Immediately after seeing it, I felt a bit hollow-but maybe that, too, is the point, to shock you into submission and then have the bigger ideas gnaw at you in the following days and weeks. The film has grown on me, especially after reading more writing on it. Deckard is really the only person who can keep the legend of his existence alive. His only companions we know of, Joi and his boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), are both killed too. Joe, after subverting his programming and achieving what he set out to do, dies. Niander, the villain, gets away, and we’re left to presume he continues his work manufacturing replicants for slave labor, seeking a way to have them procreate in order to scale faster across Earth’s off-world colonies. This is Joe’s story, and by the end, he passes it on to someone else. There are no huge battles or cataclysmic events. It’s a tale you can imagine characters hearing whisperings of, but one that no one really knows well enough to tell on their own because they weren’t there to experience it. Ultimately, it’s a moving but undeniably small story in this vast sci-fi universe. Telling a good story is one way, which Blade Runner 2049 mostly does. How does a film inherently unnecessary make itself vital? The plot is a clever metaphor about itself. In the days since I saw Blade Runner 2049, I’ve come to believe the film follows a similar path, contemplating its own right to exist as an unnecessary sequel to a great film made decades ago. He will help the true child-a girl-meet her father, and make his own existence meaningful. That is when Joe does something that changes both the course of the film and also the way it interacts with its 30-year-old predecessor.
Joe’s memories are indeed real, but they’re not his. Joe eventually finds out that he is not the replicant child, but is implanted with her memories by rogue replicants to divert the authorities away from the true child.
It gives him, perhaps, something all other replicants lack, no matter how close in appearance and personality they come to humans: a soul.Īlas, it’s not meant to be. This, Joe thinks, gives him new meaning, a higher purpose. The revelation that really kicks off the film, though, is that K, renamed “Joe” by his artificially intelligent hologram girlfriend, Joi, discovers he may have actually been born instead of made-the child of a replicant who somehow became pregnant.