Before Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was released in theaters a little more than a month ago, Hollywood insiders speculated that the movie could be a rarity: an intellectually rigorous blockbuster that could connect with mainstream audiences and Academy voters. Once 2049 underperformed at the box office it was treated as a misfire, proof that audiences don’t like to be challenged, or that the marketing campaign didn’t try hard enough to appeal to millennials or women, or that the distributor’s overzealous attempt to police spoilers wound up constricting the conversation around the film.
The lack of a single authentic source text is at the core of 2049‘s allure. (J. Hoberman, upon reviewing the director’s cut in 1992, celebrated Blade Runner as an exemplar of “postauthorial” cinema.) Despite its futuristic aesthetic, Blade Runner is one of the few movies that becomes more legible when treated like an ancient manuscript; it’s a palimpsest, with each extant version layered atop a previous one. As I once wrote in Cine-File, Blade Runner occasionally suggests the “impossible grandeur of a medieval saga, a lumbering epic embroidered and corrupted by countless textual variants.”
These are more interesting questions than the ones most modern franchises set out to answer. (Significantly, of course, 2049 doesn’t really try to answer them at all but instead suggest and gesture toward new avenues of inquiry.) Rogue One, the most recent entry in the Star Wars saga, looks like a playground debate in comparison, trying to settle questions (“But how did the rebels obtain the Death Star plans?”) no one contemplated in the first place. A similarly bankrupt “Blade Runner II” would be content merely to show the C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate that replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) described so evocatively and cryptically in the original.
