I Can't Possibly Be Wrong All the Time

This is not necessarily going to be a full review of the movie Blade Runner 2049.

Oh, I’ll give my official thumbs up or thumbs down at the end of this article- or maybe before – but there are interesting ideas in the movie that I think are worthy of a blog post or two. Will this blog post be worthy of your attention? As usual, I make no promises.

I’m assuming that you’ve already seen the movie, or are willing to have some plot points spoiled. I might administer a Voight-Kampff test as well. (I won’t. Or will I?)

Replicating the Irreplicable

Despite how the title of this post might be interpreted, I’m not implying that Blade Runner shouldn’t have gone sans sequel, a one-and-only. I enjoyed the original with Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, and even if I don’t consider it a cinematic masterpiece, it’s certainly an influential film and solid science fiction. Blade Runner 2049 is a worthy successor.

Blade Runner 2049 is a more complicated film, and brought multiple ideas to the table, whereas I consider the original more straightforward, a story of replicants desperately trying to extend their lives and a human (I’m not in the camp of those who assert that Deckard is a replicant) trying to prevent that from happening.

Blade Runner would have been just an interesting and stylistic future-noir science fiction if not for the transcendent ending where replicant Roy Batty opts to spend the last few seconds of his abbreviated time on Earth by saving his enemy Deckard’s life, so Roy could peacefully expire with someone alongside him. Because dying alone is dreadful.

Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t quite hit the same emotional moment as Roy Batty quietly chatting with Deckard, whom he had been trying to kill minutes before on a rainy Los Angeles rooftop. But I think the movie does try and nearly succeeds early on.

Part of the success of the Roy Batty ending in Blade Runner was in the unexpectedness. Deckard and Batty were both trying to kill one another in a creepy old abandoned urban mansion. I expected Deckard to somehow get the drop on the homicidal replicant and a satisfactory B-movie ending would be had. I did not expect what actually happened.

I went into Blade Runner 2049 with very little advance knowledge, but I hadn’t expected that Ryan Gosling’s character K, or Joe as his hologram Joi names midway through the movie, would be a replicant. And not some bullshit is-he-or-isn’t-he that we’re stuck with in regards to Deckard. (He isn’t. He just isn’t.)

But that wasn’t the surprise I’m talking about, the unexpected twist that engagingly set up the spine of the movie.

It was the discovery that Rachael Tyrell from the 1982 Blade Runner had died giving birth. Emphasis on giving birth.

Baby Replicants? Or Just Babies?

The movie didn’t have to make a big deal about this, since this was obviously a big deal with big idea implications. Was Rachael and Deckard’s child a human, a replicant, or something else? (Let’s assume Deckard was the father.)

The biology of replicants is deliberately vague in these films. Really, almost all of the details of what a replicant is is vague. It’s clear that they’re manufactured humans, and by virtue of their manufactured origin are not granted the rights of personhood. Joe at one point brings up the idea of a soul, something it’s assumed that a replicant lacks, but the human beings on display in either movie aren’t really much of an argument for the existence of souls in rank-and-file humanity.

But everyone in the movie is shocked with the implication that Rachael could give birth. It’s declared by replicants in the know as a miracle.

The movie wisely avoids getting too metaphysical, and three factions with very practical goals gradually reveal themselves.

• The conversative faction – represented by Robin Wright’s police chief “Madame” (she’s credited as Lt. Joshi, but I don’t recall anyone calling her anything but Madame.)
  Our protagonist Joe is ordered by Madame to track down and retire the now-adult offspring of Rachael and Deckard. Simply to short-circuit the chaos that would ensue otherwise if this impossible person went public.
• The entrepreneurial faction – represented by Jared Leto’s creepy Niander Wallace and his dangerous right hand replicant Luv.
  Wallace’s interest in replicant replication is entirely motivated by business productivity. Rather than growing replicants in labs, he’d rather breed them the old fashioned way. Wallace early in the movie has a speech about the queasiness of humanity abandoning human slaves in favor of non-human labor. It seems he’s trying to get back to basics in more ways than one.
• The revolutionary/evolutionary faction – represented by one-eyed replicant Freysa (played by Hiam Abbas.)
  This group makes its move rather late in the movie, but are more or less a background constant, with Dave Bautista’s protein farming replicant Sapper Morton starting off the plotline with his ‘retirement’ leading to the discovery of Rachael’s remains, a photo of Freysa holding Rachael and Deckard’s child, and the convenient tree-inscribed date of the child’s birth (and date of Rachael’s sad passing.)

