![]() Individuals can be recreated whole-cloth, seemingly down to their original personalities. Time and again, Blade Runner 2049 points out the illusory nature of the soul: memories can be copied and manipulated. The secret of true fulfilment, the film seems to suggest, is not through individualism, but through empathy and fighting for a greater cause. It’s telling that his girlfriend isn’t physically real – Joi’s an artificially intelligent programme who floats in and out of K’s life like a softly-spoken ghost.Īlthough an android who wants to be human is far from a new idea in sci-fi, Blade Runner 2049‘s handling of it is quite unusual. Deep down, he’s desperately searching for some kind of greater connection he has no family, no friends, and no real past, beyond the artificial memories implanted in his head. Like Blade Runner‘s Roy Batty, K is therefore a replicant on his own existential journey: forced to repress his human responses – which are regularly checked by his superiors – K lives in a state of almost constant isolation. Gradually, however, K’s history begins to align with that of the missing child, and he begins to wonder whether he is, as his holographic girlfriend Joi (Ama de Armas) keeps telling him, something rather more special than an ordinary replicant. K’s superior, Lieutenant Joshi, charges K with covering up the story and, if possible, track down the replicant’s child and retire it. A more detailed autopsy reveals that the replicant died during childbirth a shocking discovery, since replicants were never meant to be able to reproduce like humans. ![]() While ‘retiring’ a replicant named Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), K uncovers a buried box of remains – seemingly human, but on closer inspection, those of a replicant. The twist here is that K is himself a replicant, and as a hunter of his own kind, is despised both by his human colleagues and other androids. ![]() Meanwhile, a few of Tyrell’s old Nexus series replicants are still at large, which means that the LAPD still employs Blade Runners like K (Ryan Gosling) to hunt them down. Along with co-writer Michael Green, returning Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher comes up with a new scenario, set 30 years after the first: the now-defunct Tyrell Corporation has given way to blind industrialist Niander Wallace, who makes a new generation of more obedient replicants who work both off-world and on Earth. Although its events wander far from Philip K Dick’s source novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner nevertheless explored some of the same topics that long fascinated the author: the nature and meaning of memory the philosophical differences between a machine capable of compassion and a human so lacking in empathy that he can shoot an unarmed woman in the back.īlade Runner 2049 takes all this and carries it forward, creating a new story that both continues the themes of the original Blade Runner and builds on them for a new audience. An electronic test, administered via something called a Voight-Kampff machine, can uncover the subtly different wiring in their brains, but it’s a slow and cumbersome process – as one of Deckard’s colleagues, Holden, finds out at the start of the movie.īlade Runner then becomes as much about Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), a replicant who’s made the illegal trip to Earth in the hope of expanding his four-year lifespan. The problem for Deckard is that the replicants are becoming more humanlike with each passing iteration. The sequel feels expansive, certainly, with its locations extended to take in a spooky, irradiated Las Vegas and a ruined San Diego, but it’s in its themes and storytelling that we see the greatest expansion of all. Instead, director Denis Villeneuve and his collaborators took a much braver approach than just making a sci-fi action movie set in the same universe as Blade Runner. A lesser group of writers and directors might have looked at Ridley Scott’s film and concluded that what it needed was something broadly in line with its dystopian tone, but with more of the things that cut together nicely for a trailer: more chases through benighted city streets more booming guns and brutal fights. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, arguably ranks alongside Terminator 2, Aliens, and Mad Max: Fury Road on the list of best sequels ever made.īlade Runner 2049 succeeded, in no small part, because of the specific way it expanded on the 1982 original. Jaws and RoboCop are examples of classic movies with less than stellar sequels. Even if they deliver on the higher bodycount or more over-the-top action, they often lose the character and storytelling of their predecessors. Unfortunately, history’s also littered with film sequels that, for all their sound and fury, soon slip from memory. ![]() Lieutenant Joshi: “You’ve been getting on fine without one.”īigger, louder, more violent: sequels almost seem duty-bound to one-up what came before. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |