Blade Runner 2049

More human than human – an analysis of Blade Runner 2049 and Blade Runner.“More human than human”; the phrase implies that it is known what “is” human or what it is “to be” human. Now any review of a film will consider items like plot, acting, music, editing, logic, cinematography, audience interest, run-time, etc… but I am not interested in these aspects - although I think they are all covered rather well in Blade Runner 2049 especially the Hans Zimmer soundtrack/score that I consider both perfect and to be the greatest album of all time - at the very least as a measure of emotion represented in sound. What I am interested in, are the themes of each film and of the two films in aggregate.Blade Runner did not have a sequel for over 35 years due to a combination of finding the right story, Hollywood politics, and the challenge of living up to the original that became the highest ranked science fiction film of all time. So why did Blade Runner become such a benchmark or high water mark? Again let us not focus on story, cinematography, acting, or the amazing Vangelis score, or even the noire dystopian future vision.Note that in the 1982 film, at the highest level, we have a future of massive population and cities, with their obvious expected housing and pollution issues, but there is also a realistic (vis a vis Star Trek for example) vision of a future with pollution and lack of green space and lack of light that, unbeknownst to so many in our Western world, signifies oh so much of the actual industrialized and developing world already. However the film notes (perhaps correctly), that there are already “off world colonies” and we have references to this space technology including “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,” however we see NONE OF IT. Why? Because that is NOT the temptation nor the key theme of the first film nor, for that matter, of the entire 20th Century. On a side note, it is quite possible that the “complexity of the mind” (consciousness) will be, if ever, solved after both the physics problems of quantum gravity (the true nature of space-time) and the engineering problem of traversing the gulfs of deep space.But one could argue that the over-arching theme of the entire 20th Century is that engineering (i.e. science or “technology”) can solve ALL problems and achieve all goals or dreams. Thus the future in the 1982 film is NOT built on spaceships or “star wars” but rather on an empire of “replicated” human minds!!!! In short, the future is built on genius that builds or reverse-engineers our own “human” existence. If we pause for a moment, we must remember that hundreds of millions of humans lost their lives to world wars and proxy wars that were so very often initially assumed to be easily won due to advances in technology; Prometheus Unbound to say the very least and still mankind never let go of the idea; machine guns, aircraft, tanks, nuclear weapons, computers, lasers, A.I., stealth, etc…. But now let us examine the films themselves. Tyrell dies from his own creation. Roy saves a life as he loses his own. However the lust and wonder of the first film is NOT on philosophy but rather on visuals and dreams of empires of technological achievements from skyscrapers to flying cars to android “replicants” with artificial minds and bodies.Now let us break to the sequel Blade Runner 2049. Again we have a setting of even more and larger and improved skyscrapers, replicants, and holograms (even maybe conscious holograms we initially believe) and size and technology (note after a global information crash) but we have a fundamental change at the core and in tone. We have, in fact, THE change that is, in my opinion, the very heart of all of the story.We now have a story that comes back to the theme of what it is ”to be human.” Our protagonist “K” discovers his own memories are not even real, but rather those of another. His “girlfriend” is ephemeral and (even worse) everything he experienced with her that he thought was authentic was just an encoded routine like her calling him Joe etc… so there is the elimination of trust or even love for him. The concept of ethics and family are eroded in his worldview as he must eliminate a child and Deckard appears to have given up his own child. Already with replicants we have doubt in flesh and now experience or memories so we are faced with only the very core “human” concepts that are left in a life. In essence, we must acknowledge that, outside of our biological processes that drive our psychology (almost all of them) and our culture (basically the rest of them), we have simply our memories and our dreams. In this case we have artificial biology, a culture one can argue that has “gone amok” and, and memories that are artificial and dreams of a future with his holographic Joi love now gone. In short, we are at the foundation of what is left to discover what it is “to be human” – a rather sad story for an unlucky “person.”We hold our memories AND our dreams, and when our dreams are lost just as when one’s memories are lost, what does one become? When one’s reality is gone what next? Is it altruism or anger or violence or all of them? In the film we see the latter two used for an altruistic cause of saving Harrison Ford (Deckard) so he can meet his daughter. So, for lack of words like “soul,” one can still argue that in this cinematic world of excess population, size, scale, pollution, technology, one finds that we have a film about still core decency and sacrifice. In a realm of darkness, if not utter loss and depression, we have “salvation” from THE ONLY THINGS THAT ARE LEFT which are decency and sacrifice. Perhaps underscoring the same, we see a hint with the literal remarks about witnessing “a miracle” and an impossible birth with obvious Christianity overtones. Thus we must acknowledge the major pivot from the first film. In the better of the two films Blade Runner 2049, the “setting” is no longer “the star” of the film but, for all intents and purposes, just the opposite and it is actually meaningless. Our protagonist is us and everyone in any age. We have come full circle as an audience, as a cinematic world in a pair of films, and, perhaps and hopefully, as an aggregate society to see the EXISTENTIAL LIMITS (especially given a fragile and limited human lifespan) of science and engineering (note how in Ridley Scott’s linked Alien film series how Weyland who created of the robot David 8 shoots to attain immortality) and to conclude the film with a SACRIFICE and a father’s LOVE of his daughter.

