Blade Runner 2049: A Dystopian Story
ICN- Baran Abednia: ‘To be, or not to be: that’s the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?’
Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
Blade Runner 2049, a 2017 American neo-noir science fiction film, is directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. It is a sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner which was directed by Ridely Scott, and stars Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, with Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Lennie James, Dave Bautista, and Jared Leto in supporting roles. Ford and Edward James Olmos repeat their roles from the original film. Set thirty years after the first film, Gosling plays K, a blade runner who “uncovers a secret that threatens to break a war between humans and replicants.” Despite positive reviews, the film was a box office disappointment, grossing just $92 million in North America and $259 million worldwide.
The movie received five nominations at the 90th Academy Awards, winning Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. It received eight nominations at the 71st British Academy Film Awards, including Best Director, winning Best Cinematography and Best Special Visual Effects.
In November 2014 Scott said that he would not direct the film and would instead produce. Interviewed at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, director Villeneuve said the setting would again be in Los Angeles, and the Earth's atmosphere would be different: "The climate has gone berserk [which means extremely out of control]– the ocean, the rain, the snow is all toxic." It was later announced that Scott would be executive producer.
Principal photography took place between July and November 2016, mainly at Korda Studios and Origo Studios in Budapest, Hungary. For the casino scenes, the old Stock Exchange Palace in Budapest's Liberty Square served as a filming location.
Figure 2The Stock Exchange Palace in Budapest was used as a filming location
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 87% based on 350 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Visually stunning and narratively satisfying, Blade Runner 2049 deepens and expands its predecessor's story while standing as an impressive filmmaking achievement in its own right."
Metacritic, another review website, gave the film a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 54 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
The Guardian, praising the production design and its cinematography, wrote: "It just has to be experienced on the biggest screen possible. Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic."
A. O. Scott of The New York Times described the film as "a carefully engineered narrative puzzle" that "tries both to honor the original and to slip free of its considerable shadow", and mostly succeeds. However, he described Blade Runner 2049 as "a more docile, less rebellious 'improvement'" as well as the cinematography and visual effects as "zones of strangeness that occasionally rise to the level of sublimity".
Graeme Virtue, in The Guardian stated that the film's "impact is never at the expense of visual comprehension. Characters may crash through walls but it is never unclear where those walls are in relation to the mayhem. These occasional jolts of intensity do not snap us out of the film's hypnotic spell, which remains persuasive enough to make the 163-minute duration feel like something to luxuriate in rather than an endurance test."
Michael O'Sullivan of The Washington Post emphasized on the depiction of the villain-aspects of the industrialist played by Jared Leto who stated: "In the world of 2049, there are now two kinds of replicants, in addition to people: the old, rogue versions, and a newer, more subservient variety designed by a godlike industrialist (Jared Leto portraying Wallace), who refers to his products, tellingly, as good and bad 'angels’."
The Economist was more critical of the film, calling it a "bombastic sequel" and noting its "thin and threadbare" storyline, which was "riddled with holes", and the "little more than a cameo" appearance of Ford, despite his being used heavily in the film's promotion.
Kevin Maher of The Times gave it three of five stars, claiming "a more devastatingly beautiful blockbuster has yet to be made", but concluding that the plot was lackluster.
The first lines of this article from Hamlet are intentionally put in order to give hints about the things I want to present to my readers in the following:
Blade Runner 2049, like many other sci-fi movies, has a narrative which takes into account both the concepts of mortality and death and the concept of identity in a post-apocalyptic world as their focal themes. It is a story that takes us so far as to show the extent to which humans have lost their identity or feel dramatically confused about it that do not know or have forgotten how to be a human or an individual to which, in my view, the existence of the replicants (androids) has provided a proper, indirect binary opposition in order to stress this confusion: a human/replicant or human/humanoid binary. The question that the main character, K. played by Ryan Gossling, who as a replicant cop is in charge of hunting down certain types of androids (the early-model ones) and retiring (killing) them, would later deal with is whether he belongs to a human mother or a replicant; in other words, where he comes from turns into a fundamental issue for the question of identity. In this regard, the lengthy quest of this hero begins when he comes across a photo of a humanoid (another word for replicant) that had been pregnant with a child and had died while getting a C-section. An overwhelming sense of shock, sympathy, and confusion develops in him and he starts to cast doubt on his duty to kill the child. The reason to eliminate that child is because, as warned by his boss (played by Robin Wright), nobody should be informed of that his/her existence, given the astonishing ability of a replicant to give birth or reproduce, and if that happens, there might be no way to contain replicants. Furthermore, for the question of mortality and death, we see that the police are profoundly determined to track down the early models of replicants not because they are outdated but since they have “open-ended lifespans” and immortality is not to be trusted as ever. According to what the New Yorker stated, “Such is the premise of Denis Villeneuve’s ambitious sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which came out in 1982 and was set, with startling powers of premonition, in 2019. That was the future back then. How’s it looking now?”
