My Issue with Blade Runner 2049

                Okay, so I know that the movie is still about a year away, but there is an issue that has yet to be addressed about the new Blade Runner sequel.

For those of you who don’t know, Blade Runner is a 1982 Ridley Scott movie starring Harrison Ford. The movie is about a type of robot, called a replicant, that looks like a human and is used to preform labor on off world colonies. Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a Blade Runner, which is a detective who is specifically trained to spot these robots. He gets called in because a small group of replicants have broken away from one of those off world colonies and come to earth for unknown reasons. As Deckard begins his search for the escaped replicants, we learn more about them and the rules that govern their existence. Chief among them is that they are only allowed to live a certain number of years before they expire, which is why, as Deckard learns, they have returned to earth. They don’t want to expire and are seeking the head of the company that created them in hopes that he can extend their lifespan.

 

Harrison Ford as Deckard and Sean Young as Rachel

Another character that Deckard meets is Rachel, a Tyrell employee who swears up and down that she is a human, but Tyrell says is a replicant herself. This is proved when Deckard recalls memories of hers that she had supposedly never told anyone, but in actuality belong to the nieces of Tyrell’s CEO. They were programmed into her to make her more convincing as a human.

I understand this is a lot of explanation, but bear with me.

Throughout the movie, Deckard keeps having the same dream about a unicorn. A fellow officer, played by Edward James Olmos, has a calling card of leaving origami figures wherever he goes. At the end of the movie, it is revealed that he has left an origami unicorn in Deckard’s apartment where Rachel has been living with Deckard. Now it is heavily implied that Deckard himself is a replicant. The movie ends on a note of uncertainty for both him and Rachel.

 Edward James Olmos as Eduardo Gaff

The question of Deckard being a replicant has long been an issue of debate among fans of the movie. Ridley Scott himself threw his two cents in and said that Deckard is in fact a replicant. Which brings us to the issue of the upcoming Blade Runner 2049. First off, it is coming more than 30 years after the original. I’ve always had a problem with sequels that come 20+ years after the original. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule, Star Wars being among them. Of course, being that it is a science fiction movie, that does mean that the effects will be updated, which was always kind of distracting about the original. A movie with 30 yr old special effects is not gonna hold up that well, but the original also had a distinct visual style that kind of helps.

The second issue I have pertains to the issue of Deckard being a replicant. The smart way to go about this movie is to make it without Harrison Ford, or any mention of his character or of the events that transpired in the original film. The world of Blade Runner is big enough that you can make a separate story without interfering. The reason why I didn’t want Harrison Ford to be in the sequel is because now the mystery of the ending is ruined. It would be like Leo Dicaprio being in a sequel to Inception because it would clearly answer whether the top stopped spinning. Unlike Inception however, the mystery of Deckard isn’t clearly stated, it’s more hinted at. Deckard never asks “What am I?” he just gets a look. And now this subtle question is going to get a not so subtle answer, and that is going to piss a number of people off. Because again, replicants are only allowed to have the lifespan of 3 years, and if you look at Ford, there has clearly been a longer span of time than that. And it was addressed in the original movie that there are ways to increase lifespan, but they all have problems so the replicant wouldn’t get much of an expansion anyway. So Deckard has to be human, which completely contradicts what everyone has been saying.

Thirdly, the issue with a Blade Runner sequel is that the movie itself wasn’t a huge hit. It was a box office bomb and panned by critics, but in the years since its release, the movie has gotten quite the cult following and has gone from being a flop to hailed as a sci-fi masterpiece. With that said, I imagine a lot of people who watched the trailer to be asking a lot of questions. I mean, yeah Ryan Gosling and Jared Leto are in it, but what other reason will they have for going to see it? I guess depending on who you ask, that’s all the reason they will need.

 To its credit, the sequel does at least have the same visual style as the original

Now, before anybody wants to label me a fanboy that is just hating on something new, I’d like to make the following disclaimer: I’ve learned to approach such things with a less than completely shut off mind, while I do currently have issues with it so far, that’s not to say they won’t find a way around it. If the movie gets good enough reviews and other fans are saying they like it, then I will be more than happy to purchase a ticket. I’m just extremely nervous about it at this current time.

Rogue One vs The Force Awakens

Rogue One vs The Force Awakens

                Kathleen Kennedy might be one of the best things to happen to a franchise. Let me explain. Since she took over as the head of Lucasfilm, she made it clear that Star Wars would be open to a new generation of film makers, so that they may be given the chance to give their own vision to the Star Wars universe. That way, the films would not just be limited to one person’s idea of what it should be. This is similar to the way Kevin Feige has approached Marvel entertainment. While Kennedy and Feige are very much the ones in charge, they are more than happy to give their directors enough creative freedom to make the film they want.

                And that, oddly enough, is what my biggest criticism of George Lucas was. I’m willing to let the prequels go and just say “they sucked, now let’s move on with our lives”. I can forgive him for making sub par movies. What I can’t get over is that he is on record saying that Star Wars is restricted to his vision and what he wants. This is his brainchild and ain’t nobody gonna mess with it. He was once asked if someone came up to him with an idea for Episode VII, would he consider using it? Nope.

