Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
"You newer models are happy scraping the shit... because you've never seen a miracle."
Dir. Denis Villeneuve Rated: R Run Time: 2 hours 44 mins
Where Can I Watch? Amazon Prime Rental ($3.99)
1982’s Blade Runner is a decent movie wrapped in stellar packaging. Don’t get me wrong, I love Blade Runner (you can read my thoughts here), but I love the way it looks and sounds more than I love the story. There are individual moments that are absolutely iconic, but clearly its influence and staying power owes more to its groundbreaking visuals and sound design, rather than its storytelling. Blade Runner 2049 is not groundbreaking from a visual or sound design perspective (to be honest, I don’t know if we’ll ever see anything groundbreaking again in the moviemaking medium, because computers have rendered possibilities limitless), but it is a better movie than Blade Runner in its storytelling and its evolution of the ideas on offer that go beyond its predecessor. It still looks and sounds incredible, sure, but you’d expect that from a movie made 35 years after the original, but in its own way it is a treatise on the pursuit of exponential design, and what that pursuit does to a product’s designers when an unbreakable ceiling is reached.
K (Ryan Gosling) is a replicant who works as a Blade Runner, hunting down older model replicants with open-ended lifespans. After killing a replicant, he discovers the skeleton of an older replicant that appears to have given birth, something thought impossible. This causes a two-pronged hunt for the child (or children) that this replicant gave birth to: K’s police captain Joshi (Robin Wright) believes the knowledge that replicants can possibly reproduce could start a war between humans and replicants, so she wants the child destroyed and all evidence erased; The Wallace Corporation, which has taken over production of replicants from the now defunct Tyrell Corporation, believes that the child represents the “missing link” in the design of replicants, which will finally bridge the gap between humans and replicants.
The replicant who gave birth is Rachael (Sean Young in the first movie), which makes the father Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). This answers two fundamental questions left open at the end of Blade Runner (regardless of which version of that film you watch): Deckard and Rachael did get away and go into hiding, and Deckard is definitively not a replicant (otherwise he would have died long ago, as the early models only had a four year lifespan). Rachael is said to have died in 2021 (the original movie took place in 2019), so she lived long enough to give birth, but is said to have died during childbirth. Rachael, it turns out, is the only replicant of her kind, the only model capable of giving birth, and since Tyrell was killed in the first movie, the secret to how she was created died with him. Wallace (Jared Leto), who believes that humanity should colonize the stars, can only produce so many replicants, but if they could reproduce on their own, then that work would be far simpler.
It’s a lot of big ideas, and a lot of moving parts, but the movie takes its time with them and explores them in a slow, methodical fashion. Deckard doesn’t enter the movie until nearly two hours in, but this is not Deckard the Blade Runner, pulled back in to action. If anything, Deckard’s role in the movie is to underline the sacrifices we are sometimes forced to make in the name of love. In his words, “Sometimes to love someone, you gotta be a stranger.” Rick Deckard has never met his child (or children) and that’s by design: if he knew where they were, it would compromise their safety. Instead, he’s holed up in a defunct Casino in Las Vegas where he’s managed to stay hidden for the last 30 years, until K’s investigation leads him to Vegas and their two paths collide. Deckard provides the most compelling evidence of the replicants’ humanity, as when Wallace presents him with a perfect replica of Rachael, Deckard says it isn’t her because “the eyes are different”, which would suggest that each replicant is unique in some way.
