Studio: Wicked
Director: Brad Armstrong
Cast: Alektra Blue, Randy Spears, jessica drake, Kaylani Lei, Mikayla Mendez, Kirsten Price, Marcus London, Brad Armstrong, Jayden Jaymes, Kayla Carrera, Barrett Blade, Tommy Gunn, Eric Masterson, Alexis Texas, Rocco Reed, Tory Lane, Janet Mason, Mick Blue, Jerry, TJ Cummings, Bill Bailey
It is 2040 and sex with humans just isn’t safe. Three decades ago, we are told (holy shit that’s next year !!!) a perfect storm of diseases converged to produce “a worldwide pandemic of epic proportions.” What will this do to Love?
The screenwriter goes uncredited, but the story of “2040” has bits of everything from “Pinocchio” to “The Velveteen Rabbit” to “Blade Runner”: Love something enough and it can become human.
We meet Ryan Spears (Randy Spears), who is a porn performer, just like his dad, the porn actor Randy Spears. Ryan’s job is similar to his father’s, but he must perform it clandestinely because of (as the voiceover tells us) the porn tax of 2015, the porn police, and because porn companies are now “corporate entities traded on the open market.”
(Like in the original “Blade Runner,” we can do without the voiceover.)
Not only that, but Spears must also fuck robots.
Spears and company deliver a lot of inside jokes and product placement to the benefit of the Real Doll company, Wicked Pictures, and AVN, whose 55th annual awards show is presented complete with bad band and fucking in the bathrooms.
The first scene, as carried off by Spears and the faulty robot Alexis Texas, is very funny and more than reminiscent of certain porn sets I’ve attended.
The Alexis Texas robot blows a fuse, you see, and the crew and Spears have to wrestle her to a squatting position so that Spears can aim a load into her R.O.C., or removable oral cavity. The sight of Texas kneeling there, mouth open, eyes glazed over, and bolt-ons perpendicular, is both chilling and familiar (Texas is acting, of course, like she just came off a Max Hardcore shoot).
With the Texas “doll” or “mecha” out of commission, the production enlists scientists a robot that looks just like Alektra Blue. Her name is Mira.
But Spears is dismissive.
“She’s a toaster,” says Spears. “You fuck one mecha, you’ve fucked them all. And they all taste like toast.”
But Mira is not your ordinary frakking Cylon. She sweats! Her skin reddens with whipping! And her vagina is adjustable!
Spears is amazed. Could he be falling for a toaster? And, since he is Mira’s “first,” she imprints his data in her “memory banks.”
What follows is a lot of exposition, some corporate intrigue and skulduggery, sex for no reason (but we’re happy it happened, don’t get us wrong), the conspicuous absence of Stormy Daniels and, sprinkled throughout, some poignant moments in which Mira comes to terms with her blossoming personhood.
The problem with “2040” is that, in trying to be Wicked’s epic for the year, a movie that would have worked better small became instead top-heavy. There were plotlines and actors who didn’t need to be there, like a community theatre production in which everyone who auditioned got a part. At the heart of the bloat that is “2040” is a really good porn movie that no one believed in enough to let stand on its own.
That said, the people the movie is about, Spears and Blue, are fantastic. While he can ham it up with the best of today’s porn dudes, Spears also has a gravitas that no one in the porn world can touch. And Alektra Blue does great work as a living doll; I wish she’d been allowed to do more. (If RealDoll.com has an Alektra Blue model, I bet it’s awesome.)
“2040” has a happy ending and I bet you can guess what it is. There is an uplifting message for cuples that almost sounds like Stay Monogamous. People must be buying these feel-good, trying-too-hard slogs, because Wicked keeps making them.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Today in porn swag – “2040”
Portions of this review also appeared on Fleshbot
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