The interplay between these groups’ goals are somewhat intertwined and at times contradictory. Madame’s fear that the existence of a naturally born replicant offspring would lead to chaos is in sync with the replicant revolutionaries’ belief that the child is proof that they can be more than biological machines. But Wallace’s fundamental business plan rests on the assumption that replicant offspring are not humans, just differently-manufactured replicants.

It seems like both things can’t be true: the child can’t be both the savior of replicants and the key to either a new form of slavery or a return to an old form of slavery. Unless it can. I mean, it depends who wins.

The movie doesn’t delve deeply into these implications, which I don’t mind. The best science fiction establishes its core speculative tenets and then chugs along, allowing the reader/viewer to derive meaning and complexity. Not having one’s hand held allows for some lateral thinking.

For example, I’ve recently come around to thinking that Madame’s fears might be more in reaction to Wallace’s plans than from the societal upending goals of the revolutionary faction led by Freysa. Madame might want to bury any proof of successful replicant reproduction to prevent inevitable massive forced-breeding slave labor manufacturing. That it’s better to have a sterile replicant workforce than human slaves.

The Girl in the Bubble

Although I enjoyed the thoughtful premise with the understated implications, laid out early and with appropriate stakes, I don’t know if I was entirely satisfied with the examination. Most of the movie worked on the red herring that Joe was the child of Rachael and Deckard. This seemed implausible for various reasons, mostly because Joe is a replicant.

It’s established that the contemporary replicants have serial numbers visible on the sclera of their right eye (which is why Freysa is sporting a rather Odin-like aspect.) I would be very surprised if as a child, K was born with a convenient serial number. In theory, K was no different than other Nexus 8 and later replicants. (I’m assuming Rachael was a Nexus 7, since she was a new model without the limited lifespan – Deckard in Blade Runner was busy tracking down Nexus 6 rogues, at that time the latest model.)

K, or Joe as I’ve also been calling him, appears to have obedience instincts that were bred into the contemporary models. Madame at times comes short of giving him an order to force his compliance, and that implies that this has been done in the past. Rachael’s child wouldn’t have had this Wallace corporation conditioning since the conditioning did not exist at the time.

But Joe eventually realizes the truth, that he’s not this miracle child despite having some memories of that child’s harsh upbringing in a San Diego orphanage. That can be a topic for some other post, but his research into these memories brought him into contact with Dr. Ana Stelline, a memory creation artist who lives inside of a protected environment, because of her alleged compromised immune system.

Joe deduces that she is actually Rachael’s child. During the movie, I accepted it – I mean the only other women in the movie were scary Luv and Mackenzie Davis’ Pris-analog Mariette (I had to look up her name… so many people in this movie either had no names, or I missed the introductions. I mean, I know that the medical examiner who gets killed has a name, it’s Coco, but Davis’ sexy replicant? I had no idea.)

So sure, I guess Ana Stelline could be the miracle baby, as a process of elimination.

But because she was in an enclosure and could not interact with the outside world, and spent her time entirely working with holographic features and creations, she might have not been any more real than Joi.

In fact, as far as I’m concerned – Stelline wasn’t Deckard’s child that Joe gave his life to provide  Deckard a reunion with, or even a human. Just a holographic program creating fake memories.

This’ll be my version of the Deckard-is-a-replicant crazy theory. You heard it hear first. (Maybe. I mean, I haven’t really checked.)

Oh! I give Blade Runner 2049 a thumbs up. I liked it roughly as much as the original Blade Runner, but for different reasons. Your mileage may vary. That’s cool.

Hey, if you’re a replicant, don’t leave a comment.

I’ll know.

---

(Comments are always welcome. Super welcome! After suffering through this giant pile of words, you might not be that interested in any other of my movie-based posts, but I promise most are not as ponderously long as this one. How could they be? You can find the on my Movies page!)

Images are from 1982’s Blade Runner and the sequel Blade Runner 2049 

I make no claims to the artwork, but some claims to the text. So there. 

© Patrick Sponaugle 2017 Some Rights Reserved