I'd call their relationship and its resolution secondary to the main plot, yes. It was, to me, ultimately more interesting than the search for Rachel's child. The part at which we finally realize K's place in the story and Joi's actual significance to his pyche was a more intriguing thought experiment than K's relationship to Deckard and even the memory of the horse.

I was just very pleased that it wasn't just all eye candy.

The interesting part of the Joi sublot is when it meets with the Rachel mainplot...

Particularly when (SPOILERS) K sees the large pink hologram ad of Joi when he is on the bridge, as it is the moment he finally decides to put away the sex toy distraction of a fake holographic girlfriend to instead reunite Dekard with his daughter... In effect K makes a moral and humanist choice to reunite a family rather than to simply be a dutiful officer or join the cause of a resistance...or hide in a stunted state of passing time with a video game

Dekard falls in love with Rachel and has a spiritual awakening when he recognises her humanity... K recognises his own humanity when he realises that Joi is just a good simulation and not much more than a sophisticated sex toy or digital companion...

They both recognise truths about themselves from these interactions, but it isn't just a repeat of the past... Dekard learns the inhumanity of killing replicants of humans... K learns to find real human connection instead of hiding in a simulated world...

Even the prostitute recognises K's problem before he does.. At the scene when the group of prostitutes are talking to K and he is not responsive to them, one of the prostitutes recognises that "he doesn't like real girls"... She sees that he uses a digital surrogate for human connection...

Dekard gets unted with his daughter, instead of reunited. Fine, but samantics aside, my point stands...

At least that is my interpretation of it

@Renovatio said:

The interesting part of the Joi sublot is when it meets with the Rachel mainplot...

Particularly when (SPOILERS) K sees the large pink hologram ad of Joi when he is on the bridge, as it is the moment he finally decides to put away the sex toy distraction of a fake holographic girlfriend to instead reunite Dekard with his daughter... In effect K makes a moral and humanist choice to reunite a family rather than to simply be a dutiful officer or join the cause of a resistance...or hide in a stunted state of passing time with a video game

[SPOILER]

That's the part that I'm referring to, yes. That's when Hampton Fancher and Denis Villeneuve exposed how well they manipulated the audience, including me, into thinking K was the central figure when in fact he was merely an observer of events. Without him, Deckard would never have been reunited with Ana, but if you look at the movie as a whole that meeting was never necessary and in fact the search for his own identity put Ana's secret in jeopardy.

Joi only told K what he wanted to hear. It was K's recognition that Joi was nothing more than manipulative AI, coupled with the realization that he was in fact NOT Rachel's child, that ultimately led him to reunite Deckard with Ana. I don't think K had any interest in The Resistance, aside from the fact that their leader revealed that the surviving child was a girl, not a boy. And it was Deckard's hard rejection of the temptation that fake, willing replicant slaves built by Wallace represented that set the example for K.

It was nicely conceptualized and acted, for the most part, though I can't say Ford did much for me nor was his role in the film particularly compelling.

@Invidia

Are you suggesting that Ana is just another programme like Joi or the dancing, singing Elvis and Sinatra programmes?

I think that is a stretch given what's in this movie alone, but I suppose it could be made into a twist in a following one... But if she is a hologram that doesn't give Joi any more meaning. It just means that K was manipulated by two programmes, not just one 😉

Joi is just a programme. It is a sophisticated toy that is there to please K, her owner... emotionally and sexually... She is not alive and has no self determination... Just an computer projection. By the end of the film K sees how fake this is.

All of the intelligent living things in Blade Runner resist control... Roy Batty, Rachel and the other replicants from the older film did it, as did Sapper in 2049... Joi is just a programme, like Siri on your iphone, but a sophisticated version with a pretty face being projected. It has no self determination... K realises this fact when he also realises that he has self determination...

I understand that joi is a more advanced programme than the sinatra & elvis holograms, but it is still just a hologram meant to make K feel better and give him whatever he wants... companionahip, support, encouragement, sex simulations, etc... It's still just a programme.. K is a replicant based on human DNA... A living thing... it's qualitatively different...

The things you list are just part of how Joi is an effective programme, it listens on K's calls the way facebook and google use emails, posts and messages to learn about users and make targeted content... Joi asks K to delete it's memory because that will serve K and it is what he wants to hear. It is no sacrifice, because Joi is not alive. Joi can be reinstalled just like my computer operating system, if i don't do a backup i just lose my data but the system is the same. Siri is still at my service, but siti cannot love even if it is programmed with a beautiful face..

Also Luv either being jealous or wanting to delete Joi simply to hurt K doesn't make Joi any more real. People get jealous because the person they desire is interested in somone or something else, it could be a great sex toy, a car or a video game system.. Also, you can inflict psychological pain on someone simply by breaking their toys.. it doesn't make the toys alive or human 😉

Most reviewers online are in love with Joi because she is played by a hot cuban actress, Ana De Armas.. She looks hot, is 100% supportive all the time and gives holographic sex... This is a nerds wet dream fantasy; the "perfect" unchallenging girlfriend 😂 It is the definition of an escape from reality... They fall for Joi as K had, but unlike K these nerds do not realise that they fell in love with an iphone! it's actually quite absurd... 😉

It reminds me of Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko character in Olive Stone's Wall Street... He is meant to be a representation of an evil capitalist that breaks rules, companies and even has disregard for the rules of the financial markets, he's a white collar criminal... Yet movie fans fell in love with his character so much that people wanted to be him, they wanted jobs on wall street and try to emulate him... Even Oliver Stone later recognised this...

