The intention seems to be to visually connect the circles of human eye (but it might equally well be the eye of a replicant, a sort of copy organism) to a non-organic reflection of the same form. For example, the discussion revolving around copies and reflections is expressed in numerous ways.Īfter the opening shot, an extreme close-up of an eye, there is a cut to a large cylinder-shaped object that we assume to be some kind of funnel. We witness the so-called “baseline test” of a replicant twice in Blade Runner 2049, and two mantra-like words recur: ”interlinked” and ”cells”, which are emblematic for the complex interconnectivity of the film’s strands of themes and motifs. In the Blade Runner universe humanity as a whole has to reconcile itself with a perverted version of life as we currently know it, in a world poisoned by decay and extreme cynicism. In the latter film the parents pretend that their robot son is a ”real boy” – this very expression is echoed in Blade Runner 2049, probably a deliberate reference – and in the epilogue the situation is inverted, since the artificial boy settles for the copy of his “mother”, who has been dead for centuries. The temptation to settle for an artificial substitute is a theme also found in the two Solaris adaptations ( by Tarkovsky, 1972 by Soderbergh, 2002) and in Spielberg’s A.I. But the more authentic they feel, the more comforting they are to a well-functioning replicant. There are fluid lines of demarcation: memories are implanted in the replicants to make their reactions and behaviour more human, but the recollections are artificial in the sense that they are staged, because it is forbidden to use real memories. (There is also an enclosure with input from others from various interesting Facebook discussions.)ĭenis Villeneuve‘s follow-up to Ridley Scott‘s celebrated Blade Runner from 1982 twines Gordian knots of thematic strands like authenticity (humanity), copies (the manufactured replicants), and various types and degrees of reflections. Nevertheless, this article shall delineate some impressions, ideas and thoughts that have reached the surface. So far the author has three screenings under his belt, and it is still not easy to mobilise the analytical part of the brain. Blade Runner 2049 is so powerful, the canvas so wide, the cast of characters so big, and the plot sufficiently complex, that the first encounter with the film can only be reconnaissance.
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