'Blade Runner 2049' Review: The Patriarchy Is Alive and Well in the Future

At one point, K ventures into a deserted city that appears to have been some sort of Las Vegas-like entertainment hub—it's a ghost town adorned with Sphinx-sized sculptures of nude women in high heels. Inside an empty nightclub, a broken holographic entertainment system is stuck in an endless, buffering loop—and yet it still finds ways to show Elvis, fully dressed in all his glory, alongside promiscuous, feather-laden showgirls.

But seedy entertainment is actually the most innocuous display of female nudity in Blade Runner 2049; violent female deaths are run-of-the-mill in this movie. The most disturbing scene is a man-meeting-his-creation moment between Wallace and his new female model. It's tough to watch as a fetal, naked woman smothered in synthetic amniotic fluid falls brutally out of her suspended packaging and Wallace tells her to stand. The shaking, frightened woman obliges, and he proceeds to fondle her abdomen—which visibly upsets her. He forcefully plants a kiss on the model while Luv watches, silently shedding a tear at the horrifying mistreatment of her kind. In all the naked woman's fear and vulnerability, Wallace viciously stabs her in the stomach and watches her bleed out on the floor, even drawing pleasure from the moment. His behavior sends a clear message: In this world, women are nameless, faceless, disposable beings, able to be used, murdered, or subjugated.

In fact, every female protagonist in the movie is met with a violent death. Most notably, Luv is strangled for what feels like forever. The scene is meant to evoke triumph and satisfaction, but it felt unnecessarily graphic and dragged out. (Female strangulation is ubiquitous in action films, though—see: Mystique in X-Men: Apocalypse, both Black Widow and Maria Stark in Captain America: Civil War, and Bridget von Hammersmark in Inglourious Basterds—so, it wasn’t shocking.)

Too often, female characters function as plot devices to motivate the male protagonists, and the majority of the women of Blade Runner 2049 are used and disposed of as such. Even the sex scenes in Blade Runner 2049 get weird. Take the ménage à trois between K, his holograph Joi (Ana de Armas), and sex worker Mariette (played by Mackenzie Davis). In order to synthesize real intercourse with K, Joi recruits a sex worker to “sync” with—like a poltergeist, Joi possesses Mariette and takes her human form. However, the effect isn't perfect: Joi and Mariette merge into a version of a woman that resembles both of them. When Mariette moves quickly, Joi lags behind, thus leaving the effect of having sex with two women at once. This eerie display of the male gaze was gauche and left me feeling sticky.

I know what you're thinking: "What about the men in this movie?" Not one male protagonist dies in this film—though, to be fair, there was one shot that panned past an unfinished humanoid model’s penis. Literally one.

But hope is not entirely lost. The most badass character of the movie is Luv, who wears Google Glass–like shades that allow her to lead a remote missile strike. Using voice commands like, “fire” and, “do your fucking job,” Luv sat comfortably in her lair while apathetically getting a manicure. Total villain goals.

And while many parts of Blade Runner: 2049 felt timely and reflective of modern-day America (like the corrupt, kleptocratic business tycoon), the most striking parallel was the female-led revolution. Freysa, a rebel robot, and her squad of undercover sex workers (including Mariette) form a Resistance against Wallace, which I'm assuming we'll see play out in the third installment of the series. So while this installment may have been exhaustingly chauvinistic, I have a feeling the next will seek retribution. Now that is a future I look forward to.