BR2049
Somewhere in the future, after the ecological collapse of the 2020’s there is a naked tree. Next to that tree we find two replicants, bioengineered humans created by corporations.
The replicants are almost indistinguishable from real humans in appearance and behavior but are designed with specific purposes in mind—typically labor, combat, or pleasure. The original models were given a lifespan of four years to prevent them from developing full emotional maturity, which could lead to rebellion. We are taking about Blade Runner of course.
The central theme is whether replicants, despite being artificial, possess genuine consciousness, emotions, and a right to life, raising questions about identity, humanity, and morality.
The two replicants are an old one and a new one. The new replicant is meant to hunt the old one, retire it. Before the old replicant comes to the brutal end of his life, he tells the new replicant, that he is no good, because “he had never seen a miracle”. Later next to the tree a yellow wildflower (buttercup) is found. That is the first miracle. The second miracle is that under the tree is buried the first replicant who gave birth to a child.
I want to analyse some concepts of the film on a meta level : The replicants are product of a post-ecological society. Man – nature balance has been broken. Human industry has consumed the natural world but gave birth to a bioengineered humans, who are hybrids between the natural and the artificial, man fear and exploits these. Nature is subjugated to extinction, while at the same time the beyond human, beyond natural, symbolizes the new hope and the new fear.
Like the great Odyssey the main protagonist is searching for the truth, meaning and his own origin. Hid search turns obedience to the search for identity, freedom and purpose. Most of the film is centered around the theme of lack of presence of the origin. Replicants lack natural origins, nature itself is missing. In the context of lack of origin, what can we call real ? That applies at the same time to humans and replicants. We humans outside the film should also identify and contemplate the loss of presence of the origin, of touch with nature, of touch with what it means to be human, before the post industrial period.
Replicants lack origin in the same way modern humans lack divine grounding. They are thrown into existence without ancestry, tradition, or natural belonging. Their implanted memories parallel old metaphysical illusions: comforting but false anchors. K, the protagonist, tries to reaffirm his inherited meaning : maybe he is the one, being born, not manufactured. In maybe the strongest point of the film, he is forced to come it terms, that he lacks this inherited meaning, a hint for us to come in terms there is no inherited meaning in our world today, he will have to reaffirm his life without a given origin. K chooses his own values, to save Deckard in order to reunite with his daughter, which doesn’t come from any higher source, not god, not nature, for sure not the system.
The replicant child is a symbol : it is not simply an origin, but a rupture — life can emerge where it “shouldn’t”. That child is the dream weaver, a narrative inventor, in order to sustain meaning in life. Origin is an act, not in the past, through the death of origins, the temptation of illusion and the fragile emergence of a new life. This is, by the way, echos a very strong philosophy of life affirmation.
Beyond 2049
The main theme again is the loss of origin, the stuff that made great people like poet Friedrich Hölderlin go mad.
“Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.”
(“But where danger is, there also grows the saving power.”) — Patmos
We are now in hypermodernity, where modernity managed to fulfill its manifesto, cut ties with the past, and increate time acceleration many folds. History takes less and less place in the mind of people, and the speculative, rootless future, more and more. There is an increasing black void looming in a distance, its lacking essence.
Being cut off from the roots of nature and history, we are also cut off from our sense of identity. So we surround ourselves with illusions. In Blade Runner 2029 one of the most beautiful scenes of the film, the replicant K makes love for the first time with Joi, his holographic AI companion (A traditional archetype of mother, lover, seer or helper ?). He hires another replicant body to enact it. It’s “love” three steps removed from origin, yet it feels emotionally genuine.
The scene captures both tenderness and deep melancholy — love as projection, but still meaningful. In an interview about the film the cast and crew were interviewed about this scene. In the making of the scene there was the meta principles of the scene itself: the technology that produces multiplicity, experiencing multiplicity through technology by acting a scene following another person, on the set they said it was like a third person created from the two actresses.
In the end K has to faces a choice when he is confronted with a huge holographic of Joi (what does she symbolizes to K, this huge erotic figure ?), the gýgr giantess also symbolizes the illusion of conformity to K, at that moments he decides to rebel, he goes and saves Deckard while almost sacrificing his own life, he accepts his lack of ability of achieve a comfort illusion of pre-determined identity.