In this story, early-model replicants have a community of their own who are in favor of liberty and oppose the rules which are set against them; the ones considered by the police department as potentially dangerous that should be retired (killed). Therefore, K. during a set of events finds himself really perplexed about whether killing them is right or not. He goes on to develop a sense of sympathy and belonging to them. We see the replicants are shown to be compassionate about one another and have this strong solidarity while humans are shown to lack such empathy and are depicted as cold, unkind beings. In this respect, with a deeper look, we can say there is a force on the audience to re-evaluate the concept of humanity and consider what it really means to be human in such a technology-driven world. The New Yorker wrote:
In “Blade Runner 2049,” the land is the color of a corpse, and the skies are no better. The only tree is sapless and dead, and the only farmer is harvesting weevils for protein.
The film runs slowly for nearly three hours so it requires the audience to be patient and to pay attention to the tiny clues which appear gradually on the way for K. to discover his past. It is also worth mentioning that K must respond to certain words and phrases: “Cells,” “Interlinked,” “A Tall White Fountain Played” which are a part of “Post-Trauma Baseline Test”. After K. fails to answer a question in this test given by a computer, the story continues against a backdrop of a strong fear to get caught or killed and it is from this part that the hidden excitement of the movie reveals itself. K.’s confusion has led him to investigate not only historical crimes but his own potential presence in the labyrinth of the past. The gloomy, sad part of his private life is uncovered for the audience from the very beginning when we see him with a virtual girlfriend, called Joi, who is dazzling but can be sadly turned off or removed at the press of a button, which shows us how much he is drowned in his loneliness. He with his calm attitude and silent gestures drives hard into this post-revolutionary world and grasps desperately at even digital images for love and human-like feelings. Yet such love is not felt real and normal; for example in one early romantic scene K. gets a voice mail that freezes Joi, so “love is deleted and the Blade Runner gets back to work. The future can’t wait”, the New Yorker commented.
K’s journey, as an android, is pictured like a human’s: He goes wherever his curiosity leads him and experiences a lot of pain to discover a purpose for himself and an identity. He is after a way to make his actions right, making sense of his life; his slow change from a trained killer to an individual who instead discovers finally that there’s something out there worth fighting for. He helps Deckard find his daughter in the end and that takes us to the controversial concept of the family nowadays. We can infer from the conclusion that the final solace everyone could feel would be at home with their family which is also one of the meanings of where you come from (Deckard reaching out to his daughter and through that K. also feels relieved) and it is a serious topical issue and its loss is among the problems that the post-modern world has caused for us. Another underlying point of this whole journey, in my opinion, is the loss of individuality in such a technology-stricken world. The hardship that the human race is experiencing now to find a goal to look forward to and hope for, along with the loss of the meaning of family, can be considered as the most central themes which the movie focuses on.
Accordingly, the serious questions about artificial intelligence-Could the feelings familiar to mankind exist in the replicants? Could an operating system grow a soul?—become worthy of attention in the movie. These questions which have been long discussed since the early beginners in this genre about replicants such as in Ridely Scott’s Alien, have gained a high, broad significance as one of the serious concerns in the circles of some filmmakers. Where is this science taking us and what for? How much can we rely on AI (Artificial Intelligence)? What is the real purpose behind it? Blade Runner explores such questions by creating scenes which show the consequences of huge biomedical power over the individual– especially regarding replicants' implanted memories.
Corporate power which has engineered human genetics to excess for the purpose of producing “synthetic humans” or “replicants” plays a significant role in this dystopian world. This is slavery in its excessive consumption and maltreatment of humankind that can be traced back to the old story of Frankenstein where human showed great weakness and failed to overcome his thirst for power resulting in a catastrophe he could never imagine like the world we see in the movie. The tension between past, present and future is often mirrored in post-apocalyptic, dystopian stories. The present of the Blade Runner is our future in 2049 and its past is our present. It can be asked, what have we done to this planet and to each other? And what are we going to do with this mess? Is it likely that humans will doom this planet to its demise like the way it is pictured in this movie?
