Review: Joe and the ‘Real’ Girls: Blade Runner 2049

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: About halfway into Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Officer K (Ryan Gosling) finds himself seeking the source of a wooden and quite literal Trojan horse that, he has been told, originates from a hotbed of radioactivity. K sends his drone-like camera into the vaporous twilight to find the locus of contamination. Constantly moving and re-centering simultaneously, the viewfinder reveals the first of numerous and giant sculpted women littering the Vegas wasteland. A “heat analysis” reveals “life” collecting in a tangerine puddle at the fingertips of her delicately carved hand. The digital equivalent of these deserted Galateas, K’s fembot companion Joi (Ana de Armas) responds, “what is it?” to which K retorts, “guess we’re about to find out.” Like life itself, both this question and the film’s very quest are of woman (figure) born.