Blade Runner 2049 is pretty high up there on the uniqueness scale and I actually think that it kind of suffered at the box office because of that. Casual moviegoers who saw the trailer and teaser for Blade Runner 2049 would have easily been duped into thinking that it was just another paint by numbers sci-fi film when in fact the movie is anything but. It is a deep character study of what it means to be human and deals with lofty philosophical ideas that would definitely turn a moviegoer off if they were walking in to see another Star Wars-esque spectacle. The most unique part of the film is K, our protagonist, who again would be really easy to mistake for a Luke Skywalker character on a linear destined path to fulfill prophecy and become this magnificent hero. K, himself, in the film believes this, he believes that he is the first ever replicant to be born rather than made and this makes him uniquely special and a symbol of hope and humanity to all of his fellow replicants, The movie encourages us as the audience to believe the same until about three quarters through the movie when the rug is pulled out from underneath us and K. He is not special. He is not going to fulfill some prophecy. He is a run of the mill replicant, factory made, he is not Luke Skywalker, he is a walking can opener.
There are many out of the ordinary moments in this film, one of my favorite is the fateful meetup between Harrison Fords Deckard and Ryan Goslings K. It takes the movie nearly two hours to reach this point and when we finally see Harrison Ford return in all his Blade Runner glory we get some interesting dialogue that begins with “Mightn’t happen to have a bit of cheese about you, do you boy?” a quote from one of my favorite books Treasure Island. There is a fight, one of the few action scenes in the movie, but what is so out of the ordinary is the way in which the fight takes place. This isn’t the Avengers with big explosions and showy displays of masculinity, even though K is a replicant with super strength he doesn’t really attempt to harm Deckard at all, it a very noir fight in a decaying Las Vegas showroom with snippets of old school Vegas performers like Elvis, Sinatra, and Nancy flashing in the background. K lets Deckard get his punches off until Deckard tires, at which point the realization sets in that he cannot win, again exploring what it means to be human.
The genre of Blade Runner 2049 is again unique in that it borrows elements from so many genres that it almost becomes its own. Theres elements of science fiction, fantasy, action, adventure, mystery, thriller, and Neo-noir. Critics will mostly characterize it as strictly science fiction but again it is so much more than that. It has its own mythos built from its predecessor and builds on that mythos with ritual and ideologies that go so much further than the original.
Hi, Joseph. I really appreciate your post on the Blade Runner 2049. Through your post, I have seen a lot places that I have not done well enough. I have not done the ult text part and I have to go back and fix it. I think one thing that you can add to the post is the citation. Maybe cite a dialogue from the movie, or some definitions from the book that applies to the movie just like when you talk about the uniqueness about the Blade Runner 2049 in your first paragraph. But overall it is still a fantastic post, I really enjoy reading it!