And the blade runner this time out, K (Ryan Gosling), is a replicant who weathers the pain of being a robotic Uncle Tom, as his own kind views him as a traitor while humans see him as inferior.īlade Runner 2049’s racial text is oft-plumbed by the horror and sci-fi genres, recently and with far more success by Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Rupert Sanders’s Ghost in the Shell.

A police official, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), speaks of maintaining a wall between the humans and the replicants, so that each side knows their place in order to prevent revolution or chaos-language that recalls justifications given for repressing the actions of the civil rights movement. Replicants are explicitly referred to as slaves in the film, which offers a striking contrast from the thematic muddiness of its predecessor. Inasmuch as Scott’s concerned with psychology at all, it’s Deckard’s pain that’s prioritized, as the filmmaker paints a self-pitying portrait of a white man’s burden.Īrriving 35 years later, Denis Villeneuve’s self-consciously woke Blade Runner 2049 is similarly a product of its age. from a 1940s noir and a ragged cop from a 1980s action film. Harrison Ford’s Deckard, the central slave hunter, or “blade runner,” is a romanticized figure, a sexy and disenchanted blend of a rogue P.I. Scott isn’t blind to the strife of the replicants, as the film’s most powerful scenes concern the brutal deaths of these androids, but he’s so drunk on his now-iconic set design that he barely questions the story’s classist society. Remarkably disinterested in the sociopolitical relevance of its concept, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner follows a futuristic police precinct as it murders fugitive “replicants,” synthetic people who rebel against their enslavement.

Blade runner 2049 review