I watched Blade Runner the Final Cut, and Blade Runner 2049 back to back yesterday. Let’s get into it.

Blade Runner, The Final Cut, directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, and Rutger Hauer. It is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

So Just to complicate things right out of the gate, there are about a half dozen different versions of this movie. I watched the OG Blade Runner back in the day, now referred to as the theatrical cut, but this time I decided to watch the final cut, which is director Ridley Scott’s favorite/preferred version. Blade Runner came out in 1982, but this final cut came out in 2007. It was restored from the original and includes a few changes. The biggest thing I noticed in a casual watch was that the narration (done by Harrison Ford) was removed, that the cinematography was even more beautiful then I remembered it, and that the ending is very slightly different. There are a lot of Blade Runner nerds out there, and people will argue ad infinitum about which version of this movie is the best. To keep things simple I’m just going to say this final cut is the director’s favorite, and the version in which he had complete artistic control, without studio interference, and after watching it myself it’s my favorite version as well.

The setting is Los Angeles in 2019 (hilarious I know), and the screen blurb at the beginning let’s you know that replicants are human like robots. They were created by the Tyrell Corp. to be slave labor for humans, and were used in off-world exploration and colonization of other planets, which is hazardous work, but necessary as earth is largely no longer a hospitable place to live, and getting worse by the minute. But the replicants attempted a violent and bloody mutiny. Afterwards replicants were made illegal on earth. A special task force of police, called blade runners, were created to hunt down and “retire” replicants on earth. In other words shoot them dead. Harrison Ford plays Deckard, a former blade runner who gets pulled in for “one more job” (classic noir set up, also it seems he has no choice but to do the work, as his captain threatens him when he initially refuses), to retire four replicants that came to earth, and have already killed a bunch of humans. They seem to be on some kind of mission. These are Nexus 6 replicants, so Deckard goes to Tyrell Corp. to test a Nexus 6. They have this test to eek out replicants that involves watching someone’s eye as you ask them questions. There Deckard meets Rachael, a Nexus 6, who is the femme fatal of the movie. Deckard begins hunting down the replicants, while also spending some time with Rachael, who comes to his dark as a cave apartment. She doesn’t know she is a replicant, or she just figured it out I guess. Replicants often have memories of childhood, implanted, to make them more human like, and this complicates things.

The Rachael/Deckard “romance” is problematic. There is a scene that is maybe supposed to be sexy, but reads today as abusive, where Rachael attempts to leave Deckard’s apartment after he attempts to kiss her, and he physically stops her, slams her against a wall, and then forces her to ask him to kiss her. “Say it, say Kiss me,” he demands. And she does. The scene fades out but it’s clear they’re about to have sex. Or you might say that Deckard is about to rape Rachael. Much later he returns to his apartment and she is in his bed. He asks her if she loves him (not saying that he loves her) and she, without a drop of emotion says, yes I love you. It might seem odd to expect emotion from a replicant but other replicants are sad, angry, and seem to care deeply for one another. The four nexus 6 replicants that Deckard hunts down behave as a family. And their leader cries multiple times. So does Rachael even like Deckard or is she just scared of him? She is a replicant, a slave in essence, and he is a human. Unequal footing. Troubling, especially when we get into the next film, which presents Deckard and Rachael as a love story so pure it creates a miracle of sorts.

Is Deckard the hero here? Is he even the anti-hero? Roy (played to perfection by Rutger Hauer), the leader of the four replicants, makes for a much more compelling hero. He is intelligent, caring, and he is only trying to make sense of his existence. He seems to think and feel deeply about things. Replicants of his kind only live for a short number of years, and he (and his family/pod) are almost out of time. He really has come to get help, for him and his people. People he seems to love. He is a slave. The weight of that slavery is apparent in his sorrow. Deckard is a burnt out cop who doesn’t seem to have anyone in his life that he cares for (again the Rachael thing doesn’t read as love to me). Who should we be rooting for?

The beauty of this movie holds up. The city of LA is dense, layered, dark, continually rainy, covered in neon, ads, transport vehicles (on the ground and in the air), filth. The use of darkness, light, and shadow throughout the film is stunning. Stunning! The interior spaces are often dark, but lights from the city smash into the space; spotlights, flashing neon, strange thrumming and shifting shadows. Sometimes it’s raining inside. And it is always raining outside. People are often standing in dark rooms in front of lit up windows. It’s industrial and ominous. The city is a gorgeous hellscape, and the living spaces (Deckard’s apartment, the weird abandoned building this other guy Sebastian stays in) are cold, dark, confusing, and fantastical. I won’t spoil the ending of this thing, as everyone should see this movie (or already has), but it leaves you questioning what it means to be human. It also left me wondering if life would be worth living in a world devoid of nature, animals, etc. A world bleakly manufactured by humans, and structured entirely around capitalism.

