BLADE RUNNER 2049: A SEQUEL OR A NEW CREATURE ENTIRELY?

By Andrew Stewart

At the outset, it bears mentioning herein that the BLADE RUNNER film known and loved by fans was
not released in 1982, in fact the picture now considered a part of the American science fiction canon
was issued in 1992 as a Director's Cut following the success of preliminary efforts made by James
Cameron (THE ABYSS) and Steven Spielberg (CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND). The
supposition otherwise is deeply mistaken because the 1982 version of BLADE RUNNER was actually
a terrible piece of junk due to a tacky voice-over narration track and lame ending, both imposed in
post-production by studio executives.

I argue this bears mentioning because Ridley Scott's original vision of the film might not have ended up
being exactly what we know and love today as his Final Cut, which was released a decade ago exactly
in cinemas for a limited run before being issued on an astounding DVD/Blu Ray set for the Christmas
holiday. What we know and revere as the classic BLADE RUNNER is actually a strange synthesis of
studio meddling and directorial vision, one which was further complicated by the fact that Scott and
star Harrison Ford hate each other. It is a product that is borne of true contradiction.

As such, the 1992 picture ended up being almost like a French New Wave film, a kind of Existentialist
meditation on humanity in the early days of the Reagan administration and the implementation of the
neoliberal political economy. Strands of Sartre and Camus seem intertwined in a noir picture that just
accidentally ended up being Anglophone rather than Francophone. Ridley Scott is without a doubt one
of the most sublime Western Marxist film makers of his generation, an artist who puts the clunky retro-
Popular Front ethos of Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola to shame. The picture expressed the angst of a
free trade future where hegemony of capital's ability to move across national borders unhindered while
labor would not be granted the same mobility now is made manifest in the economic nationalist
xenophobia of the alt-right and their enforcers within the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE). The ecology, showing a California of 2019 besieged by constant monsoons, was ultimately
proven to be the inversion of its current drought. And because the script was written at a time when
Japan seemed to be a future economic powerhouse that could never be stopped, the emphasis on LA as
an Asian rather than Latinx town seems rather tone deaf.

These shortcomings are benchmarks against which the new script works to correct the universe as
much as possible. Set 22 years from now, it suggests a time when the polar vortexes caused by an out-
of-sync jet stream will remake Los Angeles as a snowscape roughly equivalent to New York in
wintertime. The struggles of the undocumented worker are borne out in the plight of Replicants who
are camouflaged in contemporary times due to an unseen terrorist attack two decades earlier that
obliterated their electronic DACA-like registry, an episode shown in a pre-release 15 minute animated
short titled BLADE RUNNER BLACK OUT 2022 (https://youtu.be/rrZk9sSgRyQ). In an obvious nod
to the fact that the original film was not exactly a feminist praxis on celluloid, the MacGuffin of the
film is an outright obsession with female reproduction and fertility, manifested most clearly, not to
mention creepily, when the film's villain, portrayed by Jared Leto, engages in multiple instances of
ritualistic female Replicant sacrifice. The protagonist's primary romantic entanglement is an empathic
hologram who has the capacity to emote and (perhaps) even love.

Yet that subplot is the keyhole the audience looks through to see that we are not on the same terrain that
the original film occupied. Let's face it, Philip K. Dick is now an industrial standard of science fiction,
with handsome Library of America volumes on sale and multiple adaptations available from
mainstream film and television studios. The original film from 1982 was the first adaptation of his
work and the studio tampering with the original release demonstrates how much of a gamble they
thought Dick's work was. This was borne out again by the second film adaptation of one his stories, We
Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which was thoroughly revised into an action film starring Arnold
Schwarzenegger released in 1990 titled TOTAL RECALL. Only after the 1992 Director's Cut
developed a cult fan base in the course of the next decade did Dick become more palatable to
Hollywood, perhaps first manifest in 2002 when Spielberg's MINORITY REPORT, starring Tom
Cruise, stayed rather faithful to the source material (at least for the first half of the film). Over the next
several years, action films of minor note were produced from short stories by Dick.

