Set in 2049 Los Angeles, the much-anticipated sequel to Blade Runneris set very much in the same cyberpunk scenario as the original, though its world of the future seems even more blighted than it had in the original, partly because other damaging events have occurred since the 2019 setting of the original film, including a general “collapse of ecosystems” in the 2020s[1]. These events have, among other things, led to the downfall of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, its former role as the producer of the replicants who are so centrally to the world of the film having now been assumedby the Wallace Corporation, headed by the brilliant Niander Wallace (played with creepy menace by Jared Leto). Wallace is a major corporate power: its products are everywhere, though it is most notable as the producer of a new generation (the Nexus-9) of more compliant replicants. Wallace himself, though, is not satisfied with his company’s current role. Essentially a mad scientist, Wallace seeks even greater power, which is not necessarily good news for the world of the future. Meanwhile, remnants of the earlier Tyrell replicants are still on the loose (and still rebellious), which means that there is still plenty of work for blade runners (who are essentially bounty hunters who track down rebellious replicants) to do.
Blade Runner 2049 and Blade Runner
Blade Runner was a major achievement in the production of science fiction visuals that has exercised a powerful influence on science fiction films ever since—especially on the visual representation of future cities. The soundtrack and sound design of Blade Runner have also been highly influential, but it is safe to say that Blade Runner 2049 goes well beyond Blade Runner in both sound and visuals, making for an absorptive viewing experience that led reviewer Peter Bradshaw to headline his five-star review by calling the film “a gigantic spectacle of pure hallucinatory craziness.” Within the review, Bradshaw notes that the film’s “mind-boggling, cortex-wobbling, craniofacial-splintering images are there to trigger awe or even a kind of ecstatic despair at the idea of a post-human future, and what it means to imagine the wreck of our current form of homo sapiens.”
Of course, many of these same things might have been said about Blade Runner itself back in 1982, and (despite the effective use of improved technologies) Blade Runner 2049 remains very much in the spirit of Blade Runner in this sense. The sequel also resembles the original in that both are science fiction tales that draw extensively upon the energies of film noir, the cycle of dark, generally crime-oriented, films that was a major phenomenon in American film of the 1940s and 1950s. Film noir had a distinctive black-and-white visual style (partly inspired by German Expressionism), which was then revived, along with the dark subject matter, in a new cycle of “neo-noir” films beginning in the 1960s and reaching fill fruition in the 1980s and 1990s. The original Blade Runner was a key example of neo-noir film, demonstrating the versatility of noir style and subject matter by extending it into a future science fictional world. Blade Runner 2049 does much the same, though the noir elements in Blade Runner 2049 often read more like a reference to Blade Runner than to film noir in general, something that is also enhanced by numerous visual and musical cues that tie the two films directly together. In terms of subject matter, both film noir and neo-noir often focus on detectives who attempt to solve specific crimes but then uncover far bigger problems and conspiracies than they had originally envisioned. In addition, many noir films focus on characters who might be described as “lost” men—spiritually empty men who, for one reason or another, find themselves in situations beyond their control and in which they cannot function normally. To an extent, Blade Runner belongs to both detective noir and lost-man noir, as does Blade Runner 2049, though the principal blade runner of the latter film, “K” (Ryan Gosling), is even more of a lost man than Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in the original film had been. K (who also eventually begins to use the name “Joe” so that he will seem more like a real person) is a Nexus-9 replicant who is charged with the task of hunting down and “retiring” the remaining fugitive replicants produced by Tyrell. It is a task at which he seems very good, as we can see when he takes down Sapper Morton (played by Dave Bautista), a powerful replicant, in the opening scene (though we later learn that Morton might have let himself be killed so that he could not divulge certain key secrets). Meanwhile, Gosling seems very well suited to the task of playing K, given his pre-existing credentials playing lost-man characters in earlier neo-noir films, including Drive (2011) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012).
