Love in the Time of Holograms

As I noted in my review of the film, I am not a fan of 1982’s Blade Runner. Yes, it’s a dazzling movie that crafted a sci-fi dystopia like we hadn’t seen before, but hanging on that is a threadbare story with empty characters I just do not like. I have watched the films three times, each time trying to give the film a chance on its own merits without holding the previous viewings against it, and every time I’ve come away with the same opinion of the film. It is just not a movie for me.

That’s the main reason why I avoided going to see 2017’s Blade Runner 2049. Although critical reviews praised the film, it was also a case where critics tended to like the original Blade Runner so I couldn’t necessarily trust that opinion. Audiences were far more mixed on the film, with the sequel only pulling in $276.6 Mil against a production budget that went as high as $185 Mil. It was a second failure for the franchise at the Box Office, and once more it seemed like Blade Runner just wasn’t meant for a wider audience.

But did that make the sequel bad? I wrote it off at the time, yes, but one benefit of doing runs through series for this website is that I’m forced to confront all manner of material I might have avoided otherwise. Sure, that leads me to a lot of crap, but it also lets me find films I otherwise would have ignored. And I am pleasantly happy to report that, for the most part, Blade Runner 2049 is not just another dazzling dystopian sci-fi wonder, it’s also a much better film in all regards when it comes to style, story, and characters. It’s everything I wanted from the first film.

K (serial number KD6-3.7, played by Ryan Gossling) is a Nexus-9 replicant. After the Tyrell corporation went bankrupt, the Wallace Corp swooped in and bought it up. They made newer, more obedient replicant models (like the Nexus-9) and the corporation was able to get the laws changed so replicants could be legally used on Earth once more. Not all replicants are good, so blade runners are still needed, and K works as one for the LAPD under Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright). Joshi is one of the only people at the department that trusts him, and he does a solid job investigating cases for her.

One such case is quite strange. After taking down a rogue replicant that had been on the run for twenty years (played by Dave Bautista), K discovered an old grave. Inside was the skeletal body of a woman who had died during childbirth, but it also turned out that she was a replicant. If replicants could bear children and continue their own ancestry that could cause all kinds of problems for society, or at least that’s what Joshi says. She assigned K to track down and find that child and eliminate it (for the good of humanity, of course). But others, such as CEO Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), want the secret of how replicants can breed so that he can increase the volume of replicants he can make, greatly expanding his slave class. K is torn between factions, all while trying to decide what the right resolution is to this case, if he can even find the child at all.

Blade Runner 2049 is a more directed and interesting film and the first movie. In part that’s because its plot is more specific and focused. Instead of going around randomly killing for replicants as in the first film, our new hero, K, has to solve a real mystery. He follows clues, talks to suspects, picks up leads, all in the name of some kind of justice. It makes K a much more active participant in the case (unlike the first film’s Deckard, who frequently seemed surprised whenever he stumbled on a replicant), which gives the film solid narrative momentum.

It helps that the film also puts a lot of focus on K as a character. Where we never learned much about Deckard at all in the first film (mostly in service of its own subtext mystery of if Deckard was a replicant or not), the sequel immediately works to show us who K is as a person and what he cares about. He seems like a decent guy, from moment one when he tracks down his first replicant and tries to talk the man down, hoping he can bring them in peacefully instead of with violence (spoiler, that doesn’t happen). He also has a home life. Sure, he’s in love with a hologram program, Joi (Ana de Armas), but there’s a genuine, real connection there, at least from him, that gives his character depth that Deckard never had.

While we’re discussing Joi, I do like that the film is coy about if the hologram lover has real emotions or if it’s all just a really deep illusion. We get attached to her as a character, in large part because de Armas is a fantastic actress and she has amazing chemistry with Gossling, and we hope that what they have, strange as it, will lead to some kind of happy ending (although I won’t spoil if that actually happens). At the same time, the film plays its cards close so you’re never quite sure if she’s really real or if, as a Joi program, she’s just following her code. Certain actions say she’s real. Certain clues make it seem like she’s not. It’s like the “is Deckard a replicant” thread, but done much better.

The production design, meanwhile, is also fantastic. The film was helmed by Denis Villeneuve (who also directed Dune and Dune: Part Two, among other films), and he brings a richness to the world that the first film was lacking. It’s still a mega-city sci-fi dystopia, but somehow it feels more lived in and real. It’s also lush and richly detailed, at times gorgeous to look at. All of it is presented with Villeneuve’s steady hand and watchful eye. I like the world of Blade Runner 2049 so much more than how it was presented in Blade Runner, and much of that credit has to go to Villeneuve and his team.

With all of that said, the film is not entirely without flaws, and most of it comes due to the case. For starters, it’s revealed early enough that Wallace wants the secret of replicant reproduction so he can crank out more replicants. That’s the kind of concept that seems sound on paper, but it also sounds like it would quickly get out of control. How do you use replicant mothers and control them without the secret of it getting out. Wallace might have the lock on replicant technology, but that ignores the fact that industrial espionage exists, let alone corporate whistleblowers. Sooner or later the secret would get out and then people would know. A slave class that can breed would have ramifications for laws and regulations, to say nothing of the fact that people might view keeping a slave class of breeds as quite the corporate sin.

And if one set of breeders can be made, what’s to stop others from occurring as well? Is Wallace going to purposefully sterilize every single replicant child born to control the flow of breedable replicants? Even if he does that, there’s a lot of replicants already out in the wild, and surely some of them might have a mutation that would eventually let them create children. The film, through its story, raises a lot of questions it then doesn’t answer, and that leaves the audience feeling a tad unfulfilled by the direction of the case.

On top of all that, it’s pretty clear the film was set up for a sequel it never got. Wallace is poised as a villain for the franchise, but (mild spoiler) the film doesn’t resolve his plotline conclusively. The film also hints at some kind of replicant resistance movement, but then there isn’t time for that to come to a resolution before the film ends. Everyone involved stated they wanted to follow further stories if Blade Runner 2049 was successful, but then when it wasn’t, it seems like all those little plot threads are going to be left unfulfilled.

This is a big problem with current franchise filmmaking. People put the cart before the horse and expect that sequels will just happen, so why bother tying up loose ends? Blade Runner 2049 should have let some plot threads stay hidden until a sequel was announced, that way we wouldn’t be left with dangling ideas that might never be addressed. Sure, Amazon is now working on a Blade Runner 2099 film, so maybe some stuff gets answers, but anyone watching Blade Runner 2049 in theaters back in the day likely would have been annoyed that the film doesn’t answer everything it purposefully raises.

Despite all this, I don’t hate the film. I actually really like Blade Runner 2049. It’s a visually stunning film with an interesting plot and characters I really like. It really is a much improved version of a Blade Runner story, and I appreciate all the things it does. It’s not perfect, and I don’t even know if having sequels would have addressed all my concerns here. Still, I think what it does well it does really well, and I do wish it could have continued on from this place back in the day. That would have required people showing up for it, of course, and back in the day I had no interest in doing that, just like I’m sure many others were uninterested as well.

So maybe that is the greatest flaw. Blade Runner 2049 is a fantastic movie hobbled by one major decision: it’s a sequel to a failed sci-fi movie many people just don’t like. If it could have been its own thing, with this level of rich detail, character development, and world building, I think it could have been a real success. The issue was making a sequel to Blade Runner and thinking people actually cared about Blade Runner. Clearly, as per the Box Office returns, they did not.