Blade Runner 2049 and the Problem With Sequels
An Essay, November 8, 2017
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“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 the rain. Time to die.”
— Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty), Bladerunner
Those classic lines, written by the actor himself the night before it was filmed, have become engrained in the minds of every science fiction movie fan, with good reason. They sum up beautifully the sorrow of death, and the intense human desire for more life. A classic cry of despair at the indifference of the universe. It is, or should be, the clarion call of everyone who has been cheated of a meaningful life. Those lines are the climax of one of the most studied modern films since Citizen Kane.
To tell the truth, I couldn’t tell you exactly when I first saw Blade Runner. I know it was edited-for-television version and had a weird narration at the beginning. (I’m assuming this was the CBS television version from 1986.) I knew immediately that this was like something I had never seen before, and it wasn’t because of the chopped up narrative, actors spilling out over the edges of the frame, or the ambiguity of the ‘happily ever after’ ending. I had been reading these kind of stories since elementary school in novels like ‘Dune’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’, but I had certainly never seen anything like them on American television, where the edgiest Science Fiction program out there was Star Trek. It wasn’t until I saw the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner (on VHS in 1993) that I realized that it was based on Phillip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, one of three of Dick’s novels that I had read in high school (including ‘A Scanner Darkly’ and ‘Man in a High Castle’)
From my first viewing, I had always seen Rick Deckard as the bad guy, or at least certainly not the one I was supposed to feel empathy for. In the beginning, he’s portrayed as an alcoholic cop who executes runaway slaves, not someone that I easily empathized with. (My father was an alcoholic.) As the movie went on, he became less and less anaesthetized until he finally regained his humanity with the help of Roy Batty and Rachel. If you look at the story from that perspective, it is difficult not to feel for the Replicants, who are hunted and killed remorselessly, without trial or recourse. You can’t help but feel empathy for their quest to know what it all means, what all the endless suffering was all about, only to find out in the end that this is something that none of us can ever know. Many have seen this as an ambiguous ending, but I think it was a truthful ending that is immensely satisfying, if not comfortable for everyone. For years afterward, I had heard rumours of a sequel, but nothing ever came of it and nothing ever did. I had always been fascinated with what might have happened to Deckard after Rachel’s 4 year life span was up. Enough that, in 2002, during a long hiatus from work due to the September 11th attacks in the United States, I even wrote a Blade Runner screenplay as a writing exercise. (Set in 2021 and based loosely on Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein’. Check it out *here* if you’re interested.) I only tell you this to give you an idea of the depth to which I have studied this film.
And then, in 2015, the announcement finally came, and the Hollywood media machine began to build excitement. But, ‘Blade Runner 2049’? Really? I have to admit, I was given pause. Why had they not bothered to find a more meaningful title? Ridley Scott went to the great lengths to find the perfect title for his masterpiece, buying the entire film rights to Alan Edward Nourse’s young adult novel ‘The Bladerunner’(1) for the expressed purpose of lifting only the title from the book. (No, William S. Burroughs did not come up with the title, however good a story the screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, has made of it.) It’s an unfortunate habit of Hollywood to tack a date onto the original title for the sequel, a clumsy way to give the audience a clue that a certain amount of time has passed. Trust me, anyone old enough to remember the original theatrical release of BR2019 doesn’t need the title to tell them how much time has passed. It seems lazy even by Hollywood standards, especially for a movie that has been anticipated as much as this one. But with so much talent behind the sequel, and with Ridley Scott’s blessing, it seemed that we would have little reason to worry, right?
“Indulge me.”
— Joe Turkel (Dr. Eldon Tyrell), Blade Runner
Well, it turns out I did have some reason to worry, with the title being the least of it. I had to temper my reaction to this movie since I had the inevitably high (possibly overblown) expectations of a Blade Runner zealot. It’s only after a week’s reflection that I started writing down my thoughts on the experience of watching BR2049, a journey I had not really prepared myself for on my first viewing.
