Blade Runner 2049

Building a Better Replicant
or
"Is It Real?" "I Dunno. Ask Him."

Prejudices out front: the original Blade Runner is, to me, a beautiful, fascinating, very watchable failure. All of those aspects land at the feet of director Ridley Scott, who directed it to a high, gritty gloss, while not understanding the source material or its theme...at all. That's the frustrating thing about the man. Blade Runner has a troubled history—on its initial release, studio butterflies forced concessions (the narration, which, as a device doesn't seem out of place in a noir-landscape, but the horribly written final version of it was insulting), and Scott has spent 30 years "Lucasing" it to conform with his idea that its main character, the "blade runner"—a title which was bought from another sci-fi property and has nothing to do with Philip K. Dick's original story* or the film (it just "felt" edgy, kids)—was, actually, himself, a replicant, charged with killing other replicants. I don't know why Scott came to that conclusion, other than he liked replicants better than human beings, or he was put off by Harrison Ford's human Deckard boinking Sean Young's android Rachael, or it might be a reaction to the fractious relationship he had with his star while filming. Who knows? I've always found Scott's contention thuddingly stupid, but that's what you get when you're more concerned with the fluff in the air than the words on the page.**

After years of parsing out the legal rights to do it, Scott has executive-produced the much-anticipated sequel, Blade Runner 2049, with a script by the original's Hampton Fancher and flavor-of-the-month script-doctor Michael Green, its original star, Ford (and a couple others we won't discuss), and a new director Denis Villenueve (Arrival), another director adept at visuals if not the best handle on story. Blade Runner 2049 shows him able to tell a compelling story with a strong visionary sense (replacing Scott's vision with the help of cinemagician Roger Deakins), but adhering to the same landscape of an American wasteland, scarred by acid-rain and out-of-control corporate tyranny, where workers are shipped off to "off-world" colonies, supplemented by the latest slave-supply, manufactured androids, called "replicants."

In the world of Blade Runner 2049, cities are dimly lit by solar farms—the priority, presumably, to keep the "Pan-Am" and "Atari" neon signs lit (a neat little call-back to the original as those companies are as buried as "Batty")—and androids are now outnumbering humans on Earth, and—what Scott first (eventually) envisioned in the original that the replicants would soon eat their own—are being employed as police "blade runners" to kill off the replicants that have exceeded their expiration date. We see LAPD officer KD6-3.7 (Ryan Gosling, in his circumspect "you have to read the emotions, I'm not going to show them" mode) taking out a "Nexus-8" model named Sapper (Dave Bautista, who is turning into a curiously intricate actor) and not reacting at all when he gets knifed in the shoulder during the fracas. He's a replicant, alright.

Surveillance of Sapper's isolated protein farm finds that a box has been buried under the property's single dead tree—why would he keep that, and prop it up long after its death (empathy?)—and Sapper's cryptic comment "You've never seen a miracle" are the odd loose ends for the "retirement." He's recalled to the LAPD, and there Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright) gives him "a talk", the type of talk a superior gives their street-cop when there's some exposition to be made and context to be given, but the gist is that he's a replicant and he's there to do a job and that job is to keep the replicants in their place as workers, separate from humans, and any replicant that tries to achieve more and go past its usefulness will be put down. Humans get to live, replicants get to serve...but only for a time. You are now caught up with the original Blade Runner, so, no, it's not mandatory to have seen it to get anything out of this one, except for some incidentals.

But, that box. Analysis shows that it holds the remains of a replicant female, dead of mysterious causes that don't make sense, the manufactured bones carefully arranged, like a form of shrine and the tree bare except for a date inscribed in it—a date that stirs something in Officer K. It's a mystery buried inside a mystery and the implications disturb Joshi, who tells K. to forget about it and go home. 

"How was your day, honey?"

It's here that I should probably stop with any detailed rundown of the film, because if I do, there will be some spoilage of surprises, some of which are pretty damn clever and their "reveals" are done quite nicely. I will say that if a replicant is the supplicant to a human, it would stand to reason that replicants would have them, too. But, in what manner would that be, what form would it take, and what would the possibilities be in the interaction between two such forms of life? Where does programming end and uniqueness begin? It was part of the "otherness" of the original and Blade Runner 2049 takes it one more level to an ironic and melancholy conclusion.

Along the way, several complications have occurred. An electromagnetic pulse discharged in the atmosphere in 2022 rendered the records previous to that time unusable—convenient for slowing down the plot, but not so inconvenient that somebody can't be found to trace things back to their source and even replay old software records. San Diego has become a citywide dumping ground. And Las Vegas, an irradiated ghost-town. The Tyrell Corporation went bankrupt after the death of its founder at the thumbs of one of his creations (in the original), necessitating the disposal of that line in favor of the more advanced "Nexus-8" replicants, and acquired in a buy-out by one Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), a visionary with a singular lack of vision, given to internecine plots to keep his supply to the "off-world" colonies (we're never sure where that might be, but it has to be close as it's just 2049) and as good as he is at the manufacturing of replicants, he can't seem to keep up with demand. Coincidentally, the discovery by the LAPD of the replicant bones may solve the issue, and so he sends his assistant, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to keep a close eye on the investigation, even to the point of stealing the evidence.

