Blade Runner isn't only the best science fiction movie of all time, it is also the best movie of all time. There never was and there never will be a movie to top Blade Runner and ...
No, wait: there's Blade Runner 2049, a rare gem of a sequel that excelled its predecessor.
Okay? Are we on the same page here? Yes? Great.
Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 are two sides of one coin that ask one question: what is it to be human? And even: what do we do to deserve our humanity? The Blade Runner movies ask us these questions. Whereas Blade Runner follows our protagonist through the movie, self-assured and comfortable in his humanity (where, in fact, he is not human, at all), Blade Runner 2049 follows our replicant protagonist through that movie, so lost and afraid, but growing into his. The irony in both these movies is that it takes the soulless replicants, striving for something they don't have, to teach us what we take for granted: our humanity.
What can be said about the Blade Runner movies that haven't been said before?
This:
The Blade Runner movies are the finest, most successful pieces of fan fiction ever to be realized.
Think about it for a moment. Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It was an entire world, with all the buildings disintegrating into 'kibbles,' people reduced to idiocy from radiation holding dead-end jobs on the pretext of keeping a society functioning: a society that had simply given up hope. So, what did people turn to? A VR religion that was a sham based upon the Sisyphean Greek myth, just so they could feel something, and a police force that had long ago (to nobody's knowledge) been taken over by the androids in their next step to take over the world. And, frankly, nobody in that story was likable, not our gum shoe, nor his wife, nor the Rachael android. They were all a selfish, indistinct, navel-gazing lot.
Ick.
So, how do you take all that in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and put it on the big screen?
You don't.
What the screenwriters, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, did was to re-craft the book into the story they wanted to read or to see: Blade Runner. That is to say, they wrote the best piece of fan-fiction in existence. They took the characters in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and entirely changed the story around them, then entirely changed them, leaving their most basic motivations, to re-realize (or, in Battlestar: Galactica-parlance 'reimagine') the story to what we see on the screen today. But not only the screenwriters get credit for this, but the actor who played the relicant Roy Batty, Ruger Hauer, made his own contribution that is "perhaps the most moving death-soliloquy in cinematic history." They made a movie that had it all: life, death, love and redemption.
How can you top that?
You can't. Or so I thought. Then came Blade Runner 2049. What director Denis Villeneuve did was to replicate the movie Blade Runner, and almost exactly at that, but then turn everything on its head. Instead of the replicants not knowing they were replicants (as was the case for Deckard and Rachael), our leading leads, K and Joi, knew exactly what they were and their place in the world, but then Blade Runner 2049 changed the game when the movie introduced the game-changer, a baby.
For, unto us a child is born.
So, Blade Runner 2049, a Christmas movie?
And, like the original Blade Runner, this new movie asked the question. Now that the replicants have had a baby, what is the status of this child? And, since the replicants have had a baby, what is now their status? Furthermore, what is the weight, what is the value we, as humans, place on our children? The movie shows humanity treating both humans and replicants as material, but the replicants, when they learn that there is a child among them, they place everything on this one hope. Just as Children of Men showed us the very simple message: No children; no hope. Blade Runner 2049 gave the opposite message: One child; all hope. What is the value we place on a child, on children, on people, on the person sitting across from us. Blade Runner 2049 shows people and replicants as worthless because they are valued as such, then turns everything around and says just one child can change all that.
And, at the end of the movie, a Dad whose given up on everything, including himself, gets to meet his child he's never seen, and we get to see the light of hope, of love, reignite in the eyes of a man whose heart had gone stone-cold. Blade Runner showed Deckard as a machine, moving through the world, doing his job, just because what else was there to do? Blade Runner 2049 gave Deckard his redemption. The two movies are one movie, a complete story arc that took 40 years to tell.
What did Blade Runner teach me?
- Maybe I've internalized this lesson for so long that I needed to be reminded of this in Blade Runner, but it taught me you don't have to be a human being to be human, and, conversely, being a human being does not grant you a free-pass to your humanity. The most human characters in these movies are the replicants, struggling, striving to earn their humanity, and they do, even if they don't live to see this victory. The lost, soulless characters are the crowds and crowds of people doing their jobs, going from a to b for no reason at all.
- There is shame in being a writer of fan-fiction, and rightfully so: most fan fiction is of the Mary Sue-variety and has too many flaws for just one blog entry (and that is why I have a metric ton of blog entries addressing these errors). But what is fan fiction, at its heart? It is an homage to the source material. Good fan fiction – Blade Runner, Galaxy Quest, American Gods and (ahem) My Sister Rosalie – retell and reshape the original so that you love the original more from what you've read in the retelling. "I write fan fiction." Sure, you can be ashamed of saying that, but know this: you're in very good company.
- You have time. Both movies are 'slow' and have been criticized as being as such. But what is the payoff. You spend a lot of time with these characters, doing nothing: eating, looking at photos, walking in the rain, hanging out at a bar. Their cares become yours, and the payoff is that their lives have meaning and so do their deaths. To die here, in these movies, mean something, and, at that death, that story ends forever, and you don't get it back. These are my stories: my characters spend a lot of time with each other, talking, not understanding each other, and, finally, caring, and when a glimmer of connection appears for my characters, it means something to the readers who have invested all this time in my stories, and it means something to me. It's okay to spend the time, doing 'nothing,' in your stories when your characters matter to you, not only is it 'okay' to do this, but it's a measure of respect, and gives your characters grace that the world does not give them and does not give us.
The Blade Runner movies have shown me what humanity can be in a cold, uncaring world, and from that has shown me that writing can be something that you care about, that writing can be beautiful.
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