Let me start by saying that Blade Runner 2049 is not, by any means, a terrible movie. But, like the original release in 1982, it just wasn’t what was promised in the advertisements. By this, I mean s
omewhat of a continuation of the story of the original. It was only this in part. Calling this movie a sequel to BR 2019 was a bit deceptive, since the story bore only a peripheral relevance to the original story. It would have been better described as a spin-off in the old television-series meaning of the term, where the original world was recreated for the habitation of strangers, (a different type of Blader Runner, different type of Replicants, different type of corporate oppression, different type of atmosphere in general), with the main characters relegated to a supporting role. None of this necessarily makes BR2049 a bad movie, just a different movie. This was unfortunate, since many, including me, were hoping (or expecting) the return to form of some of those beloved characters, or at least shedding light on what those characters were. Ridley Scott has never been one to cater to expectations(2), and it shows with his approval of this movie’s screenplay. There was, understandably, a certain amount of reluctance on the part of the original producers to venture into the unwinnable position of producing a sequel to a classic. (I understand that it wasn’t until the most reluctant of them (Bud Yorkin and especially Jerry Perenchio) died that the movie finally moved ahead.)
“Memories. You’re talking about memories.”
— Harrison Ford (Rick Deckard), Blade Runner
As expected, memories, real and fabricated, play a big part in this film, as they did in BR2019. After discovering Rachel’s remains buried on a worm farm in the ‘North’, Joe K(3) discovers a date inscribed on the root of a tree that triggers one of his implanted memories. The nature of these memories lead K (and the audience) into thinking that he might be someone special, the offspring of Deckard and his Replicant lover, Rachel. That somehow, these childhood memories that everyone has told him were fabricated, were actually real. If Mr. Gosling had more clearly shown us how much this found memory meant to him right from the beginning, then maybe he could have made us care when it was finally revealed that the memories were never his and could not have been. The point where he finds out that these memories belong to someone else is one of the more emotional moments in the film. It’s a beautiful idea, that he would dare to believe that maybe he was someone special. Unfortunately, there had been no emotional build-up to this, his initial hollow reaction to his own optimism ends up robbing his disillusionment of much of its impact when it finally happens, with no real emotional payoff. (You might notice that I keep saying this a lot.)
If Joe K had been more erratic and marginal than he was portrayed by Mr. Gosling, (like Deckard had been in his heyday), then it would have certainly enlivened the more emotionally flattened scenes. As a Replicant who was also a Blade Runner, he would have been, by definition, on the fringes, unlikely to be as docile as he was portrayed. There was an unnecessary story point made about the Replicants needing to maintain a ‘baseline’, which required Mr. Gosling to maintain his intensely static performance at all costs.
Since Nexus Replicants had been banned from Earth more than thirty years before, you would think that there would not be a lot of them around for him to hunt. So, what does he do when he’s got no Replicants to hunt? He sits like a robot in his own apartment talking in monotone to the digital entity he allegedly loves? Would he remain at ‘baseline’ even when alone and unobserved? If Joi (his digital ‘love interest’ played by Ana de Armas) was designed to allow us to feel empathy for his desire to be loved, it unfortunately didn’t pay off. I assumed all along that she was some sort of corporate spy, another method to prod Joe K into finding Deckard. The idea that the 
corporation couldn’t have gotten into Joi’s programming seemed a little unrealistic, and her betrayal seemed an obvious way to have Joe K be kicked while he was down, rather than just having Luv ‘kill’ her. Ironically, I believe such a scenario could have made Joi seem even more human, and reinforced the idea of corporate paranoia evident in BR 2019.