K's investigation sends him to San Diego to meet a manufacturer of replicant memories (Carla Juri) and, ultimately, to a deserted Las Vegas where he tracks down an old blade runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford), who knows more than he's telling. The path leads K down a couple of blind alleys, but by this time, it's personal and he finds himself confronted by the past, and what could very well be his past. At this point, after the elaborate set-up of the previous couple hours (the film is 2 hours 40 minutes long), the film gets simultaneously better (Ford's back! And the film-makers have a grand time playing with Vegas) and worse (a lot of de rigeur action stuff and a couple gaping plot-holes, but then, what's a Blade Runner movie without them?).

Now, some generalized thoughts about the movie without going into the plot details that produce them. One thing about the first movie that Replicants may have a similar physiognomy, but it is never made clear about what runs them, but one thing is made clear in the original—they seem to wear what can be construed as their heart on their sleeves. Their very capacity for feeling, for appreciating life, because their's is so short, is what make them different from the relatively uncaring, shall we say "privileged" human beings who take their longevity, comparatively speaking, for granted. One thing about the first that never really gelled for me is its dressing itself up in the trappings of film-noir. That aspect doesn't really work other than the darkness that permeates the screen. There is no greater evil in human (or replicant) nature in that story that that darkness represents. But, Blade Runner 2049 does have that aspect at least as it relates to the main characters in the story, K and Deckard. 

For K, the decidedly replicant blade runner, the investigation is a journey of discovery. He starts out as a cog in a machine of authority and as he gets deeper into the mystery, he begins to see himself as something more, maybe even unique. His feelings are pushed and pulled, one way and another, during the course of the film, but one thing that humanizes him (if you can use so precious a term) is his relationship and very real affection for his house-mate/partner (can we call her that?), Joi (Ana de Armas), who cares for him, as he does for her, in kind. It is the closest relationship displayed in the movie. But is it love? Is it caring? Can it be named, as such? For both of them, it is real. But, in the course of the movie, K comes to question what that relationship is. As with one of my favorite films about the subject, Hitchcock's Vertigo, at the end of Blade Runner 2049 you question—as the song goes—"what is this thing called 'love.'"

At the end, K is given a much darker truth that changes his mission and makes him take the actions that will finish the film, acts of self-sacrifice done in the despair that what he might have treasured is not so special a thing at all, but will make him fight for what he sees as genuine—not unlike Roy Batty at the end of the original Blade Runner. His world is rocked by the negation of his hope of uniqueness, and he is given a damning realization that he is just part of a bigger system of manipulation, commodified and cheapened by corporate interests, and he is left with nothing of value, other than what he can do to make his life worth...something. 

There is a larger evil in the world that he is powerless against it, and, indeed, he's part of it. And he's an artificial life, a manufactured copy, a simulation of his human masters. How would such a being feel about that? As with the original, it makes me wonder about the relationship between us and our machines. We all name our cars (don't we? Please tell me you do, too), or "personalize" our computers. Is that a way of grafting affection, producing a partnership? It makes me occasionally wonder if my kitchen micro-wave might be grieving that the plastic has worn away from the "Start" button and sees that as neglect. The "Toy Story" series played with that (especially Toy Story 2). So, did Spielberg's (and Kubrick's) A.I.

And Deckard? I still contend that he's human...or else, what's the point? But the film changes him, as well...and the original film, without altering what went before. But, he discovers that, instead of being a rebel, he was nothing more than a lab rat, and maybe that's the difference between human and replicant—he can live with that, as long as he lives.

Blade Runner 2049 is flawed—sure, it is. But, I find it better than the original, one of a handful of sequels that can boast that, certainly in that it, and its director, knows what it's doing. It takes the original, deconstructs it, expands on it, and ends up being more truthful to its source material than its own adaptation.  It makes you think, and like any really good film in the tradition of film-noir, not in a good way.

* "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Have you read it? You should.

** This may seem minor to Blade Runner fans, but is essential to the story's theme about the mechanical replicants teaching the human killer what it means to be human. And Scott's tinkering with the film over the years—the insertion of a unicorn dream (which actually "plays" when contemplating a replicant's uniqueness—or the fragility of a life), the reflective qualities of a replicant's eyes—which is given to Deckard, the suggestiveness of the origami figure Deckard is left by his fellow officer Gaff, and the implication that Deckard, like all replicants—has been implanted with memories—to maintain that Ford's Deckard is a replicant (despite the character's all-too-human flailing about in the film) renders that central theme empty and useless. It's like saying that Charles Foster Kane's last words implies that he mourns the loss of snow rather than the carefree childhood, implied by his sled, that was lost when he was signed over to Thatcher by his parents.

*** During its gestation or production phase, at one point, the rumored "Blade Runner" sequel was to be a series of shorts, either for the web or TV. The seeds of that idea came to fruition with three commissioned "prequel" shorts, which are below, courtesy of Warner Brothers' YouTube channel.