saddled with improbabilities left over from the first film. Why is it cost-effective for a planet teeming with unneeded street urchins to invest in androids that can't reproduce? Why spend the impressive effort making the androids look perfectly human, and then fret about how human-like they are? Etc. Then it added plenty of plot holes of its own. If the bad guys are looking for the MacGuffin, why go looking for it yourself when you know they can follow you? And then when they do follow you, why go to the second MacGuffin as soon as practicable? Who are you working for, really?

Thematically, there didn't seem to be any new space to cover that hadn't been done by the original Blade Runner, by Her, by Ex Machina, by A.I., etc. The most poignant part of the original Blade Runner was the theodicy of Roy Batty demanding from his creator why his death had been predestined. Followed by Roy's final moral decision, which has no particular parallel in this film.

Those are good points, but I agree with Confessor's explanations... especially regarding why Replicants are used instead of the countless unwashed masses of orphans and unemployed garbage sifters: the advantage of Replicants is not availability, it is expendability. They can be used, abused and sacrificed legally. (They are also probably better suited to their task, being engineered for it). 

I agree with you that it is a little silly to make Replicants look human and then worry about them looking too human and hard to track. Even taking into account that we don't want them to look like robots, they could have had, say, some easily identified feature easier to spot than an eye tattoo. Making them blue, for example. 

As far as comparing Blade Runner 2049 with Ex Machina or A.I., I agree... there is common thematic ground when it comes to the point where a machine becomes human. But I think Blade Runner 2049 went beyond those other two films.

In A.I., I never felt any ambiguity or deep philosophical question. The robots in that film were written, quite simply, as real people in mechanical bodies. They were Pinocchio, they were R2-D2 and C-3PO. Nothing in their origin ever made me consider them less than actual people. All I felt was annoyance at the humans who treated them like dirt.

With Ex Machina (one of my favourite S.F. movies), the director skillfully played with our preconceived notions regarding sympathetic robots. After a short while seeing her interact with people, we are pretty convinced that Ava is cast from the same mold as the other "nice" robots from the annals of SF: she seems human enough, and not just a good imitation. Then comes the twist, and we are left to wonder.

But with Blade Runner 2049, we go one step further. Joi is presented as a virtual girlfriend and we know that she's just a program. Even her very convincing emotional manifestations, up to and including being willing to sacrifice herself for K, can be chalked up to good coding. But while her reactions are the results of what her parameters says, she is clearly able to self-program and adapt to her environment, modifying her actions accordingly... and who is to say that real people are any different? Who can say that the love she manifests K is any less real than that of a person who has been programmed by genetics and socialization to love their significant other? The big difference with the traditional "nice" robots or A.I.s is in how we are reminded that Joi is a product, whose basic programming is common as dirt. When we (and K) are treated to that big slap in the face, when the giant publicity hologram calls him Joe and shows us all that Joi was not an original person (albeit with artificial roots), we could conclude that it was all a sham, that she was "just" a program. But it goes beyond that: sure, K's Joi started as just another iteration of a basic algorithm... but she grew, and evolved into an individual. She's the first science-fiction character that really made me believe artificial intelligence could be exactly the same thing as its biological forebear. 

My interpretation is that Joi never actually grew into an individual. She simply mimicked individualism in a Turing-worthy manner. (I know, one of the themes is whether there's really a difference at that point.) Her late-life naming of K as "Joe" was revealed to be something that was in the program from the beginning and just hadn't had an appropriate opportunity to be spit out (we are led to understand). The most interesting thing to me about Joi is that she was programmed to draw K in not just by pleasing him, but by acting pleased when he did things for her. We all want to be appreciated, and that was the most alluring thing about Joi: she seemed genuinely thrilled by getting a present, by the opportunity to go mobile, by the illusion that she was feeling rain on her skin, etc. And yes, that she expressed her appreciation with physical affection.


If you haven't seen "Her," you should definitely do so, since it's the movie of the bunch that deals most clearly with the complexity of AIs and the appearance of romance, moreso even than Ex Machina did.