'Blade Runner' Update Evokes Colder, Isolated World
In 1982, iconic filmmaker Ridley Scott imagined the dystopian world of 2019 as overcrowded, cynical, polluted and inhabited not only by humans but also by their genetically engineered look-alikes called replicants.
In 2017, Denis Villeneuve creates Blade Runner 2049. As the lines between humanity and artificial intelligence are blurred, once again, both films probe the nature of life and its moral implications.
Ryan Gosling interprets Blade Runner K, a police officer and a replicant himself, programmed to exterminate his own kind. But along the way, he comes face to face with his own humanity.
K, an introvert, lives with Joi, played by Ana de Armas, a beautiful, loving companion but a digital application. Their intangible relationship highlights the isolation and artificiality around them.
The dystopian world is ruled by a genius villain, bioengineer-tycoon Niander Wallace, played by Jared Leto.
Harrison Ford reprises his original Blade Runner character, Officer Rick Deckard, to team up with K on his mission.
"The original film proposed a future in which humanity had reached a point where cities were overpopulated, there was a lot of suffering, a challenge between classes, and this story continues on most of those themes in an interesting way," Ford said.
"The challenges with the environment have progressed where there are life-and-death issues, and science has loosened its moral constraints and is willing to develop a biological creature identical to a human being," he said.
Villeneuve's precise and orderly future is anchored in the original but finds its own vision reflecting our social and political anxieties, 30 years later.
