Thread by @andykhouri

Blade Runner 2049. Hard movie to thread. So much story is told in extended shots of the hero traveling through environments by himself, saying nothing to anyone.

The film uses music and imagery to at once reference the opening of the original but also demonstrate the differences. Where BR2019 began with a kind of romanticism, a warm skyline, a vaguely utopian musical theme, 2049 opens with bleakness, cold desolation, a menacing score.

The key to every story and design decision in 2049 is the fact that it’s 30 years since the events of 2019 — as in the world of 2019, as opposed to the world of 1982. The 2049 filmmakers created the future of a fictional reality laid out in 2019, not OUR future. Make sense?

“How can you kill your own kind?” The first twist of the film comes in the first scene. The hero is a replicant, and his job is to kill other replicants. What was made intentionally vague subtext about Deckard is made text about K. This film isn’t asking “Is he/isn’t he?” Bold.

The first aerial of Los Angeles shows how far the city’s fallen in 30 years. Packed to the brim, oppressively grey, the off serenity of the chaotic Japanese influences of 2019 are replaced with a soviet-like brutality. Surrounded by massive walls, the city is like a gulag.

The music reinforces this loss of serenity. Vangelis used synthetic strings, harps, pianos and brass. Zimmer uses what sounds like a revving spaceship engine. This Los Angeles is inhuman.

With replicants operating as part of everyday life, K is treated not with the fear and awe of the Nexus models of 2019 but as a kind of nuisance. His baseline test is humiliating, his neighbors abuse him, his dwelling is almost a prison cell; the bare minimum for a minimal human.

In 2019 the rain was constant in Los Angeles. In 2049 it’s constantly snowing in Los Angeles. Climate change has gotten incredibly worse. Sea levels are so high they have to build a wall around the city. The movie keeps telling us: things are going to get worse.

The ultimate humiliation, depending upon your reading: K’s only emotional connection is to a device meant to simulate emotional connections. A fake woman to serve him fake food and give him fake kisses when he comes home from his job killing fake people.

Does the mobile emitter give the Joi hologram the final push into sentience? It really depends who you ask. The film gives us a scene near the end that informs my interpretation.

The meaning of “You haven’t seen a miracle” is revealed when K discovers the body he found was a replicant woman who died giving birth. This is a genius expansion of the BR mythology and a fucking great mystery. As Robin Wright explains, the ramifications of this could be war.

K says to be born is to have a soul. That’s the main difference is he sees between him and everybody else. It’s why he’s “Constant K” on the baseline test. He knows who and what he is and what his job is. But once he feels he might have been born/have a soul, he can’t un-feel it.

We see a few quick shots of the darkened and presumably shuttered Tyrel Corp building from BR2019. It’s dwarfed stunningly by Wallace’s building, foreshadowing his compulsion to dominate, his boundless ego, his delusions of godhood. It’s no wonder they cast him with Jared Leto.

The scene where K and Luv listen to Rachael’s Voight-Kampf test, I honestly got chills in the cinema. It was that “holy shit, Rachael had a baby, this is a true fucking sequel.” And it only works because of the real passage of time. K’s basically excavating the old film.

Wallace is an astonishingly bad person. Everything the film tells us about this guy is disgusting. Even his decor, made exclusively from wood while everything else is concrete and metal and glass, implies wealth that’s beyond vulgar. But he talks about himself as a humanitarian.

Wallace is consumed by jealousy for Tyrell’s achievement of creating a synthetic woman who can reproduce. So much so that he callously murders a replicant woman who can’t. What Wallace wants to do for mankind is only a means to an end; his dream of godhood. It’s pathetic.

Mackenzie Davis will NOT allow anyone else to be in computery movies and tv shows.

K finds hidden mementos in the Rogue replicant’s home. We remember from 2019 that these older models had a weakness for photographs in particular, one K doesn’t share. Everything about K up to this point has been to dehumanize him. No life, no interest in Mackenzie, etc. UNTIL...

K has a memory of being a child with a toy horse. My coworkers got me a prop replica as a gift. There’s a nice touch that you can barely notice in the film: the horse was a unicorn; you can see and feel where the horn was broken off. Deckard made a unicorn for his child.

TWIST: K might actually be human. That’s a brilliant flip of the script. In 2019, we wonder if our ostensibly human character was a replicant. In 2049, we wonder if our ostensibly replicant character could be human. The story sets up everything beautifully for this to land right.

San Diego is LA’s garbage dump. Sorry, Blink 182 fans.

The one section of this movie I think you could cut out is K getting shot out of the sky by those garbage people. It doesn’t seem to have any affect on the story and even breaks it a little. Like, K doesn’t question who is helping him fight these guys nor why. Feels weird.

