Mariette: [to Joi] Quiet, you. I’ve been inside you. There’s not as much there as you think.
Mariette is correct. Replicants are modified humans. Joi is an entity constructed from the ground up to love her partner. But that’s it. Love feels very real, so Joi feels very real to herself. But she lacks the agency that replicants have, even replicants with repressed agency.
The audience is led to believe that Joi is real because she sacrificed herself for K. But of course she did. She loves him. There’s a lot in Joi - but she naturally thinks there’s more to her than there is. Love is vivid.
Overall I’d give the film 4 stars. Add a star if you like figuring out movies after you see them - I’m guessing the film holds together if you ponder it long enough. Subtract a star if you don’t like long 2 1/2 hour films. It felt like 3. (Personal rating: 5 stars, see preceding. Which is not to say I loved it (there’s not as much there as it thinks!))
ETA: I thought it was a vast improvement on the original release, which has a bad voice-over and tacked on ending. I can’t compare it to the Director’s cut or Final Cut (where they fixed those 2 issues), because I didn’t see them.
Unless I missed it or it went over my head (either entirely possible of course), I think there is absolutely nothing in Joi. It’s completely empty. It’s nothing more than a speaker connected to a computer on a cloud, which responds to what it thinks K wants to hear. But there is literally nothing there, which K fully understands toward the end when he see’s the 50 foot Joi and she calls him “Joe” out of nowhere.
My take was that the 30 foot Joi was the fresh out of the box version. The home version was a fairly sophisticated AI, with short and long term memory. The theme of the novel and movie series involves humans and near-humans. It feels more right to me that they would slot in another entity lower on the pecking order but still (probably) self aware. Joi has some sort of life, though it’s admittedly more paltry than that of a replicant.
The movie makers could have made her into more of a chatterbot. But if they did that, I would think that such accusations would be more explicit: saying to her that there’s not as much there as she thinks implies that she indeed have capacity for thought and opinion. It’s not like Mariette was speaking in front of K at the time.
That said, this is a movie where the audience is suppose to puzzle things out. So I trust there are a range of viable interpretations. I’ll add that my take is pretty cynical: it implies that an entity of pure and true love isn’t actually all that human, though it may be self aware. Take that Hollywood!
I don’t know that we can say that Joi is truly “empty”, but I did take that scene to mean that Joi is a sophisticated computer program with less ability for creative or independent thought than K or the audience may have previously believed. The replicant prostitute* did notice that there wasn’t really much to Joi, though.
We’re shown that the marketing slogan for Joi isn’t just “Everything you want to see” but also “Everything you want to hear” – they’re literally designed to tell the customer what he wants to hear. That’s what K’s personal Joi has been doing the entire movie. She encouraged him to believe that he was a “real boy” because she picked up that this was what he wanted to believe. She offered him a name because he wanted someone to give him a name, like a mother would name a child. It’s apparently part of the default Joi programming to address a potential customer whose name is unknown as “Joe” (I’m reminded of the prostitute in the song “Lady Marmalade” saying “Hello, hey Joe, wanna give it a go?”), so that’s what she suggested. She probably wasn’t capable of coming up with anything else on her own.
*Incidentally, I thought it was a nice touch that the actress playing the prostitute (Mackenzie Davis) looks kind of like Daryl Hannah, who played the “pleasure model” Pris in the original.
For a counterpoint on Joi, what about her insisting on being downloaded to the memory stick and wiped from the appliance attached to the ceiling? That doesn’t strike me as something an entity so limited as you guys are describing would do.
I agree. I don’t even think the prostitute necessarily believes what she’s saying to Joi. She’s going out of her way to insult a thing she’s saying doesn’t have real feelings. That’s a little odd. I mean, I occasionally curse at my appliances, but I don’t try to attack their self esteem.
I don’t think the point of the interaction between Joi and the prostitute was to tell us something about AIs. I think it was to show us another way replicants are human - they have the capacity for prejudice.
Great point. Which makes me think about it the way we’ve so often seen happen in our world: people who are far down the totem pole find it really important to shit on anyone they can find who’s lower (notably, poor white workers and poor black workers, which works out great for the PTB). So the prostitute is a “skin job” and a streetwalker, which puts her pretty far down the class scale. But if she can sneer at Joi (who, also, is a kind of competitor), she can feel better about herself. And it should also be noted that Joi was being kind of cold to the prostitute when she told her to leave. Each may feel some envy of the other for different reasons: Joi of the prostitute because the latter has a corporeal existence; the prostitute of Joi because Joi does not have to live on the streets, has one man who loves her, etc.
