Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel to the original movie from 1982. Before watching and then writing this I did not watch the original, mostly because I did not know about it. Honestly, I only knew about this movie because of that one picture (the one that’s the featured image for this post), and a meme that seems to follow Ryan Gosling’s acting career. Most modern internet memes are really hard to explain well; they’re like a “if you know, you, know” kind of thing, but it pretty much comes from Ryan Gosling playing different characters that have very hyperbolic character traits, and then people wanting to “be that character”. This didn’t have anything to do with my viewing experience, but I thought this might help to serve as some backstory.

Anyway, even though I had not watched the original movie, I had no trouble following the story or understanding any of the characters. I did and still do not know the start of this world and how it got to the point that it is during the movie, even so I feel it did a great job of telling a well-encapsulated story. The story follows the police officer/blade runner and replicant, K, through a seemingly post-apocalyptic and cyberpunk Los Angeles. Replicants are basically human-like androids that were made to work as slaves. But when the replicants inevitably rebelled, a new model of replicants, the blade runners, were made; whose sole purpose is to track down and kill the fugitive replicants. Some of this was explained during the beginning of the movie, but I really just learned about it through plot summaries and such of the first movie. I won’t be going over that for this post, so you can read about it here if you’d like.

I’m bringing up the original so much (even though this post isn’t about it) because when after watching 2049, there are two main takeaways I have and there’s one feeling that’s I’ve felt cast across the entire movie. First I want to go over one of the takeaways, and that being the…

Crafted Tension

When watching some scenes of this movie, there was a certain level of tension present that I think comes from the vfx(visual effects), music, set design, scriptwriting, story and probably world building. For a lot of areas that are shown there is usually a layer of fog laying on the ground. A few times when he went to a new place, there would be a scene of K walking through the fog with this drowning music in the background. I feel that the almost muddied kind of music really helped with the immersion of the scene. While searching for images and videos to put in this section, I found through a reddit post that cinematographically, this effect is called a volumetric haze. This is done to add some level of pressure or sense of mystery, as we are not able to see that much farther in front of us as viewers. This could result in a feeling of uneasiness since we have no way to really tell what is going happen once something is found in the fog. Especially since for many of these just walking scenes, there are long breaks in between dialogue. Most of the scene then is reliant on the quality of the acting to further tell the story like what the character is thinking and what discoveries they are making.

Another method this movie uses to build tension is with the set design. Since this is set in a post-apocalyptic world, there are many places that are in ruins and are mostly deserted. Many times in these kinds of worlds, when there are widely deserted areas, they are usually deserted for a reason. The areas they show in this movie are ones that are either filled with gas, radiation, or it’s an area that’s just been turned into a garbage dump. Specifically the scenes in the garbage dump, we are immediately shown that it is a very dangerous area by K basically getting his car shot down, and having the people who shot him down try to kill him and scrap his car. Even in the area that isn’t in complete ruin, the main city of LA isn’t much better. It’s very common in these types of futuristic, dystopian cities that it is always either night or raining. This movie often shows K walking through the low-ground streets that are filled with shady people and autonomous robots doing various trash jobs. With all the bright, futuristic lights and holograms just above head, down below is the dark streets that are prone to all kinds of heinous acts. Since the main character is a cop, we don’t see this happen to him much; but for anyone who is familiar with these kinds of settings, if anything were to happen it would not be an irregular occurrence. So I think when these scenes are playing out, that warrants some level of hesitancy.

Feeling of Hopelessness

Throughout the events of the movie, there is a theme of hopelessness, specifically with the main character, K. Because K is a replicant, the humans in the police station are shown to treat him like less than trash, plus he doesn’t do anything or even react very much which implies that this happens all the time. He is a different type of replicant to normal ones, he is a blade runner. Blade runners only reason for existing is to kill fugitive replicants. It seems that the police keep K on a very short leash; constantly reminding him that his job is to do what he is told, and if he doesn’t then he will be gotten rid of. If his mental state even so much as changes a bit, then he is considered to have deviated from his “baseline” requirements. Just watching the scenes of his checkups after the missions gives a kind of eerie and unnerving feeling.

But we start to see K’s downward spiral of hopelessness after the first mission of the movie. After hunting down another replicant, he searches around and finds a doll that is familiar to him. This doll hints to a chance that a child could have been born from two replicants. Replicants are created, so they do not have any past memories of their own. Instead they are given memories as a way for them to have some sort of personality. So for something from his memories to be real and for it to be involved with a naturally born replicant child, is very dangerous. If he turns out to be that child then he would be tracked down to either be experimented on or killed. This would also mean that he has done horrible things like hunting and killing replicants not as a blade runner and fellow replicant, but as a human. The actor does a really good job throughout the movie showing the deterioration of K’s mental state. In the beginning he acts stoic and robotic, without much emotion; but the more he learns about this child the more human he starts to act, showing more emotion which helps the watcher better connect with the character. Later on, K goes to see a scientist that specializes in memories, and that’s when we first see K’s mental state start to break.

