Blade Runner 2049 reminds mankind of degrading conscience, extinction

Films have envisioned mankind’s obscure future in many destructive manifestations. The obliteration of the atmosphere through natural disasters, a catastrophic nuclear destruction in a final war of the worlds or the first and final malevolent encounter with a superior alien species on earth, all of them seeded by one common theme. Humans are destined to self-destruct. The end presented, however, is never devoid of hope. Human supremacy almost always kindles a new dawn.
 
Blade Runner 2049 does not give in to this lack of imagination. Picking up from its prequel, Blade Runner, the sci-fi classic set 30 years apart, director Denis Villeneuve plunges the viewers directly into the chaos of a new world order. Like biblical mythology speaks of a paradise lost after god created man in his image, Villeneuve’s world is a post-apocalyptic rendition of man’s war for liberation with its near-perfect bots.
 
Yet, Blade Runner 2049 is not scripted to demonise a futuristic world that delivers an action-packed climactic burst of wars. It delves deeper into the psyche of machines that aspire to be “more human than humans”. The destruction that ensues with man’s first conflict with machines, thus, only forms the background of the film, and is a story told, but not as part of the script.
 
Instead, Villeneuve and his team of artistes have created three short films, which dramatise the events that took place in the time lag of 30 years after the first movie. These give a sneak preview and set the base for what unfolds in the film. While the new Blade Runner stands on its own, it’s advisable to watch the short stories to better appreciate the vision of its creators.
 

Blade Runner 2049

Set in a futuristic 2049, the ghastly town that becomes of Los Angeles is visualised in shades of black and grey, and the bright coloured wigs atop the heads of animated women only adds to its vulgarity. Living in cramped houses and strolling in dingy lanes, men breathe out animosity and the quality of life is at its modern worst. The giant screens tempt them to own a human-like bot and offer more food for a troubled mind than for the body. There is no dignity left in survival.
 
Walking among these men is Officer K, played by Ryan Gosling, a cop who is no more than a loyal pawn, a serial number and a battering ram of a robot tasked to maintain status quo. The absolute calm in his manner as a machine is a window to a tumultuous storm manifesting in his mind, which makes Gosling a perfect cast for the role. His interactions with his animated girlfriend, Joi, skilfully played by Ana de Arma, portrays him not as a hero who would lead a revolution, but as a machine — hatefully referred to as a skin job — longing for more.
 
Following orders to destroy his preceding generation of androids, K stumbles upon proof that among the bots once walked a woman who challenged their evolution by giving birth to a child. This sends him on a quest to find the old guard, once the best of Los Angeles Police Department, Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, who is an outlaw in hiding. Through the course of events that unfold, K discovers and rediscovers his own existence as a human and a robot. The lines blur so much that possessing a soul becomes meaningless by the end.
 
But the fear of androids evolving on their own is channelised by their new master, the blind creator Neander Wallace played by Jared Leto, into devilish anger. Though his screen-time equals a cameo, Leto takes the villain’s lack of emotions to its menacing depths.
 
The film is a visual spectacle that seeps in slowly, and takes the viewer from accepting a suffocating, futuristic world to hallucinating in it. The predictability of the storyline is an affordable casualty, which is bespeckled with the depth of characterisation.
 
For the people who have accepted this new universe as a recurring theme, some questions about the nature of humans versus machines are left to interpretation. The anti-climax preserves the storyline for a possible sequel, but ends the chapter with a remarkable scene of Gosling as Officer K, thought of only as man’s vanguard creation, making and then falling to his own human fate