Full spoilers below.
Blade Runner 2049 finds a way to answer one of the most long-debated mysteries in modern cinema. “Is Harrison Ford’s Deckard actually a replicant?” has haunted and beguiled sci-fi fans for the better part of 25 years, and Ridley Scott’s seemingly endless tinkering with the original Blade Runner, releasing cut after cut, has only clouded the issue of what is the ‘true’ version of the film and what is the ‘true’ nature of Deckard.
And now, at last, Blade Runner 2049 has arrived to give us a definitive answer.
It doesn’t fucking matter.
No, seriously, that’s the answer Blade Runner 2049 puts forward. If you think Deckard is a replicant, there’s plenty of nods and tips to satisfy that belief. If you stubbornly cling to the notion that Deckard is actually human, there’s nothing in the new film to directly refute that either. Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriters Michael Green and Hampton Fancher have to walk a delicate line, but ultimately where they land is that since Deckard is damned to never truly understand his own nature, neither can we.
It turns Deckard’s final line into a kind of taunt. “What am I to you?” Harrison Ford asks, a line that he may as well deliver direct-to-camera, Goodfellas style.
But the filmmakers actually do one better than that. They actually eradicate all meaning behind the question itself. Blade Runner 2049 mounts the argument that it doesn’t matter what Rick Deckard is, it matters who Rick Deckard is, and that, that deeper identity, has nothing to do with how Deckard came into the world, and everything to do with where he chooses to exist in it now.
And that goes for all the characters in Blade Runner 2049. In a future in which there has been a near-total integration of humans and replicants, the bio-engineered slaves and laborers that actually run the world, the question of what does and does not count as humanity seems more fluid than ever. Everyone has at least some kind of claim on humanity, even the holographic girlfriends that dance above the skyscrapers. The truth of who these people are, robotic or not, comes not in their origins, but in their actions, and in the ways they value each other and the strange bonds that connect them.
Like most, if not all, good noirs, neo- or otherwise, Blade Runner 2049 uses ‘identity’ as a core theme. Doppelgangers and doubles proliferate the text, from Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) being forced to watch as her creator (Jared Leto) murders an exact replica of herself, to the multiple incarnations of Joi (Ana de Armas) that haunt Ryan Gosling’s “K”, to the truly bizarre sex scene in which overlapping limbs entwine, just out of sync. Cinematographer Roger Deakins constantly shoots scenes in such a way that silhouettes overlap each other, or reflections refract multiple copies over each other. New characters exist as echoes of those who appeared in the original film (it should be noted that Leto’s malevolent Wallace has stepped in for the first film’s Tyrell. Wallace is blind, Tyrell had his eyes gouged out), a concept taken to its most extreme form when Deckard is visited by a ‘new’ Rachael (a digitally restored Sean Young), an almost-exact replica that he rejects almost immediately.
The question of authenticity haunts both Blade Runner films, as they engage with the idea of what exactly it means to be ‘human’. If you could get so close to true humanity that no one could tell the difference, does that count? What is it that actually defines individuality, the soul? Are we just collections of flesh and memory, or is there something deeper, more intrinsic, that goes beyond what can be replicated (natch) via computer?
Blade Runner 2049 mounts the argument that it is not anything within ourselves that defines us as human, but what we do for others. We exist, the film says, not as a collection of memories but as a collection of actions, actions that have weight and meaning and effects on those around us. It’s these actions that define our lives and give us meaning, even after we’ve faded like so much tears in the rain. Action gives our lives shape, and death gives those lives meaning.
The film demonstrates this most clearly with the relationship between K and Joi. Neither person is ‘real’ in a traditional sense. She’s a holographic concoction, he’s a replicant. Late in the game, after K’s personal Joi has been destroyed, he comes across a nude, neon projection of a default Joi used for advertising. While this massive, dead-eyed digital thing has Joi’s face and voice, and while she parrots individual words and phrases that recall what K’s Joi said to him, it’s not her. K’s Joi made a choice, and for that choice she died. “Like a real girl,” as she said earlier in the film.
And K makes the same choice, rejecting the wishes of both the human system and the replicant uprising and choosing instead to save Deckard and unite him with his daughter, doing so at the cost of his own life. Earlier, K had believed that he was the designated Chosen One of this particular quest, and is crushed to realize that no, he is just another cog in an unfeeling machine. But while the beginning of his life is an incidental thing, alike to countless others, the ending of it is entirely K’s, and his alone. As he sinks into the snow, bleeding out from his wounds, it’s another instance of echoing in the film, recalling as it does the death of Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty (right down to bringing back the same music that played over Hauer’s final monologue).
But the two death scenes are actually arguing different points. With Batty’s death, we don’t just mourn his passing, but the loss of all that a life contained. All those sights and sounds that were his, and his alone, are now gone forever, just as he is. A life filled with wonder and awe is now cut short. But K’s death is a moment not of loss but of completion. He may be gone, but his choices and actions ripple outwards, changing lives (and perhaps the world entire) beyond what he could ever have imagined.
That’s what I mean when I say that Blade Runner 2049 argues that the answer to the age-old Deckard question is, “It doesn’t fucking matter.” Deckard is Deckard, and however he came to be, he simply is now. He’s someone who loved and lost, who made choices and gave up the things he cared most about in order to keep those things safe. He’s alive, by any definition, and that’s what counts.
Blade Runner 2049 takes the themes and notions of the original film and frees them from the claustrophobic nihilism that takes up much of Ridley Scott’s work (not a criticism, for the record. Just saying, the dude tends to paint in bleak). It looks into the same dark corners that Scott did, but finds the light within the darkness that Scott crafted so well.
Blade Runner is a film about how we can never be sure our lives are our own.
Blade Runner 2049 is a film that says, sure, that may be the case, but that life is still worth living. All actions have consequences, and all things linger. Even tears in the rain.