Few commercial movies have managed to walk a stranger path than Blade Runner.
When it was first released, it was, quite simply, a commercial flop.
The film underwent one of the first 'test-audience' exercises back in 1982, and it seemed that its cryptic dialogue and noir-like narrative proved too intense and cognitively dissonant for test audiences. As a result, a 'compromise' version was released, which featured a happy ending and off-screen voice narration -throughout the entire length of the film- performed by Harrison Ford (in order to spoon-feed the 'complex' narrative).
...And this was the very version which flopped.
Blade Runner's original budget was somewhere around 28 million dollars, of which 17 million was originally recouped.
Gross profit figures for the movie have since surpassed its original budget, but this happened slowly, due to its soundtrack becoming successful in its own right -and sought after-, and due to the cultish status that the movie achieved over time.
As many as eight (8!) 'authorized' versions exist of the original theatrical release, of which it is now more or less understood that 2007's 'The Director's Cut' is now canon.
The Director's Cut of the original Blade Runner does not tie up its narrative with off-screen narration, sweet endings or 'feel good wraps': it shows overpopulation leading to isolation, engineered beings behaving more naturally than ‘genuine human DNA’, as it shows genetically engineered beings who may well have a soul, whereas humans, increasingly and throughout, become dehumanized.
The film tackles both the marvel of technological advances and the alienation and isolation
embedded in modern, disjointed societies. The subtle but firm music during replicant Rory’s death
scene also suggests the questions: ‘Did
Rory Batty have a soul? Was it legal to kill him because he sought a different
life than what was planned out for him by the ‘architects of society’?
The Director’s Cut also revealed
Deckard as a possible replicant, ignorant of his own condition, and intentionally kept in the dark. Additionally, Deckard’s
boss, and Tyrell himself -the ‘maker’ who deems others subhuman- may ultimately
share this same condition, according to director Ridley Scott. Vangelis’ score and sound design
planted the seeds of doubt over these cryptic subjects and delivered a hefty part of the emotional complexity -within the Director’s Cut- aiding the cryptic, multilayered web of messages to become more intuitively explicit.
So why a sequel?
What does Blade Runner 2049 add to the Replicant narrative?
Is it really necessary to look any further into such a dystopian future?
The archetypal, complex, multilayered messages embedded
in Blade Runner have derived into a cult-ural
phenomenon. The very system it criticises –and its inhabitants– did not originally
give it a chance, perhaps because “there’s no psychologist to go to when it is
an entire species that has gone berserk”, as American ethno-botanist Terence
McKenna once said. Society has precipitated into this dystopia. Something about
it now rings true in the collective unconscious, the overarching ego of modern
contemporary culture.
This is the modern myth emergent from Blade
Runner: what does it mean to be human.
Blade Runner asks what it means to be human. It blurs the lines between human and 'machine', from both sides: that is the goal. The ultimate question is not whether or not Deckard is human - although RIdley Scott's Director's Cut (now canon) most definitely points out that Deckard is, in fact, a replicant...oh yes indeed.
But the real question is ‘what does it mean to be human’, as the lives of the replicants are more human than the lives of the ‘real’ humans. Real humans seem to live like robots, whereas ‘robots’ are, at the very least, trying to rise above their emotional limitations.
The world is, not-so-slowly, becoming the barren technological 'eco-collapse' that Blade Runner depicts. And it must be remembered that the film portrays, at its core, a deeply dystopian world. Blade Runner 2049 has taken these postulates and deployed a further number of questions, derived from the philosophical standpoints which the original movie postulated. But no definite answers are given, even to the ever-pending question of whether Deckard is, actually a replicant, because, apparently, it isn't enough to have had Ridley Scott proclaim this out loud.
In the open-ended treatment of both Blade Runner and its sequel, Blade Runner 2049 -directed by Denis Villeneuve-, the directors have chosen to open up avenues of possibilities within the original themes present in the book that both movies are loosely based on: 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?', written by Philip K. Dick.
Where the original Blade Runner (director's cut) chose to permit a romantic relationship between a human/replicant and a replicant, and heroic behaviours exercised by replicants, its sequel delves further into the blurring of 'synthetic' and 'natural' behaviour: replicants seem to be able to display what can only be described as a conscience, where humans often seem to lack this very quality.
Our modern culture is rushing towards Scott’s and Villeneuve's dystopian vision, and it requires myths and warnings that articulately observe the complexity of our situation, addressing the brutal power we now possess to modify the environment, and to modify and to enslave each other.
CRISPER -actual genetic engineering technology for the alteration of human embryos' DNA- is now a legal reality in several countries, and it's enjoying its first years of infancy. Genetic engineering is no longer an embryonic endeavour.
Scott’s
warning in his original -then final cut- vision was overlooked at the time of the
movie’s original release. Its multilayered complexity was not culturally allowed to
communicate one of the most perplexing and questioning messages the viewing public could ever receive:
Who, here, is human.
It is actions that will determine the answer. And replicants often perform actions which elevate them over the human behaviour displayed. ...Pharmaceutical mega-gigant Glaxo-Smith-Kline announced, two years ago, a £32bn (that's Thirty-Two Billion Pounds) budget for what they have coined as the ‘medicine of the future’: ‘simply’
modifying electronic impulses in the nervous system, ‘writing’ new bio-electronic
code, overriding the autonomous nervous system, via microchip implant, to ‘address
diabetes and asthma’.
...As a
collective of organisms in cognitively dissonant denial about their own condition,
our society is increasingly becoming a synthetic reproduction. We inhabit
a virtual reality, product of the ‘condensation of human activity’, the
‘noosphere’, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin noted back in 1922.
The gritty future that Ridley Scott portrayed has now proven realistic
and believable. Denis Villeneuve's sequel has chosen to deploy this world fully, expand it and surround it with further questions, many of which bear strong resemblances to questions our society is currently asking. ...Blade Runner 2049 is a brutally and densely imagined reality of 'nearby dystopia' with such subtle warnings that, perhaps, the only way for
us to understand its real message is to absorb its carefully scored
choreography, weaving the narrative waves.
