Memories are a strange thing. For years I was under the impression that I’ve actually watched this film. I haven’t.
I mean… I have? I do remember going to the theater and seeing it and I’ve owned a physical copy on Blu-ray and DVD since its release in 2018 but, while (re)watching(?) it last night I realized that I don’t remember ridiculous portions of this movie. As in, entire story arcs are not in my memories. I know for a fact I watched it multiple times but I feel like a lot of this movie is completely unfamiliar to me!
Sets. Costumes. Dr. Steline. The entire swath of the film that cakes place in the “orphanage”. SO much of it completely forgotten by my muddled brain. Is this what replicants like K feel like when they aren’t sure if their memories are real? It’s weird that I just had a philosophical scramble in my head over this movie. It almost didn’t feel real. Like I was imagining it, almost.
Thematically, it’s almost on-brand that this was the specific film to do this to me. The original Blade Runner was based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, a book by brilliant sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick, whose seminal books and short stories helped lay the foundation of the vast majority of tropes we now see as standard-issue in most modern works of science fiction. A lof of these books have made some of your favorite movies. “Total Recall” (1990) was based on his book “We Can Remember For You Wholesale”, “Minority Report” was based on the book by the same name and the brilliant “A Scanner Darkly” by Richard Linklater was also based on its namesake book. The most common theme in Dick’s novels is the fundamental question of, “what does it mean to be human”?
It’s this thematic thread that lies at the center of the original film and it’s why it has been studied, dissected, debated and argued over for more than four decades. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is a shining example of what the genre is capable of and it remains my favorite science fiction film of all time for a reason. The sequel, which I approached with cautious optimism, very much took the skeletal foundation of its predecessor and built a bold new story with a new cast of characters and remembered where its roots are at several key points in the story. The fact that it even lives up to its predecessor is an astounding achievement on its own. Where the first film posed the philosophical question of “what does it mean to be human”, the second takes it a little further down the rabbit hole and asks, “are we human if we don’t have memories”. This is more or less answered by the end of the film in what really felt like a much shorter running time than 2 hours and 45 minutes and is really just a way to shoehorn a question of my own that relates to a psychological quirk of mine that I chose so long to self-destruct for: What happened to my memories? How much was I drinking back then?!? Do I even want to remember? My mind is telling me no and my body is also like, “fuck all y’all”.
This must be what it feels for an android to count electric sheep.
Today is Day 1339 – 1.
Your history isn’t over yet. There’s still a page left.”
