By Murtaza Ali Khan
Few movies have
revolutionized a genre like the Ridley Scott 1982 cult classic Blade Runner. Interestingly,
it took Scott almost 25 years to finally come out with ‘The Final Cut’—the
digitally re-mastered version of the film that’s truest to his artistic vision.
For, Scott didn’t have complete editorial and artistic control over the earlier
four versions of the film. Of all the versions
of Blade Runner, it is ‘The Final Cut’ that’s the bleakest
and most violent. It’s the only version
to contain the original full-length version of the unicorn dream. It also
features all of the additional violence and alternate edits from the
international cut not present in the US theatrical version. All this
information may sound trivial to an uninitiated viewer but often a new viewer
of Blade Runner is not sure which version to watch and so if you want to
acquaint yourself with Blade Runner then surely you need to get your hands on
‘The Final Cut’, especially now that its highly anticipated sequel Blade Runner
2049 is out, more than 35 years after the original.
But, before we explore
various facets of Blade Runner 2049, it’s essential that we first discuss some
basic aspects of the original for the benefit of those who have yet to watch
the 1982 film. Blade Runner is basically a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s
1968 Sci-Fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? As oppose to the novel
which is set in post-apocalyptic San Francisco, the movie is set in dystopian
Los Angeles in the year 2019. In this nightmarish world we encounter humanoid
robots known as 'replicants' that are bioengineered by the ruthless Tyrell
Corporation, headed by a narcissistic scientist named Eldon Tyrell, to work on
off-world colonies. However, these replicants are known to abandon their
assigned workstations, often turning rogue. Special police officers assigned
with the dangerous task of ‘retiring’ these replicants are called blade
runners. Now, a blade runner cannot afford to mistakenly kill a human being and
so has to rely on the Voigt-Kampff
test
to distinguish the replicant from a human being. Depending on the level of sophistication of a
given model, it can take anywhere from 20-30 to 100 or more cross-referenced questions for a blade runner to identify a replicant. Rick
Deckard (immortalized by Harrison Ford) is a burn-out blade runner who
reluctantly accepts one last assignment to retire a fugitive group of Nexus-6
replicants that has escaped back to earth. During the mission, Deckard falls in
love with a highly advanced replicant named Rachael who makes him question his
mission. What it means to be human? Can an artificially created being capable
of human emotions and feelings is any less human? These are the questions at
the heart of Blade Runner. The dilemma is perhaps best expressed by the
haunting monologue that the dying replicant Roy Batty delivers to Deckard
moments after saving his life: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in
the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like
tears in rain. Time to die.”
Blade Runner ends with a
suggestion that Deckard himself was a replicant. It is a question that has
haunted the movie goers for over three decades. Till date it remains one of the
most befuddling questions in movie history. It is also a question that has over
the years elicited contrasting answers from Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford.
While the latter has always believed Deckard to be a human being, the former
has gone on record to proclaim that Deckard
is a replicant. Ever since the sequel to Blade Runner was
announced, the debate has once again come to the fore. During the course of
this article we will try to touch upon various important questions revolving
around the Blade Runner franchise including whether Deckard is a human or a
replicant. But first let’s try and get a basic idea about the storyline of
Blade Runner 2049. As the name suggests, the much-awaited sequel is set in
2049—about thirty years after the events depicted in the first film. Following
a blackout in the year 2022, which saw the end of the Tyrell Corporation,
Niander Wallace (menacingly portrayed by Jared Leto), after taking over what
remained of the corporation, has introduced a new line of replicant slaves, which
neither try to escape nor disobey their masters. Wallace is now the new Tyrell,
a megalomaniacal genius who sees himself as a god; only he is far more cruel,
manipulative, and anarchistic. Make sure you watch the three short films viz. ‘Black Out 2022’, ‘2036:
Nexus Dawn’, and ‘2048: Nowhere to Run’ to
get a better idea of what actually happened in between the timelines of two Blade Runner films.