I don't really know what I'm supposed to take from this.Is he mansplaining what an opinion is?

                There are 2 issues I have with this. First of all, while George can certainly be credited for directing that first movie, what a lot of people tend to forget is that he didn’t have that much to do with the following 2 movies. And a good number of his original ideas for A New Hope were all scrapped and rewritten. If Star Wars had been his original vision, with as much control as he had over say, the prequels, then Star Wars probably wouldn’t have been the mega franchise that it is today, and I probably wouldn’t have wasted so much money on Darth Vader merch. I still would have wasted it, but it would probably be more Batman related. But I digress. The point is that with all things considered, it sounds like Lucas is taking a little more credit than he deserves.

                The second problem I have is that if you look at a number of today’s directors, including JJ Abrams, Christopher Nolan, Guillermo Del Toro, Rian Johnson, Joss Whedon, Peter Jackson, Ron Howard, Ridley Scott, and Brad Bird have all stated how much they love Star Wars and how much it impacted their careers. If you know your directors, you’ll notice that they all have very different styles. Whedon and Nolan, for example, have both made excellent sci-fi and superhero movies. But both have very different approaches. And yet, if I told you that either one was going to make a Star Wars movie, you’d probably get excited. Whedon actually confessed to owning 8 lightsabers. With such an array of talent all pointing to one movie as being the one that made them want to get into film making, it seems wrong to keep it restricted to one person’s idea of what it should and shouldn’t be. Especially when that one person is taking too much credit in the first place. I find it funny that the one criticism about the newer Star Wars movies is that they are just high budget fan films. Cause that's exactly what they are. They are films made by fans who grew up and want to make a movie of their own. And they found a studio who is willing to let them do that.

                And that idea of having two visions for the same series brings us to today’s topic, Force Awakens and Rogue One. One of the criticisms that a lot of people had of TFA was that it felt like it played it safe, it was the Star Wars  movie that we were used to. Although the argument could be made that TFA was the exact time to play it safe. Keep in mind, it had been ten years since the last prequel came out, and since then, all we had were an animated show and an animated movie that nobody bothered with. Seriously, who remembers the animated Clone Wars movie? So for all intents and purposes, we just kind of considered the franchise to be dead before TFA came along. This was the time to play it safe. It was the time to give us the Star Wars that we knew and loved. Think of it as a friend who you haven’t seen in a while but the last time you saw them, things didn’t end on the best of terms. But when you do see them after all these years, you just want to remember the good times you had with them. Sure that means you’re just remembering stuff from years ago, but it gives you a sign that things are looking up. And after you’ve had that first encounter, now you are more open to having some new experiences and making new memories now that you are older and more mature than the last time you met. To give you an idea of where I’m going with this, your friend is Star Wars, and that first encounter you have with them is The Force Awakens after being left with Revenge of the Sith. So yeah, TFA had a lot of stuff that we had seen before, but it also introduce enough new things and characters that it made us excited for what was to come. That new thing to come is Rogue One. Rogue One is what we wanted to see as fans who grew up and wanted to see a Star Wars movie that was darker, grittier, more mature. The one thing that has become evident in the last decade is that things like comic book heroes, fantasy, science fiction and video games aren’t just kids stuff anymore, and they aren’t just limited to the geek section anymore. With movies like The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and Game of Thrones, the geek culture has expanded and touched all walks of pop culture. People who don’t like fantasy found themselves reading A Song of Ice and Fire, even people who never read a comic book in their life are lining up to see a Marvel movie the night it comes out. The Force Awakens was everything Star Wars has been, Rogue One is showing us what it can do. Since The Force Awakens managed to be a hit financially and with a lot of fans while taking the safer route, it paved the way for Rogue One to take risks and do things that we hadn’t seen in a Star Wars movie before. Unfortunately I can’t really go into much more without spoiling things.

                Truth be told, I think this was the only way it could have happened. While Star Wars should not be seen as just kids stuff, it has always been seen as that thing that we grew up with and now we want our kids to experience it the same way we did. If someone had taken their kids to see a movie like Rogue One, people wouldn’t have known what to make of it. Sure it still would have been a hit because it was a great movie, but there certainly would have been people asking is this what Star Wars has become? And then we wouldn’t know what to think when we started seeing advertisements for Episode VII. This really was the right way for things to go. Sure, they played it safe initially, but they did it the best way possible. Now Kennedy is showing that she and Lucasfilm have the spine to take the franchise in other directions and to darker places. Many people believed that the studio had doubts about letting Gareth Edwards take this route, but now their gamble is paying off, which will hopefully encourage the studio to keep it up. And if you think I’m full of shit, and that Star Wars is dead now thanks to Disney’s involvement, then that’s your prerogative. I’ll enjoy my money from Disney. Not because they are paying me to say that I liked the movie, but because I literally work for them. I’m a cast member.