"Blade Runner 2049"

I’ve already seen the Final Cut of Blade Runner so I won’t be covering that, sorry. However, I will be covering how the movie ties to this one.

Ridley Scott’s visually stunning one-of-the-most-talked-about film continues, this time set thirty years later. Fresh off the set of La La Land and Song to Song, Ryan Gosling stars as K, a Replicant blade runner assigned to retire Replicants that have gone rogue. While on assignment, he discovers a military crate buried thirty feet in the ground. The crate carried the skeletal remains of a body. Dun-Dun-DUN! Doing an autopsy, K and his commanding officer, President Claire Underwood, discover that not only was the body once pregnant, but she was also a Replicant. Replicants weren’t designed to give birth. Dun-Dun-DUN! And the body was Rachael’s. Dun-Dun-DUN! So, K sets off on an epic quest to find the child. All the while, he recalls a memory of when he was a child and had a wooden horse. The horse had an inscription, 6-10-21, the same as the inscription on the tree near the burial site. He began to believe that HE was the child. This causes all sorts of problems when Luv, the Replicant henchwoman of the Wallace Corporation, sets after him up to the point where K finally confronts Deckard. In an epic showdown by the sea, K kills the unkillable Luv, and delivers Deckard to his missing child, who works for the Wallace Corporation! Then K dies from his wounds in the epic showdown. Right there in the snow.

K had a companion throughout the movie. Joi was a hologram, created by the Wallace Corporation as whoever you want her to be. So K had her as a female companion and treated her like a girlfriend. She even began to have feelings for K. I kinda want to know how weird it was for Ryan to be making out with an invisible woman, especially in that scene that had the weirdest threesome ever put to film. The movie pulls a few heartstrings when Joi is tragically killed by Luv when she crushes K’s emanator, but not before Joi blurts out “I love you.” But it’s okay because he dies anyway.

Why was Harrison Ford billed as a costar when he shows up in the final hour of the film? This isn’t the first time a film has done this. I’ll get to that another time. It would make much more sense for him to be a surprise reveal, or don’t even mention him in the trailers. You build surprises and tension that way.

What is the baseline test? The featurette on the DVD, the way I understood it, said it was like a recalibrating system/psychological test to see how a job affects the blade runner. The questions seem similar to the Voight-Kampff test in the first movie, which I still have no idea what that was. I mean how do you answer that? Is a human supposed to get confused about how the contents of the questions correlate? “You’re reading a magazine and you come across a full-page nude photo of a girl. Suddenly there’s a wasp crawling on your arm”—Woah! Stop right there! Where in the hell did that come from? What do those two sentences have in common? Being basically a robot, Replicants should have been able to ignore the context of the sentences then, right? Same thing with the baseline test. “When you’re not on duty, do they keep you in a little box? Cells!” “Cells!” "Why don’t you say interlinked three times?” “Interlinked. Interlinked. Interlinked.” A human would have probably been flustered by that, right?

In a cutaway of K’s flying car, we see a hologram of the Atari logo projected on the side of a building. Why is Atari still relevant in 2049? I understand that Atari would have been relevant in 2019 since the first movie was released in 1982. Atari, Inc. went defunct in 1984 but then was bought by Jack Tramiel, who then started Atari Corporation. Then that went defunct in 1996, and was sold to JTS Corporation but went bankrupt in 1999. Parts were also sold to Hasbro Interactive, which started the Atari Interactive, and, as of today, it’s still going strong. Ok, I see.

Then there is the question of how was Rachael was able to give birth. When we were first introduced to Rachael, she was a new breed of Replicant, far beyond Nexus 6. I suspect she was designed to be the most human possible, which included her ability to reproduce. Or it could have been an error in the math, and she glitched. They kind of left that open to interpretation I think.

I never caught on whether or not Deckard was a Replicant too. Maybe it was the version I watched. I couldn’t see how it was possible that Deckard was a Replicant. He had one trippy dream about unicorns and that was that. And Edward James Olmos’ deep comment didn’t spark anything, even as it echoed in the end. But this movie played with that a lot more, especially when K talks to Edward James Olmos. He told K that Deckard was retired, and put an origami sheep on the table. But when we see Deckard at last, no, he’s not a Replicant. He would have been dead at least 26 years prior.

How stupid has an interstellar company, like Wallace, got to be that the person they’re looking for was right in their own offices? She is a dream maker for the company, building authentic memories for the Replicants. This sort of explains how her own memory got into K’s mind in the first place. But a troubled girl, with no past, has a million fake diseases, and needs to be kept in a CGI box didn’t raise a few eyebrows? This and the rebellion that showed up the last minute, are these to set up a third sequel? Should we be on the lookout for Blade Runner 2052? Will there be a new blade runner to lead the rebellion now that K is dead? Will Deckard become the new leader?

There is one other thing that didn’t sit well with me. While Deckard was captured, Jared Leto made him a new Rachael to persuade him to give up the hidden rebel base; they even brought back Sean Young, which is an amazing technological achievement considering that she looked exactly how we last saw her, with the exception of the plot twisting eye color. Then they kill her. Deckard turned away, but we saw the whole damn thing. I didn’t need to see that. The sound bite will do just fine.

I felt the story this time around was much more compelling than the first, despite the nearly three-hour run time. I thought the story arc overall was well done. I felt I could follow along okay and not get lost. Except when the movie can’t decide what time of the year it is. It was either raining or snowing. Sometimes it would rain then change to snow midscene. I really liked the subplot that had both us and K believe that K was the child. It sounds frustrating at first when we find out he’s not, but I feel it was a pretty good twist for us all.

I don’t really like sequels that take too long to develop. I believe after five years no one really cares. But I think the movie did a pretty good job recapturing the magic that captivated us 35 years ago. However, if there is going to be a third sequel, I would like it to happen soon.

One more thing, I didn't know what Galatian's Syndrome was, so I went searching. I really can't explain it because I'm trying to understand it myself. Here is a link to an article explaining the syndrome.

Click to view the image URL.

I hope you liked this. Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment about what you thought or if you want to recommend a movie for me to review if you can. I'm still trying to navigate the blog site, so I hope everything is set up properly. Thank you for reading. I'll return next week with another movie. See you then.

Here are some links to some fun videos involving the Blade Runner franchise.
CinemaSins – Everything Wrong with Blade Runner in 17 Minutes or Less
CinemaSins - Everything Wrong with Blade Runner 2049
Screen Junkies - Honest Trailers - Blade Runner
How It Should Have Ended - Blade Runner Comedy Recap (HISHE Dubs)

Released On: October 6, 2017
Rating: R
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Jared Leto
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87% Certified Fresh
IMDb Score: 8.1/10

Awards
Academy Awards

• Best Cinematography Roger Deakins - Winner
• Best Production Design Dennis Gassner & Alessandra Querzola - Nominated
• Best Sound Editing Mark Mangini & Theo Green - Nominated
• Best Sound Mixing Ron Bartlett, Doug Hemphill & Mac Ruth - Nominated
• Best Visual Effects John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer, Paul Lambert & Richard R. Hoover - Winner

(Click here to view more awards for "Blade Runner 2049")