Blade Runner 2049' is the Best Cyberpunk Film Since: Dave Bautista - Kay kills replicant Sapper Morton
The highly anticipated Blade Runner 2049 has arrived. As the sequel to one of the most well-regarded science fiction movies of all time, and arguably one of the best movies period, I set my expectations high, to say the least. Blade Runner 2049 came in the wake of the live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, another of the must-see cyberpunk canon, but unlike the abomination that was Rupert Sanders’ treatment of a cyberpunk classic, Denis Villeneuve actually met those expectations.
If you can’t tell from the trailers, Blade Runner 2049 is visually stunning. It has a cyberpunk visual style more inspired by the modern era than by the 80s look of Ridley Scott’s vision.
In 2049, bioengineered humans known as replicants are slaves. Kay, a Nexus-9 replicant, works for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as a "Blade Runner" an officer who hunts and "retires" (kills) rogue replicants. At a protein farm, he retires Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista) and finds a box buried under a tree. The box contains the remains of a female replicant who died during a caesarean section, demonstrating that replicants can reproduce biologically, previously thought impossible. Kay's superior, Lt. Joshi, fears that this could lead to a war between humans and replicants. She orders K to find and retire the replicant child to hide the truth.
In this sci fi movie the story opens in 2049, thirty years after the events of the first film. An on-screen text states that the Tyrell Corporation has collapsed decades before, in the wake of violent revolts involving their Nexus-6 through -8 Replicants, forcing the company into bankruptcy. After the world's ecosystems collapsed in the mid 2020s, famine swept the Earth, killing millions. With his invention of synthetic farming, a wealthy businessman named Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) ended food shortages and acquired Tyrell's remaining assets to form his own corporation. The Wallace Company has reinvigorated the Replicant industry by mass producing the Nexus-9 Replicants, a new generation of artificial humans with modified behavior to make them more obedient than the older models. These Replicants have implanted memories and open-ended lifespans, and are still used for slave labor on the off-world colonies (the Moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, etc.), but some are also used as Blade Runner units, hunting down and "retiring" the few remaining older model Replicants that are still at large.
The philosophical themes that were chosen to be explored in Blade Runner 2049, such as identity within a manufactured reality, finding meaning within this space, the relationship of labor to freedom, isolation, and authenticity, are a perfect extension of ideas presented in Blade Runner and in cyberpunk media as a whole.
An important metric, as a self-proclaimed cyberpunk, is that the film would be true to the essence of the genre. Blade Runner 2049 more than simply displaying the trappings of cyberpunk aesthetics, is cyberpunk on the nose, but more than that, it is a matured and an evolved form of the genre. Visually, the movie is brought up to date, but not at the expense of narrative. The visuals are true to modern cyberpunk visual style, but also hold meaning within the story itself. The themes are matured forms of ideas presented in the genre and in the philosophy that influenced cyberpunk itself. Even so, the film manages to not come off as heavy-handed. The high tech doesn’t gloss over the low life aspects of the world, which is still full of prejudice, uncertainty, and monotony.
The makers of Blade Runner 2049 tricked a clutch of production companies into giving them nearly $200 million to make a languidly paced, ponderous, deliberately action-reticent blockbuster. That on its own would be impressive, but all the better, the result is the best cyberpunk film since the original Matrix, and the best big-budget American science fiction film in years. I would even say that it easily surpasses its predecessor (though outside of its production design and score, I am not a fan of that movie, so consider this opinion with that in mind), building on its themes and aesthetic to walk its own path.
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Hampton Fancher (screenplay by), Michael Green (screenplay by)
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Dave Bautista, Robin Wright, Mark Arnold, Vilma Szécsi, Ana de Armas, Wood Harris, David Dastmalchian, Tómas Lemarquis, Edward James Olmos, Jared Leto, Harrison Ford, Lennie James
Production Companies
Alcon Entertainment
lcon Entertainment
Columbia Pictures
Sony
Torridon Films
16:14 Entertainment
Scott Free Productions
Babieka (Production Service: Spain)
Thunderbird Entertainment (as Thunderbird Films) blade runner prostitutes
#bladerunner #cyberpunk #cyberpunkscene #bladerunner2049 #2049scene #cyberpunkmoviescene #cyberpunkvisualstyle