Blade Runner 2049 addresses many of the same issues as its predecessor, continuing the earlier film’s focus on the central question of what it means to be human—as well as on the process through which certain groups might be judged to be less than human because other groups might profit from that judgment. Villeneuve’s film also takes a number of cues from its illustrious predecessor in both its visuals and its sound, though it should be said that (partly as a simple matter of improvements in technology)
Blade Runner 2049, Humanity, and Intelligence
In that opening scene, K also uncovers evidence that at least one earlier replicant had died while giving birth (that replicant mother will turn out to be Rachael from Blade Runner, while Deckard will turn out to be the father of her baby). This discovery that a replicant had given birth (something that had been considered impossible) then drives the remainder of the plot. After all, this discovery provokes a crisis that strikes at the very heart of human-replicant relations in this future society. The official powers that be, represented in the film by the LAPD (for whom K works), are dedicated to the proposition that replicants must never be allowed to develop the ability to reproduce, lest they completely escape the control of human beings, who would lose the ability to engineer them as they see fit. On the other hand, the powerful Wallace is actually devoted to developing replicants that can reproduce, putting him at odds with the official authorities. Even with the advanced technology at his disposal, replicants are difficult and expensive to produce, so he can only produce so many. Granted, Wallace can produce millions of replicants, but he dreams of a day when self-reproducing replicants (over whom he still thinks he can maintain control) can number in the trillions. Given that replicants are primarily used in the arduous and dangerous task of colonizing other planets, this explosion in the replicant population would allow earth to own the stars, rather than just the handful of planets they have colonized so far—though Wallace clearly envisions himself (not just humanity in general) as dominating the universe via the replicants.
Of course, Wallace, like most mad scientists, has not fully thought through the potential consequences of his project of creating self-replicating replicants, and the replicants themselves clearly believe that the ability to reproduce would lead to their liberation from domination by Wallace or any other humans. Meanwhile, the sympathies of this film are generally with the replicants, not only because K is so firmly installed as the film’s point-of-view character, but also because the replicants are so clearly treated as an unfairly oppressed and exploited minority. Most obviously—and even more clearly than in the original Blade Runner—the replicants of this film function as allegorical stand-ins for human slaves. Like slaves (and like the replicants of Blade Runner), the replicants of Blade Runner 2049 are not free individuals but property, whose only function is to provide cheap labor to their owners—not only in dangerous tasks related to the colonization of space, but also for specific tasks such as those performed by the “pleasure models” designed to do sex work. Meanwhile, the issue of replicant reproduction that is highlighted in Blade Runner 2049 recalls the way in which slaves were often used as breeding stock: human slaves (especially female ones) were often valued, not just for their own labor, but for their abilityboth to provide sexual pleasure to their owners and to produce new slaves, which would then be valuable commodities in their own right.
In Blade Runner 2049,the parallel between the replicants and slaves is made quite explicit[2]. Early in the film, Wallace declares that the replicants are needed because “the world lost its stomach for slavery” of the conventional kind. Then, near the end of the film, Freysa (Hiam Abbass), apparently the leader (or at least a leader) of an underground replicant resistance movement, declares to K that the baby that was born to a replicant proves that “we are more than just slaves. If a baby can come from one of us, we are our own masters.”[3] Given the association of the plight of the replicants with slavery, it is tempting to sympathize with this rebel underground, though this element of the film is not well developed, leaving open the possibility that the resistance might have its own sinister designs on power.
Phillip Wegner, in fact, reads this movement in just this way, arguing that the movement’s devotion to “freeing” the replicants would leave unaddressed many of the other evident problems of this future world, such as all those orphaned human children employed in forced labor in the grim techno-Dickensian orphanage visited by K in the course of his investigations, which provides some of the most clearly dystopian imagery in the entire film. One the other hand, one might note the argument by Guynes that, despite its seemingly dystopian texture, Blade Runner 2049 also contains two projects that might be regarded as utopian: Wallace’s vision of colonizing the stars, and Freysa’s vision of liberating the replicants. For Guynes, Wallace’s project is “The Bad Thing,” while the replicant revolution is presented as more positive—all the more so in that it is a collective action that does not appear to need the individual heroism of K in order to succeed (147).
Guynes might have a point, but the film still centers very much on K, and Blade Runner 2049 is ultimately interested in these large-scale political and social problems mostly to provide background for its real interest, which is the existential crisis undergone by K as he uncovers the evidence of the replicant birth, then begins to suspect that he himself is the very special replicant whose mother was also a replicant, becoming a sort of chosen one who might ultimately be a key to replicant liberation[4]. This possibility brings about something of a crisis for K: programmed for obedience to the human powers that be, he has no real desire to lead a replicant rebellion, despite his own status as a replicant. Indeed, once K discovers the real identity of the naturally-born replicant, he opts not to reveal this information either to the resistance movement or to Wallace—and certainly not to the police. Instead, he (and Villeneuve) opts for the sentimental solution of reuniting the child with her father, who will presumably help her to keep her identity a secret so that she cannot be exploited by either the authorities or the rebel replicants.