The control system put in place by the writers of BR2049 prevents any such emotional display by any of the Replicants. The actors were robbed of the ability to show what it meant to be faced with predestined extinction. The reason the Replicants worked in BR2019 was because they were as described: ‘More human than human’. We were allowed to empathize with their plight. In BR 2019, Rachel (brilliantly played by Sean Young) had a subtle reaction to Deckard that was a mixture of revulsion and fascination that led her to understand the nature of her own existence. The humorous banter between Pris (a wonderfully eccentric performance by Daryl Hannah) and Roy Batty made them seem all the more dangerous. Eliminating this type of contradiction would have robbed the film of the intensely emotional reactions each of the Nexus Replicants had to their limited mortality.
Only the Rogue Nexus in the opening sequence of BR 2049 was allowed to outwardly express the struggle the Replicants were dealing with. I couldn’t help but feel that this wonderful scene with the Replicant farmer(4) (played pitch perfect by David Bautista) at the beginning of the movie would have served better as Deckard’s hiding place at the end of the movie. It seems far more fitting that Deckard would have become a worm farmer protecting his lover’s resting place, rather than an bee-keeper in a Vegas casino.
But even with this premise in place, much of the emotional flatness could have been avoided if Joe K’s superior, Lt. Joshi, (played by Robin Wright, sadly underused and far too easily disposed of) would have been hiding his eccentricities all along in order to get more use out of him as a Blade Runner. (Maybe this was actually the point of her role, but it seemed to be lost on me.) When the twist comes and she orders him to find Rachel’s child and destroy all evidence of its existence, there must have been some serious internal turmoil since he’s beginning to suspect that he might be that child. And yet there is nothing to indicate this in Mr. Gosling’s expression.
On more than one occasion I thought that maybe we were following the wrong replicant. That Luv, the emotionally unbalanced henchman (played with quiet ferocity by Sylvia Hoeks), would have been a more interesting character. When she finds out about the miracle child, would she follow orders or rebel? I would have like to have seen that internal battle, especially after she watches her boss retire (murder) a ‘newborn’ Replicant, her virtual clone, because it was sterile.
“Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto.”
— Joe Turkel (Dr. Eldon Tyrell), Blade Runner
You might have noticed that I haven’t talked much about Deckard so far. Much of the movie was structured as a lead-up to finally finding Deckard. But after more than an hour and a half of preamble that prevented any sense of urgency to Joe K’s mission, we find out that Deckard actually knows nothing about his missing child, another plot device that robbed the sequence of its emotional payoff. (Sorry, there it is again.) Maybe Deckard should have been the one who revealed that the child was a girl, not a boy as Joe K had suspected. I would pay good money to see that scene played out at length by Mr. Gosling and Mr. Ford. Instead, this information is revealed by a barely known expository character that has virtually no connection to the story. (I sensed a blatant setup for a sequel here, but that seems unlikely now.)
I wish it had been a surprise when it was revealed that Joe K had led the Wallace(5) Corporation’s goon squad directly to Deckard, but it seemed childishly obvious that they would do this. I still don’t understand exactly what Niander Wallace (played with cartoonish glee by Jared ‘Look-At-Me-I’m-Acting’ Leto) hoped to gain by all this. I think Deckard’s own physiology would have told Wallace more of what he needed to know about Replicant reproduction than anything Deckard’s son could have told him. (At this point, he believes Deckard’s child is a boy, doesn’t he?) In any case, we know Deckard knows nothing, and we could only presume that Wallace could read Deckard’s mind somehow to find this out.(6) But threatening him with physical torture seems a little on-the-nose considering Wallace, a bioengineering genius, has apparently been planning Deckard’s capture for decades. (Turns out that Wallace is not just blind, but a bit short-sighted.) I mean, if Joe K can so easily find the source of his memory of the toy horse, why couldn’t the thousands of other Replicants with the same memory implant be used to get the same information? (Or does each of the millions of Replicants have customized memories?) Or maybe Wallace could just read Joe K’s mind or something.
