BEFORE: If I've done this right, then Harrison Ford carries over from "Paranoia", and I'm setting myself up for "Justice League" with this one, which opens on November 17, although I may not see it until the Monday after it opens, which is November 20. All good things come to those who wait - and this plan was put in place months ago to allow me to see four more films in the theater this year. (Those would be "Thor: Ragnarok", "Star Wars: The Last Jedi", "Justice League" and this new "Blade Runner", it's a funny coincidence that Robin Wright would appear in two of them.)
And I hope this justifies seeing "Blade Runner 2049" about a week after it opens, and then sitting on the review for almost a month. In the sci-fi community, this sequel is poised to be HUGE. I mean, we're getting a new "Star Wars" film just about every year now, which is great, but there hasn't been a new "Blade Runner" film for 35 YEARS. That's a lifetime for some people, and about 5 lifetimes if you're a replicant.
THE PLOT: A young blade runner's discovery of a long-buried secret leads him to track down former blade runner Rick Deckard, who's been missing for thirty years.
AFTER: I've probably seen the original film over half a dozen times, and part of what's allowed it to gain such a cult following is the fighting in the two camps over whether Deckard is (or isn't) a replicant himself. I've been strongly in the "HUMAN" camp for many years, but I find that after all this time, I've got to issue a rare Movie Year "Mea Culpa" tonight. I've always stated that there was NO WAY Deckard could be a replicant, because he shows signs of weakness when he fights the replicants, gets injured, feels pain, plus we see him eat food - I think I've accidentally been confusing "replicant" with "android" all this time. Which is really embarrassing for a sci-fi nerd to admit.
In my defense, the Philip K. Dick story that the original "Blade Runner" was based on is titled "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" so perhaps that's where I got the notion that Deckard was killing robots - but they're not, are they? Replicants are flesh-based beings who just weren't born from humans, they were manufactured or grown in a lab or something, and programmed with memories that would help control their behavior. And some of them, the early ones at least, were given limited life-spans.
And so the original 1982 film became something of a treatise on genetic engineering, which was in its infancy then, though I think there were "test-tube" babies, the start of things like in vitro fertilization, so naturally a film about the future would take the technology of the time and do its best to extrapolate from there, all the way forward to the far-off year of 2019 to try to imagine what things would be like. But really, people just wanted to know if we would have flying cars by then, and if we'd all be having sex with robots. Well, it's 2017 now, we're getting really close to 2019, and there are no flying cars in sight, but at least we're talking about driverless cars. And no sex with robots yet, though who knows, they're up to some pretty kinky stuff in Japan, it could be happening somewhere. But instead we've got porn all over the internet and maybe some VR dirty stuff is reachable soon.
If you make the mistake that I did, and confuse "replicant" with "android", then really, who gives a crap about what happens to a bunch of robots? They're never going to be alive, they can only mimic human speech and human thought, they've got no intelligence whatsoever beyond their programming. Ah, but synthetic humans, that's a whole other ball game. Do they have souls? (Does anyone?) Are they inferior because they were never "born" or are they superior because they're stronger, smarter and more durable? They may have been created to be slaves to help mankind colonize other planets, but could they become more than that someday? Could they replace the original humans, and is that why someone wanted them "retired" in the first place? Now things are getting a lot more interesting, and now I have to go back and watch the original 1982 film with my new understanding of replicants, and the fact that they are NOT robots.
Now, with all that said, "Blade Runner 2049" has very big shoes to fill, and expectations were VERY high. Much like "The Force Awakens", someone faced the uphill battle of moving the story forward in a way that would entertain everyone, both old and new fans, drawing on elements of the previous film but still charting new territory in a way. A knowledge of the first film would be very helpful, but shouldn't be required in order to enjoy the new story - that's a very tough row to hoe. And on top of that, how could a film possibly satisfy BOTH the fans who are convinced that Deckard is a replicant and also those of us who are desperately hoping that he isn't?
Surprisingly, this film managed to pull this off - I think - and still entertain. But there are other problems, most notably that this film is quite long, at two hours and 45 minutes, but it felt like there was only about an hour's worth of story. It definitely could have been compacted quite a bit, but like the original, we're talking about a film with a very notable MOOD, and part of that mood is the slow build-up of tension over the course of a police investigation. Sure, it COULD have been cut down to about 90 minutes, but SHOULD it have been? That's a debatable point. But considering that nearly 30 years have passed in this future world, the story of humanity has sort of inched forward during that time. This is explained somewhat by referring to a "blackout" that took place shortly after 2019, one presumed, and we're talking about no power anywhere for maybe a couple of years, so after that it seems that humanity nearly had to start over, at least on earth.
It's funny, we hear a lot in the "Blade Runner" universe about these colonies on other planets, but we never get to SEE them. We're stuck on planet Earth with the people who were too sick or too poor to make it to Mars or Venus, and the replicants who didn't like being slaves so they came back to Earth to try to blend in. I almost wish this sequel could have taken us off-world so we'd get a better idea about how the other parts of humanity were doing. What's life really like on another planet where the replicants are slaves doing all the tough work while the people sit around and watch future-porn or go for Sunday drives in their flying cars?
I don't really want to discuss the plot of "Blade Runner 2049" any further, because the revelations are rather good, and it starts to delve into all sorts of fascinating questions about what it means to be a replicant, and therefore by extension what it means to be human. At least this time there's a little less ambiguity about who is human and who's a replicant, which is the way it should be, but right there, this knowledge colors our perceptions from the get-go. So now maybe I understand why there's so much ambiguity about Deckard, and why people keep tearing their hair out while trying to figure him out.
What also is going to stick with me is the portrayal of a replicant (again, an artificial human) going home every night and interacting with a holographic personal assistant. Really, this is just taking the technology we have now - devices like Echo and Alexa - and extrapolating another 30 years in the future to imagine what they would be like. You might imagine that this character has feelings for this hologram, which calls to mind the film "Her" more than anything. Does he love this unreal hologram because he's not completely "real" himself? Or is he just programmed to have certain feelings and desires, which the hologram is programmed to appeal to? And in matters of the heart, aren't we all just programmed replicants responding to our own internal programming? Does love come about more from nature or from nurture in the end?
See, even though there wasn't a hell of a lot of content in "Blade Runner 2049" - at times there seemed to be only enough story to get us to the next stunning visual - I do appreciate many of the questions that it raised about humanity, both real and artificial. We're rapidly heading toward a virtual world - once we finish killing our environment it will probably be all we have left - and it's extremely relevant to think about what's going to be taken for "real" 30 or so years from now. Will there be anything real left? At that point, will we even care?
NITPICK POINT: Like many fans, I would have preferred to have seen a bit more of Harrison Ford, since he's not seen in the first half of this film. But you have to accept the fact that he was very busy spending the money he got for not appearing in the first half of "The Force Awakens".
Also starring Ryan Gosling (last seen in "La La Land"), Robin Wright (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Jared Leto (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis (last seen in "The Martian"), Barkhad Abdi (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Lennie James (last seen in "24 Hour Party People"), Edward James Olmos (last seen in "2 Guns"), David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Ant-Man"), Tomas Lemarquis (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Carla Juri, Sean Young (last seen in "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective"), Hiam Abbass (last seen in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"), Wood Harris (last seen in "Creed").
RATING: 6 out of 10 Vegas showgirls
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