Do Cowboy Androids Dream of Electric Cattle?: Westworld and Blade Runner 2049

I came in to the original Blade Runner film a bit later in to my life, which is strange, considering my obsession with all fiction relating to androids. I’m so obsessed that the only novel I attempted to write was about a dystopian future where all men have died out and women are left to run the world with the assistance of male androids and science to propagate the human race. I got three chapters in and then gave up. Why?

I was so inspired by televisions shows like Star Trek and Small Wonder (look it up and don’t laugh). The character of Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation was so intriguing. Imagine robots are created to take on the labour of humans that no one wants to do. However, in order to work effectively they need enough artificial intelligence to be proactive and safe so as not to harm humans. With artificial intelligence comes sentience. Data evolves from a pragmatic character much like Spok in the Original Star Trek, to one that develops human like feelings and empathy. The ethics of sentient robots has been explored for a long time. Isaac Asimov‘s Robot series of novels written more than fifty years ago were all stories that revolved around the subject in depth. He created the Three Laws of Robotics,

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

His books looked at the idea that maybe these rules can’t always be adhered too. What if robots can’t be safe around humans. Both Westworld and Blade Runner 2049 are based on the same idea but with very different outcomes.

My problem with both the television series and film is that the subject is tired. I’ve seen so many of these stories recycled over and over again. It’s partly why I gave up writing about it. There are other television series too like Humans, Futurama, and Lost In Space all still being aired at the moment.

I really want to like Westworld. It’s beautifully shot, costumed, and scored. Thandie Newton is stunning and bold, Evan Rachel Wood is mysterious and beautiful. Both play androids who start to wake from their situations and become aware of their exploitation. Ed Harris is just confusing as hell. This is where I start to hate it. The men are boring and uninspiring. The story lines are utterly confusing and complicated. I have to read up on it afterwards to figure out wtf is going on. There are several timelines and stories intertwined and I actually just stopped caring. I keep watching because I like to follow things through but it’s just lost me.

When I did eventually watch the original Blade Runner film in my twenties, I was fascinated. The concept revolves more around the Turing test, can an android be so convinced that he’s actually a human that they are indistinguishable from other humans? It’s 2019 and Harrison Ford plays a blade runner, Decker, a sort of cop who retires ‘Replicants’ from their existence when they go rogue. He comes across Sean Young playing Rachel, a Replicant who has been given fake memories to make her think she is human. It looks as though he falls in love with her.

In Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling plays a blade runner who is a Replicant, sent out to retire the older models who have gone rogue. Without giving the twist away, it’s actually far more interesting than Westworld. The themes of this film revolve more around bio-engineering, and the ethics of playing god in the scientific world.

The film noir/neo noir style is far more appealing that the bleak themes of Westworld and their exploitation of robots for sex, slavery and violence. This theme exists in both but there is something more romantic and heady about Blade Runner 2049.

But essentially both are tired and exhausted stories. It’s almost put me off science fiction altogether. I want something fresh, or something more real.