I really don’t know what to say about the character of Wallace except that it was a very unsophisticated rendering of a corporate bad guy. I think most corporate CEO’s are unlikely to be sitting around Zen reflecting pools meditating on their own immoral actions. (They’re more likely to be out sexually harassing female employees.) In the original Blade Runner, Tyrell was in bed cosying up to his stock reports. To me, that seems like a far more plausible scenario for a CEO.
“Death? Well, I’m afraid that’s a little out of my jurisdiction…”
— Joe Turkel (Dr. Eldon Tyrell), Blade Runner
In any case, whatever pain Wallace promised Deckard after he refused the ‘new’ Rachel could only be guessed at, but I think it unlikely that they would have had to leave the Wallace Corp Building in order to inflict it, conveniently giving Joe K the opportunity to attempt a rescue (a small quibble, I know), which leads us to the confusing climactic fight scene in the car on the breakwater. To 
be honest, I had a hard time trying to figure out who to cheer for here. Wallace promised a realistic prospect of the Replicants gaining the ability to breed as humans. And yet, the ‘child’ (in actual fact a full grown woman played with quirky effectiveness by Carla Juri) was being withheld from him because of the life she would lead as Wallace’s guinea pig. But she’s lived her entire life alone in an isolation chamber with no prospect of human contact, where she would presumably die along with all possibility of the replicants gaining their biological freedom. I couldn’t help wonder what this ‘child’ would have wanted if give the opportunity to speak for herself, but she was never asked. (I’m guessing this will happen in BR 2050.
Personally, I found this rather predictable climactic scene rather troubling. I have to say that this was by far the saddest moment in the film for me. To see Harrison Ford trapped inside that car at the end, a frightened helpless old man unable to save himself, waiting to be rescued. If there was a moment in this unnecessarily long film where Deckard needed to save the day, that was it. But, unfortunately, that moment too was (say it with me) robbed of it’s payoff.
“Nothing’s worse than having an itch you can never scratch.”
— Brion James (Leon), Blade Runner
There were more than few other things that I found ultimately unsatisfying in BR 2049, but I suppose they could all be chalked up to my overblown expectations. Much has been made of the Production Design from the first film and there is ample reference to this in BR2049, but the imagery seemed to have a far less iconic feel to it. The updated digital universe that was created by Production Designer Dennis Gassner and Cinematographer Roger Deakins, 
along with the visual effects crew, seemed less convincing somehow, despite the cartoonish architecture of the original film. To be fair, the Production Design for BR2019 has been copied by hundreds of films, television shows and music videos, so it many have been impossible to tease anything original from the concept. But, oddly, there were certain iconic scenes created for the BR2049 trailer that I don’t remember being in the movie itself. (I’m thinking of Deckard pointing his gun at Joe K (matching BR 2019) and the sunrise scene at the breakwater used as a banner for the trailers.)
I have to say it has been a long time since a movie’s musical score (created by Has Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch) annoyed me as much as this one did. Not that there was anything wrong with it, per se, it just seemed to exist only to show off how far Dolby’s audio technology has come since the original film. To take each of the most tender moments of the movie and hammer the emotion home with a wrecking ball was heavy handed and ultimately unnecessary. I do understand that music, if done right, can amplify the emotion of a scene, but there has to be emotion there to amplify. Trying to amplify non-existent emotions using the soundtrack is doomed to failure. But, there was no emotional connection and hence, the over-loud soundtrack was robbed of any intended payoff.
There were so many things missing from Blade Runner 2049 that would have made the film a much different experience. I missed the Vangelis score, which has become inextricably linked to the original film, but which we only get faint hints of in BR 2049. I missed the multicultural claustrophobia of the streets. I missed the cartoonish ‘Heavy Metal’ architecture of Jean Giraud(Moebius). I missed the greasy, glossy feel of the rain. I missed the ‘film noir’ atmosphere. I missed the Replicant’s visceral fight for survival, especially Rutger Hauer’s gravitas and humour. But most of all, I missed the emotional impact of the Replicant’s struggle for meaning in their short lives, something that was almost entirely absent in BR2049. For me, by the end of BR2049, it felt like the Replicants were defeated, their struggle lost and meaningless.
