Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. A sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner, the film 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. Set thirty years after the original film, the story depicts a bioengineered human named K, who discovers the remains of a once-pregnant replicant. To prevent a possible war between replicants and humans, K is secretly tasked with finding the child and destroying all evidence related to it.

So 30 years have passed and replicates have been integrated into society, mostly as servants. The new manufacturer of replicants is the prolific but ambitious and ruthless industrialist Niander Wallace, who took over the now defunct Tyrell corporation which was the original pioneer in this field. And we have K, a newer Nexus-9 model replicant who is created to obey his bosses and is employed by the LAPD to work as a Blade Runner and hunt and kill older rebellious replicant models. His home life is spent with his holographic girlfriend Joi, an artificial intelligence product of Wallace Corporation.

After tracking a replicant who is hiding on a farm and killing him post a struggle, K finds he remains of a female Nexus-7 replicant who died as the result of complications from an emergency caesarean section. K, and his superior, Lieutenant Joshi, find this unsettling, as pregnancy in replicants was originally thought to be impossible and she orders K to destroy all evidence of this and kill the child. K is disturbed by this order visits the headquarters of Wallace Corporation founder, who identifies the body as Rachael, an experimental replicant designed by Dr. Tyrell before his demise. In the process, he learns of her romantic ties with former veteran blade runner Rick Deckard. Wallace wants to check out replicants who can reproduce as creating new replicants is tedious so he sends his enforce replicant named Luv to steal Rachael’s remains from LAPD headquarters and follow K to find Rachael’s child.

K finds a date scratched in the farm and it matches the date of one of his own memories about hiding a toy wooden horse while being chased by bullies. Joi insists that this coincidence is evidence that K is, in fact, a real person. Searching birth records for that date, he finds that there were twins born – a boy and a girl – and the girl died while the boy lived. He tracks the child to an orphanage which he recognizes and finds the hidden wooden horse, suggesting that these memories — which he thought were merely implants — are real. K seeks out Dr. Ana Stelline, a memory designer who informs him that it is illegal to program replicants with humans’ real memories, and verifies that his memory of the orphanage is real, leading K to believe that he might be Rachael’s son.

fter failing a test of his replicant behaviour, K is suspended by Joshi, but he explains that he failed the test because he completed his mission in killing the child. Joshi gives him 48 hours to disappear. K transfers Joi to a mobile emitter on her orders, despite knowing, and informing Joi, that if it is damaged she will be erased. He then tracks the wooden horse to Las Vegas, a city in ruins, and finds Deckard, who admits to mixing up the baby’s records and was forced to leave a pregnant Rachael with the replicant freedom movement to protect her. They are then attacked by Luv and her agents and K is left for dead while Deckard is taken away. Joi is lost as the emitter is destroyed but K is rescued by the rebel replicants.  was forced to leave a pregnant Rachael with the replicant freedom movement to protect her.

K is told by their leader, Freysa, that Rachael’s child is actually a girl, and her memories were implanted in K. K deduces that Stelline is Deckard’s daughter, as she is capable of creating the memory and implanting it into him, and had begun crying upon viewing the memory earlier. Freysa urges K to prevent Wallace from uncovering the secrets of replicant reproduction by any means necessary, including killing Deckard. In Los Angeles Wallace tells Deckard that Rachael’s feelings for him may have been engineered by Tyrell to test the possibility of a replicant becoming pregnant and tempts him into revealing the location of the child he had. Deckard does not cooperate and is taken away.

K finds Deckard and kills Luv and her men, and heavily injured himself takes Deckard to Stelline. A mortally injured K, who had stages Deckard’s death so Wallace won’t send more of his men to find him, succumbs to his wounds outside on the steps of Stelline’s lab while Deckard reunited with his daughter.

The film is a stunning visual feast, though the pacing and length might not be suitable for all. It is a fitting epic sequel to a scifi classic. I love the decaying society feel of humans who seem to have lost their humanity while it is their creation, the replicants, who feel more human now. This franchise is look at the question what does it mean to be human and possibly about humanity being replaced eventually by their own creation. An 8.5 outta 10!

Blade Runner is a 1982 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos. The script was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. It is a loose adaptation of the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

Set in a dystopian Los Angeles circa 2019 (just two years away) the story depicts a future in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bioengineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on off-world colonies.  When a fugitive group of replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escape back to Earth, burnt-out Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard(Ford) reluctantly accepts one last assignment to hunt them down. During his investigations, Deckard meets Rachael (Young), an advanced replicant who causes him to question his mission. The film questions what it means to be human and the quest for life and also thematically enfolding the philosophy of religion and moral implications of human mastery of genetic engineering in the context of classical Greek drama and hubris – and also in a way a take off from Frankenstein.

It shows humans as being less empathetic, cold and impersonal, while the replicants appear to show compassion and concern for one another – the test to find out if one is a replicant is an empathy test, with a number of its questions focused on the treatment of animals. The quest for the rebel replicants to seek out their father,  Eldon Tyrell , in a quest to gain more life than the 4 years that the lifespan for their Nexus 6 has, ends in tragedy – all of the replicants die. Roy Batty, the leader of the rebels demands more life from Tyrell and the latter tells him that it is impossible; the replicant confesses his “sins” to his maker and upon getting praise for his advanced design and accomplishments, he then kisses his maker and kills him.

Then there is Rachel, a replicant who does not know that she is artificial and thinks she is human. Tyrell has her programmed with false memories so she thinks she is a human but later has suspicions and approaches Deckard, who starts to fall in love with her and she reciprocates. Deckard kills two of the rebel replicants and saved by Rachel before one can kill him. After his fight with Roy in the rain at the end of the movie, Deckard leaves to find Rachel and leaves the city apparently to hide out and live with her. I am surprised about Roy – he has no problem in killing the others but he saves Deckard though he attacks him. When the latter is about to fall from the roof, Roy catches him and pulls him up and then dies.

While a commentary on humanity, the film asks you the question : was Deckard a human or replicant? Deckard’s unicorn-dream sequence, inserted into the Director’s Cut and concomitant with Gaff’s parting gift of an origami unicorn, is seen by many as showing that Deckard is a replicant—because Gaff could have accessed Deckard’s implanted memories. The interpretation that Deckard is a replicant is challenged by others who believe the unicorn imagery shows that the characters, whether human or replicant, share the same dreams and recognize their affinity, or that the absence of a decisive answer is crucial to the film’s main theme.

The film was a critical favourite but didn’t make money at the bo – it only made $33.8 million off a $28 million budget but has since become a cult favourite and considered a scifi classic. In the year after its release, the film won the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, and in 1993 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. I give it an 8 outta 10!