Everything changed, however, with the groundbreaking (and heartbreaking) A SCANNER DARKLY in
2006. Directed by Richard Linklater and utilizing the rotoscope technology he had previously created
for WAKING LIFE, the screenplay was almost totally loyal to the source novel, the author's
nightmarish mea culpa for the drug culture he watched claim the lives of friends and loved ones at the
end of the Age of Aquarius. Starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Rider, Robert Downey, Jr., and Woody
Harrelson, it tells the story of a drug cop assigned to go undercover to investigate a drug house whose
cartel leader is...himself. The schizophrenia and paranoia created by addiction is made manifest and
further complicated by the alienation created in suburbia, the police-industrial complex, and a
surveillance system which was eerily predicting the revelations made by Edward Snowden in 2013.
After eleven years, the film is more relevant because the notion of mass-addiction in the suburbs, just a
dystopian vision back then, is now a genuine contemporary news story we call the opiates epidemic.

From that point onwards, Philip K. Dick ceased to be a subtle flavoring added to productions intended
to follow the strictures of typical Hollywood fare and became a brand unto itself. TOTAL RECALL
was remade in 2012 with more obvious elemental references to Dick. Three years later, the Amazon
web series MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, adapted from a title considered one of Dick's best and
perhaps one of the finer in the genre, premiered and became a hit. The source novel includes a clever
plot device, a sort of riff on postmodern intertextuality that perhaps predicted Italo Calvino's If on a
winter's night a traveler, which the show kept in the storyline. It is by this point that we see Dick
developed into a certain science fiction branding device, equivalent to how Alfred Hitchcock branded a
different sub-genre of American pulp fictions in another generation with his television series and
anthology magazine.

This is where the real difference lies between the original BLADE RUNNER film and the sequel. The
beloved Director's Cut from 1992 is an aberration in Hollywood production history precisely and
exactly because Dick was so much of a novelty and outlier. In 1982, Hollywood science fiction was
defined by big budget hits like ET, STAR WARS, STAR TREK, ALIEN, and attendant sequels/rip-offs
of those films. Scott's claustrophobic, brooding, and hopeless film mortified studio executives who
were looking for Harrison Ford, aka Han Solo, to star in a gritty police procedural action film as
opposed to a cyberpunk version of Being and Nothingness.

By contrast, BLADE RUNNER 2049 changes everything that did not need to be changed about the
first film and leaves in place everything that was wrong. Jared Leto's character takes on a near-
Miltonian quality as a blind sociopath inventor-capitalist whose motivations are clear and devilish. By
contrast, his two predecessors, the elder inventor Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel) and Roy Batty (Rutger
Hauer) were either benign and indifferent (the chess playing inventor who lives above the masses in his
pyramid temple) or alternatively absolutely capable of being empathized with (the Replicant staving off
his own approaching death while fighting desperately with his comrades for just one more day of life).
Ryan Gosling, the protagonist Blade Runner this time around, is an inversion of the somber, near-
catatonic Rick Deckard of the first film, crying constantly and egotistical. The claustrophobic nature of
the original, which made one wish for more detail in one of the final films shot with no CGI, is
replaced with moving vista shots, equivalent to a John Ford Western or the STAR WAR prequels, that
are quite obviously computer generated and look like a video game. While the first soundtrack was a
futuristic noir, laced with jazz saxophones and even a crooning Sinatra impersonator, this one has a
roaring bass section that seems to rattle the cabinets of the theatrical subwoofers to the brink of
explosion. The film effectively is not a continuation of the first, it is a rip-off, flavored to seem like
Philip K. Dick but not a genuine Dick story. Instead the most obvious parallel is to be found in either
the TERMINATOR or MATRIX franchises.

This is most unfortunate because there actually is a very good sequel, derived from the original Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? source novel, that can and should be made. The first film wildly
diverged from even the basic outline of the novel, eschewing an entire subplot where Dick cleverly
satirized the nascent televangelist movement and American consumerism. Consumption as religion in
America is a very pressing topic to face in our society today. Part of our game show host president's
popular appeal and image over the past 40 years was driven by his ability to tap into and utilize
American consumerism as a fuel for his own selfish ends, materializing as a brand on everything from
gauche condos to board games to a television broadcast that glorified the contestant who could best tap
into that same fuel. Dick's novel, written in California four years after Marcuse published One-
Dimensional Man, is one that has become more relevant in the advent of police militarization and
brutality coming to the forefront thanks to #BlackLivesMatter/Movement for Black Lives. The casual,
apathetic manner with which Blade Runners retire Replicants, who they even derisively call 'skin jobs',
is the perfect material for a visual analogy about white cops destroying Black lives, with a casting call
that literally writes itself.

We could and should have gotten a film about the moral and social decay of our epoch under neoliberal
settler-colonialism. Instead we get a pale (in multiple senses of that word) hodgepodge of five or six
different science fiction and action films that have become narrative standards over the past four
decades, back when George Lucas started the entire revival of the genre.