Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Bladerunner 2049 (movie review)

Welcome home to a dystopia we know well.  Los Angeles is more a melting pot than ever, and there's an LAPD. However there's no real sign of national governments, only Sony, CocaCola, Peugeot and restricted air spaces. We're in the mind of Philip K. Dick, or some facsimile thereof.

Sony has been researching hologram technology for some time now, in addition to acquiring digital rights. Here we get Elvis as a ghost in a dead casino, and Sinatra under glass.  The protagonist's girlfriend is a hologram.  But then he's not all there either, a synthetic human.

When we're able to simulate reality and use it to manipulate emotions, we tend to get lost in our own creations. Hollywood knows a lot about that.  Are we real, or are we Memorex?

There's a problem with science fiction though, which is we're so used to screen magic that we're not able to tell if these holograms are any closer in everyday experience as commercial products.

Some viewers may suspect Sony is sitting on some ability to generate building sized hologram ballerinas.  Most won't.  We've given up waiting for holograms at Best Buy much as we've given up on jet packs, as a part of that ever retreating mirage called the future.  Flying cars, yeah right.

The replicants aren't sure what's a real memory and what got placed there by clever advertising. Did I really have that birthday, or did they just stick it in my brain TV?

The protagonist, bred to think clearly, to do detective work, as a better grasp on the unreality of it all than most.