But I would have forgiven all those criticisms if the movie had just not been so…damn…long. The simple answer to most of the criticism that the story was thin has to be attributed to the almost three hour runtime, once you factor previews and end credits into the mix. There was even a point where I was counting the yawns that surrounded me in the theatre. It’s not that I don’t believe there was a good story there. Buried inside BR 2049, there is a really good one-hour-and-forty-five-minute movie disguised as a two-hour-and-forty-five-minute endurance test. Joe Walker, the film’s editor, is no slouch when it comes to deliberate suspenseful pacing. (As evidenced by his work on Arrival, Sicario, and 12 Years a Slave.) So, with all respect to Mr. Walker, what the entire enterprise needed was a basic sense of urgency. There seemed to a lot of dwelling on long scenes not directed toward the resolution of the plot. Though enjoyable, a lot of what happened with Joi (Joe’s lover?), seemed unnecessary. The scenes with Gaff (played by Edward James Olmos without his creepy contact lenses) were fair game, I suppose, but it would have been more satisfying to have him actually play a part in the resolution of the story, rather than have him appear only for the sake of continuity. Investigating the remains of Rachel’s (7) file fragments was visually interesting but hardly worth the expense of the enormous set that was built for the purpose. The endless (and ultimately fruitless) search for the child could have been told in just a few scenes. And, like the shark in ‘Jaws’, the less seen of Wallace, the more frightening he would have been.
“I’ve done questionable things…”
— Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty), Blade Runner
I’m certainly not saying that ‘Blade Runner 2049’ was a bad movie. As a stand-alone project, it’s a really good film. It just wasn’t a very satisfying movie emotionally. I find it hard to believe that this is the fault of the Director (Denis Villeneuve), though he has to ultimately take responsibility for it. His previous films, ‘Incendies’ and ‘Arrival’, had an emotional punch that I am still trying to process. Expectations aside, I wanted to feel that punch with BR2049, and I would have gladly forgiven a few technical flaws in favour of the genuine emotion of Roy Batty’s death scene, or Zora (the perfect ideal of a Replicant as played by Joanna Cassidy) and her visceral fight for survival. As a filmmaker, this is one of the first projects that Mr. Villeneuve hasn’t developed himself (and his first major film with a male protagonist), and it unfortunately shows. I’m not even suggesting that there might have been some corporate interference in the film making process itself. But, unlike its predecessor, this film had a huge production budget, (more than $150 million.) You can’t help but feel that, with so much is at stake, it makes the process more cautious than it needs to be. Blade Runner 2049 unfortunately seems to be another film where the jinx of sequels holds, in spite of the endless talent and money involved in its making. Or perhaps because of it.
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(1 – Incidentally, Alan Nourse’s book is a really interesting read, given the current state of America’s health care system.)
(2 – As evidenced by the two overindulgent and confusing Alien prequels he has produced in the past few years.)
(3 – I’m guessing this a reference to Kafka’s Joseph K, but there was also a reference to a Vietnam-era prostitute’s come-on for G.I. Joe in the painfully sexist digital billboard of Joi. (What, no 200 foot tall nude male digital partners in the future?) Or it could just all mean nothing at all. Who knows, really?)
(4 – This scene was lifted from an early draft of Hampton Fancher’s screenplay for BR2019.)
(5 – So, let me get this straight: In a world of AI and flying cars, Atari and Pan Am still exist, but all evidence of the Tyrell Corporation, the company that developed artificial organic minds, has been wiped out?)
(6 – All corporate CEO’s have ‘Tony Stark’-like superpowers, don’t you know? Which is why, of course, so many of them are white males.)
(7 – BTW, didn’t they say at one point that they only had a small fragment of Rachael’s memory, and yet they were able to recreate her for Deckard (almost) perfectly? Huh?)
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