Holograms Love The Rain
Sci-fi is filled with themes of inventions intended to alleviate feelings of isolation. Typically in the form of a hyper-realistic hologram. The holograms/humanoids or *insert other humanly molded tech thing* is understood to lack consciousness. It is a regurgitation of the owner's desires. It enjoys what it's owner enjoys and subsequently hates anything based on the same criteria. Great sci-fi films make use of cues that are universally understood to evoke out of the audience feelings grounded in our human experience. Enter rain, it seems to always come back to the rain.
In the Disney Channel original movie Pixel Perfect, the hologram evolves from being a popstar, it's genesis and reason for invention, to realizing it is different from the human characters around it. This comes to a peak when the hologram takes over a bandmate's body. Loretta (the hologram) speaks through Sam (the bandmate's) body. She attempts to walk and immediately feels the physical weight of a human. After stumbling around, she sees the rain outside, walks into it and we watch as a hologram experiences the rain.
In one of my favorite movies of all time Blade Runner 2049, we follow an officer named K who is not truly human himself. K owns a hologram companion named Joi. Joi is a product that can be purchased off the shelf in this universe. She has been programmed to sympathize with her owner and keep their interests at all times. As such she comes to recognize K's desire to experience what it means to be human. She believes that if she were more human then she would be able to give K the human experience he yearns for. So she drags them both into the rain. We see the drops fall through her until her calibration kicks in and her image starts to take the water into account. Her image mimics what it would be like to be caught in rainfall, glitching at times.
In a movie where the science is explained explicitly it is pleasantly jarring to have the rain speak for itself. We speak about our sorrows coming down on us like a thunderstorm. In the same breath we refer to them being washed away by the downpour. The devastation of a flood and the hope that any small precipitation may come to end a draught. Perhaps film makers rely so heavily on rain because you can incapsulate so much complexity in a drop of water falling into the frame.