This sentimental ending should come as no surprise. Blade Runner is one of the most beloved films in science fiction history, so its long-awaited sequel comes with built-in sentimental/nostalgic attachments. And, in general, Villeneuve is careful to respect those attachments and to supply a significant amount of fan service in the sequel (most obviously in the return of Harrison Ford as a now-aging Rick Deckard, though this service sometimes potentially reinforces what might be seen as a pessimistic element in Blade Runner 2049. Noting the obvious parallels between the death of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in the rain near the end of Blade Runner and the apparent death of K in the snow near the end of Blade Runner 2049, Wegner identifies an optimistic and forward-looking element in the scene of Batty’s death, as the dove he releases flies upward into a break in the clouds, signaling a possible opening into the future for Deckard and Rachael, and possibly even for the world. In Blade Runner 2049, Wegner notes, there is no such break in the snow, suggesting “a melancholic sense of a dearth of opportunities to intervene in the reigning situation in a way that would fundamentally change its coordinates. Moreover, the father-daughter couple formed at the sequel’s climax also looks in the opposite direction: not towards an unknowable future but rather to an imagined lost past” (141).
In the case of the original Blade Runner, one key possibility hinted at in the film is that Deckard might himself be a replicant, a mystery made more intriguing by the multiple available cuts of the film, some of which appear to support the notion that Deckard is a replicant more than others. Even the principals who were involved in the making of Blade Runner have disagreed on the issue of whether Deckard is a replicant, and the answer to that mystery was one of the things that many fans hoped would be supplied by the sequel. However, Villeneuve was very careful not to provide a definitive answer to this question within his film: while K is unequivocally identified as a replicant, Deckard’s appearance in the sequel leaves open the question of whether he is a replicant or a human[5]. This uncertainty, though, seems highly appropriate, as one of the key issues raised by this film concerns the definition of the human and the question of whether the boundary between humans and replicants is as easy to define as some seem to think—echoing, of course, attempts that were once made to justify slavery by arguing that black Africans were less than fully human.
In Blade Runner 2049, the question of whether or not Deckard is a replicant is replaced by the question of whether or not K is the special replicant who was born to a replicant mother, rather than simply manufactured. Indeed, K spends most of the film trying to track down all the information he can about the replicant baby, in the process eventually discovering that he is not the special child but that the evidence pointing in that direction had been planted as part of an effort to cover the tracks of the real child. In the process, he runs across considerable danger (especially at the hands of Wallace and his minions) and also meets up with the aging Deckard in a postapocalyptic Las Vegas.
Both of the Blade Runner films differ from most films about artificial intelligence in that the replicants of both films are genetically engineered biological lifeforms, rather than mere software or electromechanical devices. It is thus much easier to think of the replicants of this film as human than it might be with something like the lumbering Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet or the disembodied Samantha from Her. Meanwhile, the status of artificial intelligences in Blade Runner is complicated by the fact that not all replicants or other artificial intelligences within the world of the film are created equal. K, for example, does not appear to be property but lives an independent life as a Los Angeles police officer (though he experiences considerable racist prejudice at the hands of the department’s conventional human employees). Though programmed for obedience, he emerges as a relatively independent actor in the course of the film, suggesting that even the Nexus-9 model replicants have the potential to develop a mind of their mind. In fact, K himself is the owner of another apparently artificially intelligent product of the Wallace Corporation in the form of his beautiful holographic companion Joi (Ana de Armas).[6] The existence of different levels of artificial intelligence within Blade Runner 2049 thus complicates the human-replicant opposition set up in Blade Runner, posing an important dilemma: if artificial intelligence might have a variety of different physical manifestations and, for that matter, a wide range of intelligence, where, then, do we draw the line defining the human? Does intelligence define humanity? For that matter, how do we know when something is “intelligent?” If something is intelligent, but not human, what rights does it have?
