Seeing as how Blade Runner 2049 came out on Blu-Ray/DVD last week, this is as good a time as any for The Culture Tsar to render a few thoughts about one of his favorite movies from last year.
To begin with, Blade Runner 2049 (hereafter BR2049) belongs in the same group with Mad Max: Fury Road as one of those rare movies we were never supposed to get. Seriously, it’s kind of crazy this is a direct sequel to a movie that came out over thirty years ago (and was a dismal failure at the box office). The Culture Tsar first saw the original Blade Runner around 1997, and the possibility of a sequel wasn’t even a hypothetical conversation worth having. There was a series of books that continued the story, a forgettable computer game, and every so often somebody whispered about the idea of a television show, but nobody ever thought a major studio would undertake development of a big budget movie sequel. In that sense, BR2049’s very existence is almost as miraculous as the replicant child depicted in the film.
I say all of this up front because I want to make it clear that The Culture Tsar loves this movie. While not a perfect film, it’s certainly a great one on a number of levels. It might even be superior to the original, but that’s a debate for another day.
But…
The film exists in a strange conceptual space. It makes the wise decision to completely ignore real world events that transpired between the original film’s release and now. While the original Blade Runner has aged incredibly well visually, there are some quaint aspects to it that bedevil almost all near future science fiction and certainly all classic cyberpunk fiction. Wireless technology is completely absent, as are cellular phones and portable computers. In fact, computers are barely present in the original film. Instead of trying to retroactively insert updated versions of contemporary technology into its world, BR2049 uses the original film as its reference point and pushes its technology and society forward a few decades. This is the primary reason why BR2049 feels like such an authentic sequel; it doesn’t try to rethink Blade Runner’s vision of the future.
This creates a bit of a problem, however. Blade Runner is a distinctly late 1970s/early 1980s vision of a dystopian future. If you spent much of BR2049 wondering why there’s so much Japanese advertising, it’s because the original movie was conceived in an era when people feared Japan’s burgeoning economy was going to take over the world. This fear of Japanese economic and cultural dominance was a strong theme in a great deal of 1980s cyberpunk fiction. More important for our purposes, however, is the film’s depiction of race, gender, and sexuality. For all the great questions the original film asks about the nature of humanity, it presents a decidedly conservative vision of the future, with little ambiguity around gender identity and not much consideration of racial diversity. Aside from its “yellow peril” subtext (which is significant), the original Blade Runner depicts a world dominated by straight white men. This makes a lot of sense given that it was trying to imagine the future of a society that was, in the late 70s/early 80s, predominantly white and culturally heteronormative.
While BR2049 does a good job of projecting that particular vision of the future forward and adjusting it in some respects to accommodate our current cultural sensibilities, it also leaves a lot of possibilities on the table. This is a common failing of modern science fiction, especially cyberpunk fiction, which is almost doggedly stuck in its 1980s vision of the future. The film flirts with some transhumanist issues, but it doesn’t want to dive in with both feet. For a world in which artificial humans are a reality and AI companions are common, BR2049 remains stubbornly committed to binary gender norms and makes no attempt to grapple with race.
You could make the case that exploring these concepts would make the film feel less like Blade Runner and more like something else. Perhaps. While The Culture Tsar certainly enjoyed the movie, it raised enough issues (or rather it didn’t raise them) that he would love to see addressed in a different film.