Of course there are.The first Blade Runner audiences would have grounds to be quite disappointed by the reality of 2019 – though not as disappointed as readers of the 1968 book on which the film is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in the then-distant future of 1992.
This is the thrill and terror of the descent, and the long exhale at realizing that there are hidden emergency jumpjets strong enough to pull us out of a head-on collision with the ground. This is a flying car that just took a high-caliber round through the engine block. Huge dramatic physicalities are sometimes summoned, like John Woo’s doves, for no reason other than to heighten a dramatic state, and like Woo’s doves, we embrace them despite their absurdity.
With a few glaring exceptions near the end, its every story beat is satisfying and sensible, and still practically every scene’s dialogue is a wretched hodge-podge of exposition and sentimentality. Such contradiction! Its pace and visual beauty are nearly flawless, yet it is far too long and sometimes, to the eye, twice as big as it needs to be. The film is an awesomely rendered, often careful and delicate mess. Is Moebius not credited? His estate should sue. Could anything better sum up this transformation of Blade Runner from 2019 to 2049 than the landscape of ruined Vegas, strewn with hundred-feet-tall hollow naked women, twisted into porn poses and painted in dust? Only Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty is missing - standing in for him is Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), another freakishly Nordic replicant fatale, this time exceeding the proper bounds of its autonomy not to kill its father but to further its father’s vision of a new creation myth, to enable sexual reproduction itself to re-enter the world. Our new version of Daryl Hannah’s Pris (now Mackenzie Davis’s Mariette) is similarly both destroyed and renewed: she is, as a character, squandered, underutilized, and that vastly worse than before, yet she has evolved from painted toy to scheming revolutionary soldier. Where the human who kills replicants once fell in love with one, the replicant who kills his own now loves and fails to protect something even less human, a hologram, a well-animated sex toy he can’t even touch.Ĭan this even more hollow and meaningless shadow of pliable, agency-less femininity somehow reach back through time and give philosophical weight to Sean Young’s classic fantasy rendering of unlimited victimhood? Can it ripen her uncanny-valley cameo in 2049 from CGI monstrosity into perfect intersection of wish fulfillment and terror-by-fraud? Our blade runner, once a human who can’t quite perceive the film’s hints that he’s a replicant, becomes a replicant all too aware of the film’s hints that he could be (half) human. The characters, too, are louder echoes of our beloved, dilapidated originals. Where once a towering neon-and-grit Los Angeles pushed mattes and models to their maximum potential, now CGI is deployed with awesome restraint, massively amplifying the city’s scale and detail without ever slipping an inch away from its source’s visual sense. Have those years left room in our hearts for the all-new iteration? It devotes itself to worming its way in, and in the process it offers both charms and revulsions. If I’m a replicant, how come they designed my nose to melt halfway off my face 30 years from now? The intervening years and regular definitive-edit upgrades have solidified that film’s place in our hearts. We’ve grown only more interested in the question of our humanity and its meaning in the face of ever-intensifying simulations thereof. (Thirty years have elapsed for the characters and their world, thirty-five for us and ours.) The original film has, in everything but its sex politics, aged beautifully its filthy utilitarian aesthetic and bleak tribute to detective noir still scratch every retrofuturistic itch. The span between these two iterations of Blade Runner has been very kind. We cannot and do not desire everything that we imagine our future to offer. Any future marked by flying cars must also sometimes feature plummeting cars. Repeatedly, we are forced to contemplate what happens when a flying car, cruising high and fast and free, quite suddenly stops flying. In Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the flying cars are back, and their promise is somewhat darker.
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