The recent rise of ChatGPT, widely declared to be artificially intelligent but also widely disparaged as not being intelligent at all, points toward the difficulty of defining intelligence, especially as artificially intelligent machines might well display an intelligence so different from that of humans that humans would not be able to recognize it as intelligence. Such questions are not answered in Blade Runner 2049, but they are addressed in some interesting ways. Here, the role played in the film by Joi is particularly important. Whereas K is a living, physical, genetically engineered being, Joi is merely software, something that is emphasized when, in order to have physical sex with K, she has to do so indirectly via Mariette, a replicant pleasure model (played by Mackenzie Davis), who is clearly meant to evoke Darryl Hannah’s Pris from Blade Runner[7]. Meanwhile, there is a clear hierarchy among the artificial intelligences of this future society. Joi is officially K’s companion, but she is also essentially his property, designed to serve him and programmed to do his bidding. She seems devoted to K, but it is impossible to tell from what we see in the film how authentic her emotions might be. In some ways, her devotion to K seems almost petlike, while it is also possible that she has simply been programmed to act as if she is devoted to K, which raises the question of whether she is even intelligent. Ultimately, Joi’s role in the film (other than the obvious ones of providing some prime fodder for the male gaze and raising some key questions about the representation of women in the film) is to complicate the opposition between conventional humans and replicants, and to suggest that the questions of humanity and intelligence might be more complex than a simple either-or.
Indeed, Blade Runner 2049 ultimately questions the applicability of binary thinking to such complex questions in the first place[8]. Early in the film, Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), K’s supervisor in the LAPD, declares that “The world is built on a wall. It separates kind. Tell either side there’s no wall, you bought a war … or a slaughter.” In short, she sees it as her job to maintain a strict distinction between humans and replicants (or “us” vs. “them”), as figured by a metaphorical wall that is hard not to see as a reference to Donald Trump’s much-emphasized border wall. This sort of distinction, of course, figures replicants as nonhuman Others, and thus provides a justification for the exploitative treatment of replicants by humans. Indeed, it seems likely that Joshi’s horrified reaction to the notion of replicant procreation has to do less with a possible replicant population explosion than with the fact that procreating replicants would seem more human and thus threaten to shatter the wall that Joshi seeks to maintain.
Women in Blade Runner 2049
The largest demographic group that has sometimes been treated as less than human is women, and one problematic aspect of Blade Runner is the main female characters (all of whom are replicants) tend to function as sexual objects of one kind or another. Blade Runner 49 goes beyond its forerunner in this sense, but only to a limited extent. As K’s “boss” and as an apparently effective police official, Joshi would seem to play a role that is almost diametrically opposed to that of Joi, calling attention to the range of roles played by women in this film. For example, both Freysa and Mariette (who turns out to be a member of the resistance only working undercover as a pleasure model) are potentially strong characters, though neither really contributes much to the plot of the film (and the resistance is, as I noted above, problematic to begin with). There are, however, four different important roles played by women in this film (though Joshi is the only one of these women who appears to be a conventional human). The replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoecks), for example, seems to be entirely loyal and obedient to Wallace. However, as opposed to the ultra-feminine, highly compliant Joi, Luv is a formidable and efficient assassin, recalling such cyberpunk women warriors as the “Razorgirl” Molly Millions in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), while also serving as a sort of high-tech version of the film noir femme fatale. Finally, there is Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), the replicant daughter of Deckard and Rachael, who seems frail and passive but is also a brilliant scientist, as well as an artist of sorts, serving as the designer of the memories that are implanted into replicants. It might say something about the ongoing importance of the male fgaze in Hollywood film that only de Armas was propelled to major stardom by this film.
When one looks at these four main female characters, another thing that stands out is that there is absolutely no sense of solidarity between any two of them. Joshi regards Luv as an enemy and would seek to destroy Stelline; Stelline remains in a protective bubble, separated from everyone; Joi is interested only in pleasing K; Luv destroys both Joshi and Joi and would seek to help Wallace exploit Stelline. Not a lot of room for a successful Bechdel test here.
Cyberpunk science fiction, in general, has often been criticized for its representation of women, leading to a range of critiques, that (as Sherryl Vint has summarized them) see cyberpunk as “merely misogynistic, boys’-own-fantasy-escapism” (103). That description would certainly seem to apply to the film’s representation of Joi, who not only serves first and foremost as a sexual object but also sometimes enacts stereotypical feminine roles, such as that of the subservient 1950s-style housewife. Joshi would seem to be the major exception to the representation of women as pure fantasy objects, which perhaps makes it more significant that she is killed by Luv after appearing in only a few minutes of screen time. And, of course, Wallace’s tendency to see female replicants as disposable unless they can potentially serve as breeding stock (under his control) is also highly problematic. Ultimately, Marotta is probably correct when she concludes that Blade Runner 2049 is “a film where women lack communities and suffer from the perpetuation of patriarchal constructs. Unfortunately, with the devolution of cyberpunk in cinematic and televised representations, women become little more than an illusion and are certainly an afterthought” (86).