Also unclear on the nature of the orphanage. Or “orphanage.” Like, it’s clearly not an orphanage. But the guy keeps records so I guess it is? He says “work molds them into a child worth having” so do people drive to the garbage dump to take children? Just don’t get it.

Gosling’s face when he finds the horse where he remembered hiding it as a kid is just perfect. This dimension of the film might be this coolest, putting you in the position of relating to a guy who thinks he’s a robot who turns out is real, and realizing how fucked up it is.

The scene with Dr Stalline reminds me of the scene with Dr Chew from 2019. Both scientists are artists, and they both take personal pride in the gifts they’ve given replicants. In the whole world, no one treats K nor Roy with any respect at all except the people who made them.

Amazing Gosling moment, playing a man hit like a ton of bricks with the belief that he’s not a machine, he’s not soulless. He was born, he has real memories, but he’s been brought up to believe he has no choices and to kill his own people. Imagine, your whole life was a trick.

First thing K does after learning his “true” nature is watch the snow touch his hand. This is a key symbol in the film for whatever reason, something machines do when they think they’re not machines. Joi did it with the rain when she got her emitter. K will do it once more.

The moment K learns the truth he’s arrested and given a baseline test which he fails. The film is doing absolutely everything to tell you this is what you’re supposed to believe at this moment; that K is Rachael’s child. And it is absolutely thrilling. Nobody expected this.

Another cool detail about the twist-ruse is K’s lying to Robin Wright. The story established that Wallace replicants are designed to obey. So if K can lie to his commander’s face, surely he can’t be a replicant. But we’ve seen it so we know, feeling human is to act human.

Next stop on K’s crash course in humanity is sex with a physical person. He refused Mackenzie Davis before, preferring (maybe thinking he only deserved?) the formless Joi AI. But now that he thinks he’s human (hybrid anyway), why should he deny himself human connection?

Genius. This scene is so beautiful, sexy, and sad. Three machines sharing this sincere, maybe even desperate moment of connection.

The Vegas drone photography is so fucking cool. Great evolution of the photo scanner from 2019.

The double twist: “You imagined it was you?”

K and the audience learn the truth: he’s not a miracle. He wasn’t born. If Robin Wright was right, he doesn’t have a soul. The memory that drives him is shared by all of them. Selline’s memory is like consciousness virus.

The scene between Deckard and Wallace is amazing. Our old hero, who’s sacrificed everything, face to face with the devil. Now he has to sacrifice it all over again to protect his child.

“Very clever... all it cost you was EVERYTHING.”

This moment. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I got chills, I gripped the seat, I was just flat on my psychic ass with this shit. That which Deckard (and us) wants more than anything, to relive what Wallace calls a perfect moment (the original film). It’s at once euphoric and evil.

This is the most crucial moment in K’s story, and it’s definitely open to interpretation. By this point in the film K’s been put through the ringer. First he’s a soulless machine, then he’s a real boy, then he’s a machine who can’t forget what it felt like to be real.

His replicant brothers and sisters are in a way no different than his human masters: they want K to kill someone. He’s not special, his memories aren’t his, but he knows how to kill. He’s the best. He’s a Blade Runner.

But this. This is how K decides that there has to be another way. This ad of Joi, which calls him Joe, this to me is the film saying Joi was not real. She was fake. His life was fake, peppered with moments of almost-realness. He needs to feel real. He needs to BE REAL.

The film fairly clumsily tells us the most human thing a person can do is die for a cause. The replicants want that death to be Deckard’s, to protect the child. But K found another way. That’s what a real hero does*.

* 🎵 a real human being (and a hero)

The climax of this film is fucking intense. This epic, almost biblical war between these two machines in an ocean of darkness lit only by the fading dome light of a car. It’s massive and minuscule at the same time. The music is amazing too. I love every second of it.

That said, this scene is also my one major criticism. It feels wrong that Decksrd is just sitting there waiting to be rescued or die. Why can’t Wallace be there? He could be fighting with his little droids and Deckard would get to take out the devil who’s trying take his child.

My cynical suspicion is they were leaving Wallace and the replicant revolution for a sequel. But if Deckard takes out Wallace, he gets his hero moment and saves his daughter and indeed all replicants. Then K can save Deckard, and thus affirm his own humanity. My opinion anyway.

“Why? Who am I to you?”

This is probably wrong but it’s what I felt in the theater watching it: the answer is Harrison Ford, that’s who you are. You’re Rick Deckard. You’re Han Solo. And K is the audience. And K needed to give you this gift of closure and happiness and renewel

“Tears In Rain” is the theme for humanity in the Blade Runner universe. When you hear it, it means a machine found their soul.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Deckard gets the last shot. This film about dehumanization, cruelty and pain ends on a victorious note. Our hero, the one who sacrificed everything, he gets it back. And the film lets us feel it. No ambiguity this time; it’s a happy ending. He earned it.

BTW. Last year’s Halloween costume.