I was hesitant to see this film, partially because I didn’t want to run the risk of undermining in my mind a great movie, _Blade Runner_, a movie that I hold in such high regard (and having such a tremendous amount of skepticism for sequels years after the original film came out). I didn’t want the movie tarnished in my mind. I had also heard the film was slow, slow, slow.With regards to the first worry, I feel the film did very well as a sequel. It expanded the storyline, the universe, of the first film without invalidating anything. It both felt like _Blade Runner_ with the look of the buildings, the grittiness, the flying cars, the music, the giant advertisements, the noirish feel, the contrast with squalor in the streets and very arty interiors for the very wealthy, the sudden and extreme violence, the bleak environment but it also added to the film’s universe, with developments in the world of replicants since the first film, in AI especially outside replicants, getting to see more of the world, new vistas, and yes new violence.At times it was quite slow, stately even, with as reviewers stated, people slowing walking or waiting to speak or going somewhere in a flying car at a fairly leisurely pace It also had a great new series of developments in the setting, but paused at the cusp of following all the way through with the implications, that world changing things happened in the film, but we only see the interesting suggestion of even the possibilities, not the actual outcome. In a sense, the film was the calm before the storm – perhaps – that this film shows the last vestiges of a world that was about to change. We do not get to see that change and we do not even know for sure that it will happen, but at the end of the film we know it is indeed possible.It is a hard film to rate in some ways. I really appreciate that though there are scenes of extreme violence the film did not have a frenetic pace so common in much of science fiction and other genre films. Action was generally easy to follow, crashes or combat didn’t seem overly cinematic but to the extent situations with flying cars and replicants can be, felt more grounded, certainly less throwaway. The film did a good job of making the stakes clear whenever violence happened and made me fearful for the characters involved (the good ones anyway, the bad guys I would happily see defeated).The movie did feel oddly empty at times, that though we got a few crowd scenes in the cyberpunk noirish Los Angeles, so many scenes only have 1, 2, or 3, maybe 4 people. Despite the crowded, squalid city that doesn’t even have trees, many scenes took place in fairly large, spacious rooms, or even when small seemed to be removed from the world at large. Maybe it was symbolic of the extreme disconnect in the setting, of people with each other, of humans with replicants, of humans with an obviously wounded natural world (if not outright dead).By the same token many times the characters, most especially the main character K (played by Ryan Gosling) could be rather emotionless or at the very least reserved in their displays of emotion. This I didn’t see as a fault but very much part and parcel of a setting that is so cold, so dehumanizing, that values life so little, that people have little privacy (even in their own heads, as people can access and manipulate memories).I really liked it, I thought it was an impressive effort, it felt timeless in some ways, at other times it felt like it harkened back to a more stately way of making films, more pensive characters, more brooding for sure, something really rather rare in genre films that seem to try to pack in as many explosions and blaster fire per minute as they can. It is violent, there is some nudity (tasteful I thought), it was well cast, I especially liked the work in the film of Ana de Armas as Joi, she did an excellent job.The film I will say, as some critics note, is rough on women, that women in the film are things to be used for the most part, as compliant companions, for sexual use, or for pure reproduction. I agree also with critics that this isn’t in any way an endorsement of a consumerist view of the value of women but rather a condemnation, that just as the setting uses replicants for human convenience, men use women in this universe as well. It isn’t preachy about this, avoiding this by showing rather than telling and even within the limited roles women can have in this dystopian future still show they have their own minds, their own desires, wishes, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. The roles women have in the film aren’t comfortable sometimes to view but they aren’t meant to be comfortable.

good, very good