Blade Runner 2049 - More Questions Than Answers

A few months ago I got to watch the first one hundred and some minutes of the new Blade Runner movie on a flight, and a few weeks ago I got to see the rest.  I was interested in watching it after having seen the original years ago, and having a whole English class in college where we heavily discussed the movie and the book it was all based on ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ by Phillip K Dick.  We needed topics to write about and it was way more interesting that a lot of the other English classes.  I definitely recommend the book if you are looking for a good Science Fiction novel. 

But anyway, the new movie.  The previews for the movie heavily feature Harrison Ford as Deckard, but the fact is he doesn’t show up until 104 minutes into this 130 minute movie.  I hate deceptive advertising, so I found that annoying.  On IMDB Harrison Ford is listed well below most of the bit characters in the movie including ‘Female Replicant’ and ‘Memory Child’.  The character could definitely have been used better.  Otherwise the story revolved around a new cop ‘K’ who was a self-aware Replicant.  While tracking down old Replicants, he finds the bones of Rachel, Harrison Ford’s love interest from the first movie.  The autopsy determines she was pregnant and had a child but seeing as they found no grave they assume the baby lived and was hidden.  K then spends the movie trying to track down this child and for some time believes it is him. 

The first part of the movie is interesting, really until the Harrison Ford bit.  We find out more history of what’s happened between movies, see some neat technology like K’s girlfriend hologram Joy, flying cars, polluted earth, the sort-of-evil-maybe villain who now creates Replicants and is looking to figure out how to make them reproduce.  Where the movie starts to lose it is towards the end.  It tries to fit too much in and wrap up a large story with messy broad strokes and leaves a lot to be desired. 

Some of the science doesn’t make sense either which bothers me.  When K is trying to find the baby, he finds two children with identical DNA, a boy and a girl, and assumes one is a fake because two people can’t have identical DNA.  First off, two people can have the same DNA if they are identical twins, so that’s a fallacy.  In the crazy world of poor record keeping that is painted to be in, it’d be easy for dna samples to get messed up and entered twice.  And finally, there is no way a boy and a girl could have identical DNA.  The 23rd chromosome determines sex for humans, and so for them to be identical one would have to have a X or Y that doesn’t match the gender that was listed, or they’re just pretending that whole thing doesn’t exist.  Not the end of the world, but it bothered me.

Finally at the very end of the movie, K ‘figures out’ who the child is he’s been looking for, which happens to be a minor character he met once but he just assumes has to be the right person.  Seems like a massive assumption on his part and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  He also rescues Deckard from a sinking car and has to fight off the bad Replicant character in an ocean area that the car sank in.  Afterwards he tells Deckard that he died in the sinking car so he’s free to see his daughter now, but no one knew he was in the car and obviously they’d never find a body so again, it doesn’t really make sense.

I felt that the movie fell apart in the way that Science Fiction stories often do.  They start out with a good setting, but then get too focused on the technology and lose the story.  Not all the characters really made a lot of sense, and I think the graphics and CGI were the star of the movie.  I felt like there were a lot of big, unanswered questions, and I was never sure who’s side I should be on which made it difficult sometimes.  All the characters were also really prone to murder other characters without a real driving need to do so in many instances.

Overall I was disappointed but not surprised.  Science Fiction suffers from weak story lines as a genre and sequels with big actors can be especially prone to it.  I wouldn’t recommend watching it, unless you’re on a plane with not much else to do.  It’s fine, but not good, and it will leave you with more annoying questions than real answers.