After K sees the scientist, before he can even get to his car he gets taken in by the police. He gets brought to what I believe is their chief (I’m not sure if her position was said) probably to be killed or locked up. He manages to escape thanks to that chief, only for her to be killed by a higher up soon after, leaving K with no real allies anymore. Now on the run, K goes to find some person in hiding that could give him some important answers and maybe some direction to follow going forward. He manages to find this person who turns out to be someone from the first movie who I do not know since I haven’t seen it. Regardless, it is clear that this person is important, and that they do not wish to be found. But he does get found because the police had a tracker on K, so they capture the important person and leave K to die.

K does not die yet but instead gets taken in by some desert scavenger group. It’s there that they tell K that he was never child, he was always just a regular replicant. The memories that he had checked by the scientist were not his; they were actually the scientist’s memories. So K is not the special child that was tasked with some grand purpose; he is just a normal blade runner with a messed up head that has failed at his job. Throughout the whole story, K could never really seen to catch a break. He just kept getting hit and hit and hit, without any chance for him to catch his breath. This makes you almost feel pitiful for him as a watcher, because there isn’t many moments where he isn’t shown to be suffering. K is a tragic character to the point where the only place that it looks like his life has the chance of heading up, is right before his death.

Ambiguity

When watching the movie I noticed a lot ambiguous story telling in terms of the world and characters. Now many of the points that I noticed could very well be explained in the first movie, but since I have not seen it, I am going to assume that they were intentional choices by the people that made this movie. So, what I mean by ambiguous story telling is that there are many things in which we are not told why they are the way that they are. The whole world outside of the main city is in ruins, and we are not told why. There are some small details that we could use to make guesses as to why, but there is no concrete answer that is given. There are also examples of some kind of higher government that seems to potentially run the world, yet we do not know how these structures of power actually work. This is kind of story telling serves a number of reasons, but the biggest one that I can think of that I see often in other media, is so writers don’t write themselves into a corner. The less they tell us about the world, the less rules they have to follow so they end up having more freedom in their writing. We are told just enough so we are able to tell what is happening, and that’s perfect.

Another example of this is through how the characters act. As I mentioned before, this takes place in a cyberpunk dystopia. It is common in these settings for all manners of bad things to take place, and yet none of the characters really react when they happen. For the watcher, these things are shocking since we wouldn’t normally encounter those kinds of events, but if the characters were to acted shocked and surprised, it would seem out of place seeing as they live in the world and should be used to it. The characters are not shown actively dealing with or even talking about what is around them, so we can safely assume that it is just another day for them. I admit this kind of writing may not be intentional, maybe they just didn’t think about it as much as I am. But if they did, then I give even greater props to the scriptwriters and directors. If I had seen the first movie it is very possible that many of my questions would be answered, but I like that I don’t totally know what is going on. I find being left with a bunch of questions much more interesting than having all the answers.

Implementations for Future Systems

If I look at just this movie, there are still many things that come to mind that could improve how we interact with our recommender systems. All of the ideas that came to mind all revolved around improving or even just fleshing out how we categorize movies and shows. If you go onto a service like Netflix or Disney+, the most they’ll have is sections like: action, thriller, romance, kid’s movies and things along those lines. I feel like it would be much better if it was categorized by features involved in the film.

Blade Runner 2049 follows the somewhat depressing like of it’s main character. It could be beneficial for these streaming services to have a tool that could search for things to watch by character types or emotions or maybe even how well an actor does at portraying a character. Sometimes it’s entertaining to watch a bad actor play a kind of goofy character, or if you want to watch a very good actor play a complicated character very well, it might be convenient to be able to sort by those features. It might also be nice to sort by what kinds of emotions the movie is trying to portray. Some services like Netflix have something like this already, but I feel it is very bare bones. If this feature was better fleshed out, it should result in more frequent and differing viewings of various medias.

One more thing that could easily be implemented, would be searching and recommending by quality. I couldn’t count how many times I look on Netflix and something looks like a lot of budget went into it, only for it to be bad or even just plain boring. If some program could take the real reviews from watchers, and sort it from best to worst, then it’ll be more difficult to get recommended something you won’t enjoy.

Also, if there was a way to sort through not only quality story-wise, but quality technicality-wise. Blade Runner 2049 is a masterpiece of filmmaking visually. Not only is the set pieces and effects really well built, but Blade Runner 2049 is filmed in a wider aspect ratio that is perfect for the big screen in a movie theater. I never got to hear it but from what people online have said, because of the way the sound design is done, when watching it in the theater the droning and pressurized sounds during some of the scenes felt like it was engulfing the theater. If there was a feature that could better categorize movies like this that are top of the class, it would probably help to prevent the endless search of what to watch on Netflix and maybe help people discover some new stuff.