Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner is one of those movies that I was never totally crazy about. I liked it the first time I saw it, but there was something about it's uber-80s vision of the future that never really clicked with me. While a lot of 80s pop culture holds a warm place in my heart (the original Star Wars was in the 70s, but Empire and Jedi were 80s,) I've always held a slight disdain for the general 80s aesthetic - the synthetic, the over-manicured excess, the audible hollowness in much of the music. Yeah, I was born then, but I really felt more at home in the grungy, warmer 90s (I guess the 90s also held the "Xtreme" aesthetic, but I think that was later in the decade.) (I realize we could get into a whole series of posts about comparing the aesthetic of one decade or another, as if they had only one.)

Anyway, Blade Runner was a Film Noir by way of that 80s aesthetic. It replaced the sort of muted jazz with synth and created an utterly miserable (and oddly rain-soaked) Los Angeles where its protagonist's job was essentially finding and murdering undesirables.

Blade Runner 2049 certainly continues with these ideas, but I think there are a lot of new ideas about the real world that get floated - like the way that abusive and oppressive systems coerce the oppressed into complicity.

The sequel does some world building to fill out the gap between the original and itself, suggesting that after Tyrell's death, there was a revolution by replicants, leaving nearly all of them wiped out, along with a blackout on digital data. Eventually, the Wallace corporation bought out Tyrell and created a new line of obedient replicants. And the protagonist of this film, sometimes called K (the first letter in his serial number) or Joe, is a replicant who is also a Blade Runner.

One of the most popular fan theories for the original movie was that Deckard was actually a replicant himself. This movie more or less buries that idea, but it kind of meets people halfway by confirming early on that Ryan Gosling's K is one. His search for identity and meaning is the through line of the film.

I don't really want to go too much into the details here, but K's life and his travails in this story really hammer home the horrific dystopia that Blade Runner 2049 imagines. It's a bleak movie, but in a kind of Children of Men-like way, makes standing up to that bleakness the act of heroes.

And though this is obviously not a direct adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (though I'm given to understand even the original movie deviated significantly from the Dick story,) it does play with a major theme Dick was interested in, namely how you can know what you think you know.