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| Roy and Deckard battle it out in Blade Runner (1982) |
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| Ryan Gosling as K in Blade Runner 2049 |
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| K meets Sapper Morton in Blade Runner 2049 |
Unlike in the original film,
the protagonist is a certified replicant. In fact, K is looked upon
contemptuously by the ‘real’ people around him. They use slangs like ‘skin job’
or ‘skinner' while referring to him. He lives in a decent apartment but all he
has for company is a holographic companion named Joi (beautifully portrayed by Ana
de Armas). Joi is capable of changing forms and moods within a fraction of a
second. It's her job to meet K's needs and desires and she is quite adept at
it. But whatever she is capable of doing for him is just not good enough for
her. K doesn't complain that she isn't real but she nonetheless wants to be
real for him. So, she invites a hooker and tries to merge her own intangible
form with the hooker's physicality to give K a truly real experience (one moment the two feminine bodies unite to become one, only to separate out the very next instant, making the superimposition all but obvious). It's just
another day in the hooker's life but for Joi it's nothing less than some holy
ritual. She devotes herself to it completely. During the ritual she no longer
remains a hologram but for the first time ever becomes a complete woman for K.
Of course, she is only a program trying to do what it is made to do but we all
seem to forget that after some time. You see, passing the Turing Test is no
longer a concern for someone like Joi. For, the AI has become so good that the
pretense of the real appears to be more real than the real itself. Just as the
billionaire genius tells the young programmer in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina,
“The real test is to show you that she's a robot and then see if you still feel
she has consciousness”.
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| K with his holographic girlfriend Joi |
Co-written by Hampton Fancher (who also co-wrote the original) and Michael Green (writer of Logan), Blade Runner 2049 builds on
the ideas established by seminal Sci-Fi works like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Solyaris, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner itself. Perfecting the AI is perhaps the biggest challenge ever
presented to mankind. Unfortunately, it’s also like a double edged sword. For,
mankind is certainly set to lose its supremacy the day AI is perfected. This is
the very idea that central to several important works of science fiction such
as The Terminator, The Matrix or Westworld. But Blade Runner 2049 takes it to a
whole new level by introducing the idea of procreation. What if these
artificially created beings are capable of reproducing offsprings, in flesh and
blood? Would killing them be the same as killing those humanoids created in the
laboratory? Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men takes place in a dystopian future
plagued by global infertility as humanity faces extinction. When a baby is born
miraculously, after a long wait of 18 years, it holds the promise of uniting the whole of mankind.
Can such a miracle possibly unite the entire replicant community against the mankind? It’s these
uncharted territories that Blade Runner 2049 dares to tread, often asking
complex questions that have no easy answers.
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| A man escorts a woman with her newborn as the combatants stop fighting, awed by the miracle, in Children of Men |
Another important theme that’s central to both the Blade Runner films is memory. We had seen in Blade Runner how Tyrell had fed Rachael with false memories which had made her less susceptible to the Voigt-Kampff test. The childhood memories allowed her to have a greater faith in the veracity of her humanly existence. Also, it is Deckard’s recurring unicorn dream as well as the fact that Gaff knows about it that makes us suspect that he is a replicant in the first place. In Blade Runner 2049, K has childhood memories involving a toy horse made of wood. However, K is well aware that the memories are not real just like he is fully aware that he is a replicant. But he later learns something about these memories that breaks him completely. Blade Runner 2049 constantly toys with the notion of what is real and what isn’t. When Wallace reincarnates a young Rachael for an aging Deckard, she is real enough for Wallace and his replicant enforcer and angel of death Luv (beautifully portrayed by Sylvia Hoeks), and perhaps even for the audiences, but Deckard is easily able to see through the artifice because of his memories of Rachael. In the Andrei Tarkvosky's Solyaris, the remote ocean planet Solaris is capable of recreating persons called 'visitors' based on the actual memories of these real persons that their loved ones possess. The recreations look so authentic that it is difficult to tell them apart from the actual person. Although not human, the recreations think and feel just like humans. Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence doesn't tell us if the Mecha's feelings are real or not but they certainly do feel real. Maybe it's just a program, after all. But once the Mecha enters the real world, its experiences and interactions are undoubtedly real much like the experiences and interactions of the visitors (once they arrive on the space station orbiting the planet) in Solyaris. What is it that makes a person real? Is it the bodily existence or the consciousness? So, Blade Runner 2049, much like Solyaris and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, is also a reminder that what’s real for one may not be real for the other and vice versa.
