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.

I suspect most people who watch this movie will have seen Blade Runner which was released in 1982. But a few might never have seen the original so a little review is in order.
In one sense the story line is anachronistic, and the sequel does not alter that. The story for the first film was set in 2019, just one year from now, and we are a long way from the dystopian future it presented. Tyrell Corporation (think maybe some hybrid of Microsoft with a biotech firm) was producing androids that looked fully human. They were of course used for the most dangerous and unpleasant jobs, such as warfare and exploring the solar system. Their artificial intelligence also crossed the threshold into genuine consciousness. As a result, sometimes they rebelled. Combined with their often superior strength and stamina, they made formidable opponents. Special police units were set up for the sole purpose of finding and eliminating rogue replicants. The slang for them was “blade runners”. In the original film Harrison Ford was a blade runner and the plot concerns mostly his difficult job of finding a rogue team of replicants who had returned to earth and “retiring” them. What was not at all obvious in the original cinema version, but hinted at broadly in later “director’s cuts” was the suggestion that Ford’s character, Deckard, was himself a replicant but didn’t know it. The setting for the first film was wonderfully eerie and slightly creepy: Los Angeles in the future, almost always raining, and many of the scenes were at night.
Blade Runner 2049 uses this same backstory for its underpinning. Again it is set mostly in Los Angeles, but its horizons spread out a bit: into the central California valley, still used for growing things but now under the protection of greenhouses; some of the coastline between Los Angeles and San Diego; and lastly a futuristic Las Vegas, almost totally deserted as a result of radioactive contamination from a “dirty bomb” set off in the past.
The visuals and even the soundtrack will immediately remind fans of the original Blade Runner. Some of the musical themes are the same. Again there is a good bit of rain, and lots of neon lights and 3-D holographic ads (which even interact with the passers-by). In the 30 years since the first story, Tyrell Corporation went bankrupt (a result of too many of its replicants going rogue), all production stopped for many years, until finally a new corporate titan, Wallace Corp, buys the rights to the technology, adds new safeguards and begins producing them once again. The world’s biosphere has further degraded in the interim; people have to wear some type of gas mask or respirator if they are outside any length of time, and all the animals we used for food have died off. Wallace Corporation became enormously rich by developing the techniques to mass-produce grubs of some sort, and process them into ersatz meals (rather like veggie-burgers, but with grubs instead of soy meal as a base!) The story this time centers on Ryan Gosling’s character, “K”, who is another blade runner—but this time there is no question about his also being a replicant. He knows it, and so does everyone else he interacts with. Sadly, hatred of replicants by humans is pretty widespread (like immigrants, I presume there’s a basic fear they will displace more human jobs—a fear made greater by their superior durability and unquestioning obedience). The blade runners are also hated by the other replicants, since they kill their own kind—so K’s existence is quite a solitary one.
The question of whether man will ever create something “in his own image,” but which surpasses him has quite a long history in fiction going back at the least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818—so “Blade Runner 2049” has come out on almost the 200th anniversary of that story. To the questions the first movie explored, about the humanness of the “replicants”, this story adds yet another twist, which was one of my favorite parts of the film. People can purchase holographic companions, which also run on artificial intelligence. A popular model is Joi, which seems particularly popular with men who enjoy being the center of the attention of a beautiful young lady, even if she’s only a hologram. For K however, his Joi is his only real friend and confidant. And although these holograms are not supposed to be self-aware…that is, to have “consciousness”, K’s Joi gives every appearance of being just as conscious as K is. Their scenes together were fascinating to watch.
I will skip details about the plot line so as to avoid any spoilers. I will just add that since both Harrison Ford and his detective sidekick in the original film (Edward James Olmos) are still alive, the director and script writers decided: why not incorporate them into the story too? They do not get a large amount of screen time, but they are there.
The visuals of this film are wonderful. Watching Blade Runner (the original) it would have been hard to imagine improving on it, but this film did so. Particular credit must go to Wallace’s private office space in the Wallace Corporation. Words won’t do it justice—it has to be seen, preferably on a large screen. Although the sequel cannot be quite as revolutionary as the original (precisely because it is a sequel) it’s still a fine work of art, which took 35 years to appear. I give it a B+ and it's worth watching. Rated "R" mostly for some scenes of violence; there is little swearing and no nudity.

Spotlight Movie Review (8/10) “Great”
Blade Runner 2049
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Hampton Francher, Michael Green
Starring: Ryan Gosling (K), Ana de Armas (Joi), Sylvia Hoeks (Luv), Harrison Ford (Rick Deckard)
Plot: A young blade runner discovers a long-buried secret that will change the world, and leads him to Rick Deckard, an ex-Blade Runner.

Review: If you were a fan of the original noir, sci-fi style of the first Blade Runner movie, then you will definitely love this movie as it expands upon that universe and presents a world that is 30 years into the future of that movie. Like the original, this movie is dark and bleak and is more of a slower character driven movie as opposed to an action packed movie. I watched the original Director’s Cut and The Final Cut of Ridley Scott’s previous epic and have come to prefer The Final Cut version of that movie. If I were to give that movie a rating today it would probably be somewhere in the 7~7.5/10 range. I have to say that I actually liked the sequel better than the original, but it wasn’t better by a lot as it seemed Villeneuve was trying to make this movie feel like a logical continuation of that movie. Also, I recommend watching the first one before watching this movie as it makes A LOT more sense if you do.