Joi is a warning about how technology can debase even our most key characteristocs as humans, the way we relate to one another...

I think we are going in circles and simply have different interpretations of the movie when it comes to Joi... that's ok, we don't have to agree

@Invidia said:

And since K also find RECORDS that STATE the GIRL TWIN that RACHEL gave BIRTH to DIES, that also means K is the BOY TWIN who DISAPPEARS.

That was not my takeaway. The leader of "The Resistance" stated that there was only one child, a girl. The deception that Deckard helped construct was that it was a boy, not a girl, that survived. Should anyone try to track "him" down, they'd never find a male replicant/human (replicant/replicant?) child. That was part of the reason the horse in K's memory was such a wonderful misdirection; that was Ana's memory, not his, that he was implanted with to both create other replicants with Ana's memories--so that they, and not she, would be targeted and to reinforce the deception that the child was a male. At least that's what I walked away with.

So ANA is the DECOY that's been CREATED to PROTECT K.

No, Ana is Deckard's child and not K. That's why Ana's statement was so profound when she confirmed for K that his memory was "real." And that she stated that good memory makers infused every memory with something of their own. It's part of what makes them believable. At that moment, Ana knew that she was viewing her own memory that had been implanted into K. Remember, she was the memory creator, not K.

Which of course begs the question, at what point does a replicant become more than the sum of their implanted memories? Roy Batty clearly has memories of combat that he holds dear, as his soliloquy at the end of the original poignantly references. ("Lost, like tears in rain.") Human behavior, it's been argued, is the sum of our experiences. We are what we've learned and experienced. Is a replicant less than human because it begins with memories that don't belong to it? Do they "become" human if they live long enough for their experiences to change them? Do replicant children, the first of whom is Ana, start out human because they HAVE no implanted memories and develop just like any other human child? Are the memories that Ana implants into other replicants "real" or are they copies of memories passed down to her from Rachel?

I have no idea.

Because IF JOI was as MANIPULATIVE as you say, then she should also have never talked K into KILLING HER when he DELETES HER ( thus also leaving no BACK UP COPY left of her MEMORIES that could be IMPLANTED into another copy of her).

It's not manipulation; it's that Joi is created to tell her owners exactly what they want to hear. She's not manipulating them, but rather she's doing exactly what she's programmed to do. She has no sense of self-preservation because her primary task is to make her owner happy. That's why the scene near the end where K is viewing an advertisement for Joi is so important. And it's also why you never see the full Joi advertisement, with her face, until the very end; they didn't want you to realize what a commodity Joi is.

At least those were my takeaways.

@Renovatio said:

Also Luv either being jealous or wanting to delete Joi simply to hurt K doesn't make Joi any more real. People get jealous because the person they desire is interested in somone or something else, it could be a great sex toy, a car or a video game system.. Also, you can inflict psychological pain on someone simply by breaking their toys.. it doesn't make the toys alive or human 😉

[SPOILERS]

Luv is one part of the movie I don't understand. What motivates her? She's extremely hostile towards Madam and K. In fact, it's extremely important to her that she's "better" than K during the final confrontation, though at no point did I ever get the idea that she thought K was Deckard's child. Rather, she seemed to view him as a rival and an extension of Madam that she wanted to defeat and humiliate before taking Deckard back to Wallace.

Luv must have been one of Wallace's constructions. But why did he create her so ruthless? Why so vicious? While it seems clear that she's his enforcer, she seems to take particular delight in torture and violence. None of the combat model replicants up to this point have displayed sadism for the sake of sadism. Roy, Leon, and Pris do put Deckard through the ringer, but only after he has cornered them. I'd even argue that Roy had the right to do what he did after Deckard had killed his friends Zhora and Leon as well as his lover, Pris.

But I still don't get what kept Luv going besides a desire to capture the secret of replicant reproduction for Wallace. The rest seemed a bit gratuitous.

@Invidia

Thanks for stating your opinion so clearly... It's an interesting read. I like that this movie is complex enough to warrent contemplating, but not so rigid that we cannot take different things from it and react to it differently.

I'm pretty sure that I'll get it on bluray at some point, as it will be a movie that I will want to watch again...

@AlienFanatic said:

I finally watched this on demand and enjoyed it quite a bit. I've never been the biggest fan of the original, though I've had my phases, which I feel was emotionally cold but visually remarkable.

I felt that many of the concepts in 2049 were more compelling than the primary issue in BR--namely that replicants were ultimately more humane than their pursuers--especially the subplot with Joi.

I'm glad I finally decided to watch it.

I had never seen the original -- well, not all of it. I had seen parts of it at a friend's house but we could only see part of it and I don't remember why. That was a time when my family didn't go to the theater - only went to movies with the neighbors until I could drive. So, I watched the original in 2016 when I heard about this.

So, the original one SUCKS. And this one SUCKS EVEN MORE.

@AlienFanatic said:

In Many Ways, Better Than The Original

SPOILERS BELOW.

Agreed with strongly!! I rated this film higher than I did the original, and then went through a weird period where I felt like maybe I should be shot for my heresy. I mean, finding a sequel superior to Blade Runner?!??

I'm with many of the points made in this thread about the sequel. Perhaps most importantly, we don't see K (or Deckard, or anyone) shooting girls in the back in this film. I know, Zhora and Pris were replicants, but they still looked and acted like women. I was immensely turned off by their violent deaths.