Blade Runner 2049, released in 2017, directed by Denis Villeneuve, staring Ryan Goslin, Ana de Armas, Robin Wright, Sylvia Hoeks, Jared Leto, and Harrison Ford.

This was a first watch for me. The movie opens 30 years later, in California 2049. Officer K (Ryan Goslin) is a replicant 9, and a blade runner. While hunting down and “retiring” a replicant 8 on this weird protein farm (things have gotten worse on earth), a box is discovered deep in the ground containing the bones of a woman, who died in childbirth. But, big reveal here, this woman was actually a replicant. This is groundbreaking, as replicants don’t get pregnant or give birth, they’re robots after all. So now Officer K has to try and find the child, and sort of erase this whole situation. He figures out that the replicant was Rachael. Yeah, that Rachael. And he learns that Officer Deckard and Rachael disappeared together.

Tyrell Corp. has been taken over by Wallace Corp. and at the helm of this Goliath is one blind Jared Leto. His name is Niander Wallace, but it hardly matters because he is blind Jared Leto to me. He is just beautiful and evil and he wants to figure out how replicants can reproduce, so these bones and this possible child are of great value to him. He sends his henchmen, a replicant named Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), to get what he wants. So Luv and Officer K are looking for the same thing, for different purposes.

Officer K, who is a replicant 9, is incapable of disobeying an order. This is the fix installed in replicants, apparently, to prevent the troubles they’ve had in the past with the pesky revolts. He lives in a nicer and slightly less dark apartment then Deckard did. He has this hologram AI lady named Joi who is sweet and tells him what he wants to hear. She is attached to a device in his apartment but he gets a portable unit and now she can go places with him. They are both non-human, but they seem to care for one another. Officer K confides in her that he is keeping a secret. Where the box of bones were found a date was carved into a dead tree. This date (likely when the bones were buried, a death date) is familiar to him. He has a memory of having a wooden horse with that date carved into it. But he is a replicant so this memory is implanted (right, or is it?). So this leads Officer K to this neat place where memories are created, and he meets a young woman who works there. She looks at his memory, weeps quietly, and tells him it is real, not manufactured. But I guess it still doesn’t mean it is Officer K’s exactly. It’s unclear.

Now Officer K hunts down Deckard. This movie is really long (2 hours and 43 minutes folks, way too long!) and you don’t see ol Harrison until more than halfway into this thing. But he does find him. He’s living with some bees and a whiskey drinking dog that may or may not be real in a nuclear fallout zone that used to be Las Vegas. Deckard is his same violent and antisocial self, only haggard. Officer K asks him some questions, gets no real answers, and then who should show up but Luv, who has been trailing K. Again I’m not going to spoil the ending here, as this movie is worth the watch. But all hell breaks loose for awhile, and then we get some answers, and not the ones I expected, to be honest.

There are a number of things that when you drill down maybe don’t add up. How did Rachael give birth? They don’t really explain this beyond it being a miracle. What is the genetic make-up of the child? A human replicant hybrid? Life expectancy? Ridley Scott has said that Deckard is a replicant. I don’t really like or buy this. He isn’t extra strong like the replicants seem to be. He lives into old age. And he ages. None of that seems to line up. And that would mean that two replicants had a baby. Does that make less sense, or more? I’m not sure, but in my world Deckard is a human. Blind Jared Leto is a human, with a god complex, but why the obsession with replicant procreation, wouldn’t that take him out of the loop? How did Officer K keep secrets, isn’t that against his programming? Maybe because no one asked him directly? Lot of threads there, lot of threads in Thibeau’s head. But nothing that makes the movie not work.

I really liked this movie. It wasn’t as beautiful as the first, or as moody, but it was a very compelling story and I like the direction they went with it. (Side note: at Wallace Corp. they have these rooms with some kind of manufactured light that looks like light reflecting off moving water, just awash in the whole room. It is gorgeous and I want a water light machine for my apartment. Let me know if they exist.) My one complaint is it was way, way, way too long, and I think they could have cut it down without loosing the narrative fairly easily. But beyond that, a really great watch. Word is there will a be an Amazon series set in the Blade Runner Universe. I’ll probably check it out.