Without spoiling the movie, there is a premise in this movie that took a while for me to wrap my head around as I couldn’t believe how the “miracle” mentioned by Dave Bautista’s (Sapper Morton) character in the beginning of the film even happened (guess that’s why it’s called a miracle). For the sake of the movie’s world and rules I decided to follow along with the premise (no matter how farfetched it seemed) and just decided that that happened because that is this world’s miracle and phenomenon and not necessarily related to ours. And when I finally got over that hump, the movie’s larger implications of what that premise could mean for the world’s inhabitants became more singular and I came to appreciate the movie even more. Gosling plays pretty much Harrison’s role in the first Blade Runner movie as he hunts down replicants and if I had to describe him in one phrase it would be “a more efficient Deckard.” My biggest problem with Deckard’s journey in the first Blade Runner movie was that he got lucky with all of the replicants he faced – someone interfered with Deckard’s fight with a replicant or the replicant that was trying to kill him would let him go on the verge of Deckard’s death. In this movie, K is very good at his job as he efficiently and brutally dispatches replicants and he makes it believable. He also has more tools than Deckard did, which makes him fun to watch as he tries to track down the suspect(s) in this movie. Armas as a holographic entity surprised me as the movie progressed and I grew more emphatic for her. Hoeks as the unwavering killer replicant was also great as she seemed to steal the screen whenever she was on – think Winter Soldier with longer hair and a killer instinct. And of course Ford gives another great performance as Deckard and this Deckard is more tortured and angrier than the one in the previous movie.

In essence, this is a mystery detective movie, but what makes it different is the premise and science fiction backdrop the movies takes place in. Think of it as Dick Tracy in a futuristic world with robots and you get Blade Runner 2049. However, I do have a few gripes with the movie. I didn’t think it was necessary for the strange scene with Joi and the hooker robot hooking up to please K and if the director decided to leave it in I wish he had shortened it a bit as it seemed a little too long. I saw what the director was trying to do and make sex between robots a wondrous and beautiful thing, but I felt that scene overstayed its welcome for me to fully appreciate it. This movie is also a bit long, as it clocks in around 2 hours and 45 minutes, and I felt the movie could’ve benefitted if it lost 15 to 30 minutes as I found myself looking at my watch during some of the more dragged on scenes. Like the first Blade Runner movie, Villeneuve does have some shots of the elongated scenes on the character’s faces, which works sometimes, but not always. Also, the first Blade Runner has the environment beat when compared to this movie, since the first one actually felt like a living world as there were shots of people living in the city; and this movie felt a little bit more claustrophobic and the world felt smaller than the first one because there were way more scenes with a few individuals rather than teeming cities. If you can, I recommend watching this movie in Dolby Digital if you theatre offers it as the sound and visuals are some of the best things about this movie.

I was 20 maybe when the original aired and this movie was pretty good as remake/sequels go. So many will see this, and a vast majority may have seen the original but not then and not with the mindset of the time. I will refrain from further comment seeing as I wish to host no argument in our alleged collective mind.

I waited a long time to see this because I didn't really want the first movie to be ruined by this storyline. It was not. The characters are well written and well acted. The universe of Bladerunner is very much alive in the movie as well.

I have to say, when I originally saw Blade Runner 2049 in the theater I was hugely disappointed. I simply got bored after a while because the movie was so long clocking in at nearly 3 hours. Re-watching it now and I actually enjoyed it very much.

This was obviously the sequel to the highly praised Blade Runner movie that mixed sci fi with film noir. There are still replicants, and there are still Blade Runners that hunt them down. Instead of the Tyrell Corp being the bad guy there’s a new company run by Niander Wallace who is making new replicants that are supposed to obey humans.

The beginning of the film lays out the major themes. Officer K played by Ryan Gosling finds two small flowers growing which wasn’t supposed to be possible since the environment collapsed. Then he gets tested by his own agency to see whether he was a replicant himself. Then he goes home to his electronic girlfriend. Finally he finds out that a replicant he just killed got another one pregnant, another contradiction. K decides to investigate which leads him to Rick Decard played by Harrison Ford. Thus the old connects with the new.

First, the flowers are symbolic of a new beginning for the Earth. Second, Blade Runners are supposed to be protecting society from evil replicants and yet they are not trusted themselves. Third, it sets up K and the society he lives in as one of loners, full of alienation, especially for Blade Runners. His job is to hunt down androids. His only human interactions are with others at his job, and then he goes home to be kept company by an electronic image, which of course is ironic because his job is to destroy technology. As his boss tells K, he has no soul. Finally, the possibility that replicants have evolved into their own life form capable of reproducing could change everything. That would mean they were not just things to be used by humans, but their own beings that are enslaved. That's also related to the symbolism of the flowers. Here you have the major character, his job, he society he works within, and the storylines the film will work through. The underlying question is whether there will be a revolution or not.

The film tries to pay homage to the original Blade Runner in terms of style. There is a lot of darkness and shadow in almost every shot for instance. That replicates the mood of the film such as in Film Noir.

Upon second viewing I see Blade Runner 2049 as quite profound and a worthwhile movie to sit down and enjoy and explore the messages and themes.
C

This is not a bad movie, but I still like the original better ;)