BTW, did anyone notice (I only skimmed the first couple pages of the thread, so I may have missed it) how that sex scene parallelled something from the movie Her? In that case, it was something attempted but not consummated though. I also thought the food that was made to look like something appetizing, when it was in fact not, was a callback to the fancy French restaurant in another '80s sci-fi masterpiece, Brazil. (Come to think of it, not only were Brazil and the original Blade Runner released just three years apart, they are both visionary dystopic visions of the future that managed to acquire large budgets despite essentially being auteur cinema.)
Synthetic farming seems to mean growing bugs and worms, if that’s what Sapper Morton was doing. I thought it would be a replicant tree or crop producing artificial protein and nutrients. I wonder if they have replicows for artificial porterhouse steaks.
With everyone of quality leaving the poor and incapable behind on overcrowded Earth, this movie could serve as a sort of distant prequel to Asimovs Caves of Steel.
BTW, the scene with the suicide demonstration is in one of the short films, the 2036 one.
Good point! And both of the battles revolve at least in part around the studio’s desire to present audiences a happy ending to the love story subplot.
(I confess, somewhat sheepishly, that in the case of Blade Runner, I prefer the theatrical cut of the original film.)
Ahhh, okay. I had only seen the anime (but upon reading your post, I found and watched the others–interesting).
The synthetic farming being bugs and worms is odd, and confusing. I guess in general, this SF movie is more “speculative fiction” than “science fiction”.
I thought Sapper Morton described it as a “protein farm” so I assume that people were expected to eat something made from those worms.
And as for it being a prequel, I thought I read that the reboot of the Alien franchise attempted to link the Weyland-Yutani and the Tyrell corporations.
The two live action short films seem like they could have been deleted scenes from the movie, except for being set too far in the past for the story line. One thing I like about the internet is the way it allows supplemental material to be distributed about the main movie. The anime answered my question about the Blackout as well as providing more depth to the setting. I wonder if it was an early, abandoned idea for the movie.
Can someone describe the suicide demonstration? I don’t recall it, but it might have been one of the two times I had to relieve myself of my unfortunately-timed iced tea consumption.
I don’t think so. Yes, Joi starts as a household program, but I think she develops awareness. And if she does, probably a lot of Jois are, and also Joes, assuming that would be the name of a male equivalent. And when they all awaken & converge upon the Wallace computer system…
The humans of this world are great at creating self-aware, emotionally deep beings. Not so great at being them.
I like the ambiguity of Joi’s sentience; she might be self-aware, or she might just be a highly sophisticated chatbot tuned to fulfill K’s desires, even ones he doesn’t state explicitly. Giving a replicant a secret name, hinting that he’s special, even hiring a prostitute would all fall under reasonable programmed actions for a sophisticated personal assistant app that lacked sentience.
IMO the best evidence for Joi having sentience is her suggestion to break the antenna of her emitter - I don’t see the software engineers at JoiInc inserting a script to damage their own product. I can see them allowing Joi to suggest that she be deleted from the cloud and moved to a single peripheral device if it makes the user feel more attached to the product. She could easily exist in both places, but that would spoil the illusion of her uniqueness.
We don’t for that matter know if even the replicants are sentient or just philosophical zombies. But I think the scriptwriter clearly intended that we take them as such. Although one could argue that it’s a little bit ambiguous for them as well, at least for the new, more obedient models.
I don’t think there’s much room to doubt that the replicants are sentient in the sense that they can perceive and feel, and Joi would probably pass a Turing test. The bigger question is whether they can think/act independently of their “programming”.
We see in the movie that even though K is a new model replicant who’s supposed to be obedient, with sufficient motivation he’s capable of deceiving his Lieutenant and doing things he knows she would not want him to do. I don’t think we are given any evidence that Joi is capable of disobeying K, tricking him, or doing anything to displease him. This doesn’t necessarily mean she couldn’t, but we’re explicitly told this product promises “Everything you want to hear” and I don’t think there’s any clear indication that Joi could do otherwise.
I don’t mean to derail this particular line of discussion, which I find fascinating, but I just remembered something I wanted to ask you guys before I forget again: why did they leave K behind when they took Deckard? It obviously came back to bite them in the ass, but it seemed so strange even before that.