Blade Runner 2049

This is the second film I have done this for, after Drive, and honestly I am not sure it is a review. It is more me trying to get down what I took from it, because I watched it and then I just could not stop thinking about it. I had planned to wait a month after Drive before watching another one. I made it about a week.

I watched it years ago and got almost none of it. Watching it now, with different years behind me and different things to care about, it was a completely different film. The story did not change. I did. That is the thing about going back to something, the context you bring is half of it. Almost all of it is shot at night, dark and late, and that is how it sits in you afterward.

I should probably say what it is about, except I got so excited I almost went straight to the part that got me. It is set in a time where Earth is wrecked, famine, most people gone off to colonies, and there are replicants, humans that are made instead of born. An old company built the first ones, it went wrong, there was a war, and a new company under a man called Wallace took over and built a new generation that obeys. Wallace has a god complex. He wants to know how the old replicants once managed to have a child, because a child born from them changes everything, it means they are not just property. Our guy, Kai, is one of the new obedient ones, and his job is hunting down the old ones. He pulls on a thread, a date carved into a tree that matches a memory of his, a wooden horse, and piece by piece his life starts to mean something to him, because piece by piece it looks like he might be that child. The miracle.

The thing that got me, and I think it gets everyone, is the question of how special you are. I think about this a lot. I see life through my own eyes, so some part of me assumes I am the main character, that I am the one, that I am special. And you are, in a way, the odds of being born at all are insane. But it gets louder when you are lonely, when you are low on people, because then you only ever see through yourself. That is the whole theme. And it hit me hard the moment Kai learns he is not special. He is sitting in front of the resistance leader, the woman missing an eye, and she tells him the child was a girl, that he was never the one. You think you were the one. You're not. I saw it land on his face more than in anything he said. Ryan did an incredible job, I could not picture anyone else in it, I said the same about Drive and I will say it here too.

The part I keep coming back to is Joy, the hologram girl who lived with him, made by Wallace. Her whole job is to make him feel loved and chosen, and the entire time she is telling him he is special, that she always knew. Then there is this scene with a giant Joy advertisement, and it leans down and calls him Joe, the generic name the product gives to every man who buys one. The billboards behind her say everything you want to hear. That landed strangely close, because it is a little like talking to AI now. Sometimes the thing answering you is built to tell you what you want to hear, and it is worth remembering that. I think you can relate to this film more today than when it came out.

So Kai finds out he is no one in particular, just another stranger handed memories that made him feel chosen, and he loses his meaning. And this is the question the film answers, the one I had in my head before I even put it on. Can a life mean anything if you are nobody, if you are meaningless?

The answer it gives is why it stays with me. Near the end Kai has two orders pulling at him, the resistance wants one thing, his boss wants the opposite, and he ignores both and does what he thinks is right instead, which is getting a father, Deckard, back to his daughter. He stopped being obedient. He made a choice. Deckard asks him why he is doing this, why he is saving him, and Kai just says go, go see your daughter. And he dies in the snow, and he is smiling, and that smile hit me really hard. His life meant something at the end, not because he turned out to be special, he wasn't, but because he chose one thing and did it.

If I had to put down what the film is saying, it is three things. Meaning comes from choice. You should not romanticize loneliness, because Kai looks stoic and quiet from the outside and is actually living a pretty miserable, lonely life, and the film does not let you make that look beautiful. And agency is everything, agency over your own life is the thing that gave his any weight. I have read the same idea in other books, in different clothes, so I do not think I am making it up.

That is what I took. I am probably misreading parts, I am not even sure whether Deckard is a replicant or not, and it does not matter. The guy turns out to be nobody, and he still finds a way to make his life mean something. He chooses, and then he goes.