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| Wallace's replicant enforcer Luv meets Lt. Joshi in Blade Runner 2049 |
Blade Runner 2049 is rife with literary as well as cultural references. It’s impossible not to think of Kafka while watching the film; even the name ‘K’ seems to have a Kafkaesque origin. One particular literary text that the movie directly references is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (even the baseline response test that K is repeatedly subjected to borrows lines from the 999-line poem that the Nabokov novel is presented as). Joi's desire to become real for K seems to mirror the obsession of James Stewart's character to transform his dead lover's lookalike in her exact image in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. While the plot of Blade Runner 2049 has much fewer film noir elements than Blade Runner, the city’s noirish look is pretty much intact. Also, the presence of the good old neon billboards with the logos of Atari, Coca Cola, Pan Am, Sony, etc. hints towards a possible rise in consumerism. While the Japanese and Chinese influence continues to be quite evident in Blade Runner 2049, much along the lines of its precursor, the keen-eyed can also observe a strong Indian influence with Hindi sign boards now joining the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Korean ones. However, despite all its meticulousness and attention to detail, Blade Runner 2049 commits the cardinal sin of casting a Caucasian actress to essay an Indian character (Robin Wright as Lt. Joshi)—reflecting the hangover of an old Hollywood syndrome. Visually and thematically, Blade Runner 2049 stands right up there with its predecessor but somewhere it lacks the aural transcendence of the original, orchestrated by the one and only Vangelis (with all due respect to Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch).
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| Use of neon signs and Hindi language in Blade Runner 2049 |
Blade Runner 2049’s box
office performance has thus far been quite underwhelming. One of the reasons of
course is its slow pacing. For, in the age of superhero movies its wishful
thinking to expect a movie like Blade Runner 2049, deliberately paced with a
running time of 164 minutes, to strike the right chords with the restless
audiences accustomed to watching mini-climaxes every ten minutes. Another
reason has to do with the movie's complex and ambiguous narrative that can be
too demanding on the average viewer. The movie hits us with too much of food
for thought that it gets a bit too much to handle, at least during the first viewing.
Also let’s not forget that Blade Runner 2049 relies heavily on the original
film and so all those who approach the sequel directly without watching the
original are bound to be left perplexed by its multilayered plot and
characters. Remember, Blade Runner 2049 is no Jurassic Park or Avengers! And it
is way more convoluted than some of the best films made by leading Hollywood
filmmakers in recent times, including Christopher Nolan. In fact, it wouldn't be
a hyperbole to say that Blade Runner 2049 has gone closer to the
realms of high art than any other commercial film in recent times.
Coming to the question of
Deckard's identity, all that can be said is that Villeneuve does play with it
during a late sequence wherein Wallace tries to tempt an aging Deckard, who
befittingly appears to be as big an enigma for the evil genius as he has been
for the gazillion Blade Runner fans over the last three decades. In other
words, the movie doesn’t provide any definitive answer to cinema’s
most enduring mystery. In Blade Runner 2049, Harrison Ford plays
Deckard with the same mix of charm and vulnerability. In a memorable sequence
wherein Deckard repeatedly punches K, Ford demonstrates the same desperation
that he had shown when Deckard battled Roy in the original. Interestingly, while shooting one
of Ford's punches did catch Gosling off guard and some ice had to
be applied to mitigate the pain. The scene takes place inside a deserted
performance theatre and has all the makings of an instant classic. If not for
what Villeneuve, Ford, Gosling, and Roger Deakins achieve together in the sequence
then certainly because of the love of Elvis Presley whose haunting presence
elevates it to another level altogether.
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| Deckard encounters K in Blade Runner 2049 |
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| Jared Leto as Niander Wallace in Blade Runner 2049 |
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| A Still from Blade Runner 2049 that provides a glimpse of Roger Deakins' mastery over his art |
P.S. An Academy Award for Best Cinematography finally looks like a certainty for the veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins—the undisputed master of mood in contemporary cinema.
Rating: 9/10
A version of this article was first published in Cafe Dissensus Everyday.
Readers, please feel free to share your opinion by leaving your comments. As always your valuable thoughts are highly appreciated!
Blade Runner 2049 - International Trailer (YouTube)
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