Blade Runner is a film that has been with me since I discovered it on late-night TV and VHS in the mid 80s, and has grown to be a film that I hold very close to my heart even as I'm able to step away and see it for its beauty and its flaws.
I'm really uncertain of what to feel about a sequel I didn't feel was warranted or wanted and the choices that were made, even if done with love for the original.
Having seen it now, I feel like they had an interesting continuation that was unexpected and worth exploring; so I felt relieved and pleased ultimately with the narrative choices they made- however ultimately it didn't make me feel anything the way the original did. There's still a lot to unpack and some of it detracts from my ability to say "this was a good sequel to Blade Runner".
One of my biggest letdowns has to be the musical score. My first thoughts were "this could be good, they've started to capture the spirit of the original Vangelis score"- but as the movie went on, I noticed that there was almost no "score" to speak of- rather, just occasional ambient humming sounds and synthesizer effects that were jarring, and in some cases, indistinguishable from sound effects. Where are the themes? No "Blade Runner Blues". No "Love Theme". Nothing to provide an emotional emphasis to anything happening on screen. The only scene where I felt the music amplifying the narrative was K's exploration of the furnace- but it wasn't because I felt like it was a well-composed piece of music, rather it was just ominous minor chords that screamed "TENSION RISING".
And there were numerous questions I couldn't shake after thinking about the film for a bit- and would love others' perspectives on these:
- Why were the rebelling replicants even necessary for this story? They really served no purpose other than to "rescue" K after the Vegas fight. The themes of identity, the implications of what it means to choose to be human, and the ramifications of a replicant who can reproduce were all evident without their presence in the film. Their direct involvement in the story made the everything feel somehow less personal, which I felt was a bit of a mistake.
- Why was K shot down over the junkyard? Minor quibble, but the whole sequence seemed pointless and easily left on the cutting room floor. K is conveniently rescued by Luv and moves on to the orphanage, never even questioning what happened. Everything that happens after would be the same as it would have without his being shot down.
- When K goes to visit the memory-maker, LAPD immediately knows about it and there are police waiting for him. Yet when he shows up with Deckard at the end, no one's the wiser. He's still wanted by the LAPD as a rogue replicant, and whatever means they had of finding him there before wouldn't have changed.
- Why did K have her memories to begin with?
- I'm still not entirely sure what K's character arc actually was. At first, he's the duty-bound replicant Blade Runner. Then his world is turned upside down when he feels he might be the "miracle" offspring of a replicant. So his search for Deckard becomes more personal at that point. But once he finds out he is not the child, what reason does he have to come back for Deckard other than because they told him to kill Deckard (which itself seemed contrived to create that conflict and push K toward the climax of the story)? I feel like the rebels were meant to help explicltly convey the ideology that some things are worth dying for- and in doing so, replicants can be considered to be alive or having a soul; but I never got the sense that K had really adopted that perspective.
- How did Wallace even come to be aware of the discovery of Rachel's bones and of her offspring? Luv just shows up at the morgue, collecting the bones- but there's never any indication that information was available to them. I can give a pass to Wallace knowing that Tyrell had made some strides toward replicants who could reproduce, but I couldn't see how Wallace would have known specifically of K's find or of Rachel as that achievement.
- Without knowing how replicants are actually engineered and produced, it's impossible to know why Wallace couldn't produce enough to meet the demand he had, but it just seems like an arbitrary restriction that isn't given enough explanation.