Conclusion
One way Blade Runner 2049 resembles Blade Runner is that both films leave so much room for further thought about the issues they raise. There is clearly a great deal more territory for exploration here, including the possibility of a strong, independent female character—perhaps even a female blade runner. For example, one might imagine a scenario in which Stelline’s seeming physical frailty was just a ruse, allowing her to bide her time until perhaps assuming the leadership of the replicant resistance, while expanding it to demand justice for all intelligences and all living creatures in this future world? That is pure speculation, of course, but there is clearly room for an additional sequel, though the relative lack of commercial success for Blade Runner 2049 would seem to make another Blade Runner film less likely, at least for the time being. As it is, we have two Blade Runner films and plenty of serious questions posed by them concerning the nature and definition of humanity and of intelligence, questions that will no doubt become all the more relevant as artificial intelligence (of whatever sort) becomes more and more a part of our daily lives.
Works Cited
Bradshaw, Peter. “Blade Runner 2049 Review—A Gigantic Spectacle of Pure Hallucinatory Craziness.” The Guardian, 29 September 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/29/blade-runner-2049-review-ryan-gosling-harrison-ford-denis-villeneuve. Accessed 17 November 2023.
Guynes, Sean. “Dystopia Fatigue Doesn’t Cut It, or, Blade Runner 2049’s Utopian Longings.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 143–48.
Marotta, Melanie. “Cyberpunk Women: Blade Runner 2049 and Its Contemporaries.” Film International, no. 92, pp. 76–88.
Omry, Keren. “‘Cells. Interlinked’: Sympathy and Obligation in Blade Runner 2049.”Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 2020, 107-112.
Torlasco, Domietta. “The Anthropocene as Cinematic View: Time, Matter, and Race in Blade Runner 2049.” Camera Obscura, vol. 37, issue 111, 2022, pp. 87–113.
Vint, Sherryl. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Wegner, Phillip E. “We, the People of Blade Runner 2049.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 135-142.
Notes
[1] Blade Runner 2049 does not seem much interested in exploring the environmental issues (such as climate change) that might have led to this collapse. See Torlasco for an argument that the film ultimately fails to think beyond the logic of the Anthropocene, a logic that might have led directly to this collapse.
[2] In addition, see Wegner for an argument that, as part of a larger expansion of this film to address the political realities of America during the Trump administration, the replicants in Blade Runner 2049 can also be read as stand-ins for the immigrants against whom so much hateful rhetoric was aimed by Trump and his followers.
[3] As Sean Guynes points out, the film never really makes it clear why and how procreation would free the replicants, something he sees as problematic, given that slave procreation was a key means for extending slavery in the real past (146).
[4] Replicants are manufactured as adults. However, in order to make them more pliable, they are programmed with childhood memories that help them to feel more human. Much of K’s dilemma has to do with his inability to tell whether his own childhood memories are authentic or implanted.
[5] Torlasco, on the other hand, believes that Deckard is clearly figured as human in Blade Runner 2049, leading to the interesting notion that Joshi’s determination to destroy Stelline comes from the fact that she is a product ofmiscegenation (104).
[6] As part of her task of providing aid and comfort to K, Joi at one point calls him a “real boy,” alluding to the story of Pinocchio, which is built on the notion that artificial humans would naturally want to somehow be “real” humans. This moment both explains part of K’s fascination with the notion that he might have been naturally born and reinforces the film’s sense that K is somehow more “real” than Joi.
[7] This sexual encounter clearly echoes the scene in Her in which Samantha employs a human prostitute so that she can have indirect sex with Theodore Twombly. The failure of that encounter in Her partly signals the gap between humans and artificial intelligences in that film. In Blade Runner 2049, the apparent success of the encounter can be attributed partly to the fact that all three principals involved are artificial intelligences—but also perhaps partly because Joi is able to superimpose her visual image on Mariette.
[8] See Omry for an argument that Blade Runner 2049 ultimately evades the problem of the “human,” replacing it with the problem of the “humane,” opting for humane behavior as the ideal, regardless of whether it is practiced by a conventional human or a replicant.