The reason I keep saying “child (or children)” when referring to the spawn of Rick and Rachael is that, for much of the movie, it appears that Rachael had given birth to twins, a girl and a boy. The girl is said to have died, while the boy was smuggled in to an orphanage. Through his investigation, K becomes convinced that he is the boy, and that he has been essentially hunting himself. But no, all of this was a result of the child’s tracks being hidden very well, and it boils down to this: there was only one child born, and that child was a girl. Whoever helped keep her concealed listed her as dead in the system, and listed the boy as alive and buried it deep within the archives. The girl grew up, but lives in an enclosure due to a compromised immune system (likely due to the circumstances of her birth), and she is a prodigy when it comes to designing replicant memories. Early in the movie (at the time she seems like a minor character) confirms for K that his memories of his childhood are real, not artificial, so he becomes convinced that he is the boy who lived. But, it turns out, while they are real memories, they are her memories implanted in to him (and likely many other replicants), and he is simply another replicant with a shelf life, not special at all. But is birth the only thing that defines humanity? Or is it empathy, critical thinking, free will, and self-sacrifice, all of which K (and other replicants in the movie that K encounters, who have built their entire underground resistance around Rachael and the child) display when their human counterparts do not?
There is so much going on here, but it’s handled so well. Rather than forcing ideas in, they are slowly revealed through K’s investigative process, which is, surprise surprise, an actual investigation. If you watch Blade Runner again, despite being a detective, Deckard doesn’t do a ton of detecting. Which is fine, because it was concerned with other things, but here we get to see K go from a routine job to a vital one, and watch him slowly discover that he believes he’s investigating himself, then to the shattering realization that he’s just one piece in a grand jigsaw puzzle. He’s always felt he was different, and it’s really interesting to watch him go from a tightly controlled tool (who is reminded that no matter how hard he tries, he will never have a “soul”) to an agent of his own destiny, exercising his own free will. If the goal was always to make the replicants “more human than human”, then it appears that goal has been achieved.
I could go on and on about the big ideas on display here, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the world of Blade Runner 2049. While, like the first movie, 2049 is set in a future Los Angeles, we are not limited to rain soaked neon streets and high rise buildings. Those are here, of course, but we are also for the first time treated to “the world beyond”, including dizzyingly intricate webs of synthetic protein farms, wastelands and factories, and the future’s approximation of a Las Vegas that has been left an irradiated wasteland due to nuclear fallout. The Vegas here looks very different than the Vegas we’re used to, just like Los Angeles does (including a sea wall meant to repel the rising ocean, which may not be too far off from our future), but it still feels like its own version of a tribute to American excess and opulence from a future split off from our own. Clearly, Los Angeles in 2019 looked nothing like the Los Angeles of Blade Runner’s imagined 2019, and Las Vegas will likely look nothing like this as we near 2050, but that’s what’s so great about it. It’s world building on top of the familiar.
The sound design, too, echoes parts of the original, emulating but not outright copying. Whereas Blade Runner was a neo-noir detective film, so the Vangelis-composed score was a lot of synthesized jazz and twinkles. Here, Hanz Zimmer has delivered an absolutely throbbing, thundering score that relies on lots of single synthesizer notes held for long periods of time, and it feels as massive and ambient as its visual design. Denis Villeneuve, the auteur director of movies like Arrival, Sicario, and the two-part Dune saga, utilizes oppressive sound design to heighten tension and mystery to stunning success. Despite the differences here, 2049’s score still feels like Blade Runner. I will always be partial to the original Blade Runner score, and would listen to it on its own; I wouldn’t do that with Blade Runner 2049’s score, but it really works when paired with the movie.
Blade Runner 2049 was considered one of the biggest bombs of 2017. It was incredibly expensive, had a run time of nearly 3 hours, and is the sequel to another box office bomb released 30 years prior. Blade Runner, of course, is one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time, but it’s not something that your average movie watcher will just “throw on” like one might do with E.T., or Tron, or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, or even The Thing, all of which also released in 1982. It doesn’t feel like it was designed to entertain, and Blade Runner 2049 feels the same way. It’s something you experience, and I feel so fortunate that the Blade Runner 2049 we got was a recipe for box office disaster, because it feels like Villeneuve simply focused on making the best movie possible, rather than allowing studio interference to make it more “fun”. It’s so rare we get sci-fi movies that are ok not being fun.