Contains spoilers
I am, and always have been, a huge Blade Runner fan. If asked for my top three films of all time, it'll be there, together with The General, The Third Man, and Casablanca - come on, who doesn't have at least fifteen in their top ten? - despite it having a plot hole that's more sinkhole than pothole.
I am referring, of course, to the need for Holden to put suspected replicant Leon through a Voight-Kampff test to confirm that he is a replicant, even though his and his confederates' mugshots are in circulation. Leon doesn't even attempt a disguise.
I've read desperate post-hoc attempts to explain this - that it took longer for the photos to come from off-world than the replicants themselves did - but seriously? have you seen the tech in this world? Are we saying that they had to wait for the snaps to develop, wash the fixer off, then queue at the post office? It's almost embarrassing.
And, even if we accept that sort of abject nonsense, we are then expected to accept that Deckard goes to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to run his Voight-Kampff test against a Nexus-6 example as a sort of dry run in a safe environment, sceptical that it would work.
So, not only is using the test clearly still a requirement after Deckard has the photos, he doubts it would provide useful. So why this strategy, rather than just going 'fuck it, I'll identify them from their faces like any other criminal'? Simple answer: because it's one of those stories where the plot points go A, B, C and if you can't sensibly, logically or coherently get from A to B it doesn't matter because getting from A to B is all that matters, B in this case being about putting Deckard and Rachael in the same orbit.
Hence it's wonderful to see Blade Runner 2049 keeping up the tradition. It may even be why I have a great deal of fondness for it, whereas my heart typically sinks at the prospect of any sequel, prequel or spin-off to movies I hold dear.
So what's 2049's cybercrime? Having established that a replicant can bear children - a fact, if widely known, we are told, would pull civilisation apart (would it? would it really?) - Ryan Gosling's K then hunts for Rachael's child in order to find out how flesh could be born of machine. That I haven't misunderstood is confirmed by this bit of the IMDB plot synopsis:
The only way [Wallace] can meet the ever-growing demand for more Replicants is to engineer specimens who can procreate. Tyrell obviously learned how to do this, but his records were destroyed in the Blackout. The only way to learn Tyrell's secrets is to find Rachael's child.
What I don't get is what would a child tell you about the way in which it was conceived? I don't think anybody's suggesting that he or she would be able to simply report anything useful - the circumstances of Rachael's death and burial suggest they may not even be aware of their unique origins. The conceit is that the child could be somehow dissected for the answers.
Really? How? You can't tell from my DNA whether I was conceived in the typical manner (do I need to draw you a diagram?!) or I was a test-tube baby or my birth mother was a surrogate. So why think this offspring's genes may spill the magic beans?
Yes, I'm sure the baby will have DNA like any other baby (or maybe not, but even then...) but I've never heard it said that it's possible to pull mother and father apart, as it were. Maybe having child and Deckard could tell you something about Rachael that her bone fragments won't yield? If that's the case, maybe somebody would have made the point...
Oh, I forgot - it's all about getting your plot from A to B to C, and if you can't do that sensibly, logically or coherently it doesn't matter because getting from A to B to C is all that matters. Hand wave, hand wave, nothing to see here, move along now...
Still love it, though.
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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd.
