Blade Runner 2049 – Reimagined and as Relevant as Ever

Title: Blade Runner 2049 – Reimagined and as Relevant as Ever

Description: Today we are joined by our frequent guest, Erik Fogg of the Reconsidered Podcast to talk about the sequel and reimagination of Blade Runner – Blade Runner 2049 (2017.) Director Denis Villenueve examines some of the questions of the first Blade Runner movies and expands upon them. This movie stars Ryan Gosling, Bautista, Harrison Ford and an incredible performance by Robin Wright.

Learn More About our Guest:
Erik Fogg of the Reconsider Podcast
www.reconsidermedia.org

You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:

www.beyondthebigscreen.com
Click to Subscribe:
https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feed
email: steve@atozhistorypage.com
www.beyondthebigscreen.com
https://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacy

Parthenon Podcast Network Home:
parthenonpodcast.com

On Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage
https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcast

Music Provided by:
“Crossing the Chasm” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Image Credits:
By The poster art can or could be obtained from the distributors, Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51893608

Begin Transcript:

, [00:00:00] this is beyond the big screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Welcome back to beyond the big screen today, we are very happy to be joined by Eric of the reconsider podcast. And today we’re going to take a deep dive into the movie blade runner 2049. And if you listened to last week’s episode, we talked about blade runner from 1982.
So these are two great episodes to listen to back to back. Uh, so I highly suggest you go back and listen to. Episode, but it’s not required, obviously, uh, not so much because you need that as background knowledge for this movie or episode it’s just because it was a great show. So thank you so much, Eric, for being on today.
Yeah, my pleasure. I love your show and I love this movie and I love talking about great. Thank [00:01:00] you. So reconsider as a podcast about politics and news, but it’s really much more than just the news of the day sort of thing that you can get on TV or radio Zander and Erik, which I’m sad to say. Zander, wasn’t able to join us today.
But they help you contextualize current politics and history and the broader forces and in political theory. Reconsider helps you rise above the one-liners the 140 character politics and the tribal narratives, their motto is we don’t do the thinking for you and they really don’t. And that’s why I think it’s such an amazing podcast.
Do you have anything you could add to that, Eric? No, thanks, man. I, I think one of the things that I really like about reconsiders that Zander and I don’t always agree on everything and we do a great job. I think showcasing how to discuss stuff in a way. Um, you know, in a way, which we’re really learning.
And one of these days I want to do a behind the scenes episode where we actually, [00:02:00] uh, you know, cause we build these, we build these episodes out with a lot of disagreement and then we do a bunch of research and, and learn some stuff as we go. So I kind of want to do one of these blind to, to show a little more of how we do that.
But that’s my, my favorite part is, is whenever we disagree and it’s a good time. Yeah. It’s a really cool, I’d love to listen to an episode like that. Now, um, this movie blade runner 2049 is currently in the theaters. If you’re listening to this show in the 2017, 2018 time period, it stars Ryan Gosling as K Harrison Ford reprising his role as Decherd there’s Robin Wright, Penn, and a bunch of other great actors.
It was released in October of 2017. We will definitely have a few spoilers in this episode. So I think this is, yeah, but I think this is a good way to help you understand the movie and maybe get a little different perspective when you’re watching it. Your second, fourth or fifth time. And [00:03:00] this film takes place about 30 years in the future.
After the original blade runner movie. And it’s, uh, all of these blade runner from 1982 and then this newest blade runner are all based on the 1968, Phillip K Dick novel, do Androids dream of electric sheep, which was a great novel to two great movies based on a great novel. Yeah. And I think that the, one of the things I like about the second movie is it brought in a lot of the elements of Dick’s novel that were missing in the original, um, a lot of, in particular, a lot of details about society and the environment that we’ll get into.
So it, it brings back some stuff that I thought, well, you know, that, that just really flesh out the mastery of the novel in movie. Now Eric, you’re quite an officiant auto of blade runner, especially that first movie. Can you just explain a bit where your interest in blade runner came from and then maybe briefly set up how that 1982 movie leads into [00:04:00] the blade runner 2049?
Yes, definitely. So blade runner is the original blade runner is my. Pretty much hands down and what I love about it. And I was really excited to be able to talk about it with you on your show, a number of episodes back. And so guys, if you haven’t listened to that, I encourage you to listen to it. Cause we really get into the thick of it.
Blade runner is a scifi movie that manages to do an incredibly good job being true to the thematic and philosophical questioning that makes science fiction such a powerful and important, uh, literary genre in the world. Um, Saifai that gets translated into movies, you know, in order to be available for a wider audience, sets aside a lot of those questions in order to have more action, more sex, more whatever.
Uh, but these guys really spend a lot of time and, and really respect. The audience and force them to think. So the [00:05:00] first time I watched blade runner, I came out thinking what the heck happened. And so I read some more and I thought about it and I watched it again and again and again, and every time I got something more out of it and I always, it always leaves you with really good questions.
Whenever you watch it, that are hard to answer. Um, so like our show, it doesn’t do the thinking for you. And I really liked that. And so of course I had to see 20, 49 as soon as it came out. Uh, I went out, uh, you know, the, the night that it opened. And what’s interesting about 2049, is it set so far in the future?
That a lot has happened. A lot has changed in the world. Between these two movies. And there are three shorts that were released, uh, between the movies, as part of the promo that do a little bit of explaining of some of the events that occurred pre movie, like how the big power outage happened and how all the, like, all that data in the world basically was lost.
Um, [00:06:00] how the replicant program got shut down and then restarted after Tyrrell died, stuff like that. And so if you’re not familiar with those 2049. Is going to be a bit of a shock, which is okay. It works just fine, but I encourage you to watch those shorts as well. Yeah. I didn’t see those shorts. Um, now I’m definitely gonna go back and watch them that very first scene, the opening scene of LA, we see a very different LA than we did and the original blade runner.
Maybe we can get, get our setting a little bit. And then before we move on, Definitely. I was really happy with how they did this because of course, I’m, I’m walking into this SQL knowing that blade runner is my favorite movie terrified. Right? There’s lots of hype, uh, blade runner had a cult following and I’m part of it.
And I have a lot of anxiety that, you know, okay. They’re trying to do a big box office smash. And is it, is it going to blow its connection to its predecessor? Um, is it going to, you know, have the same kind of respect for the [00:07:00] genre that blade runner did? And at that opening moment, we see that we see K flying through.
Um, I knew it was going to be great. So in the, in the original blade runner, of course, it’s nearly all black, uh, it’s dark it’s destructive. It’s an industrial wasteland. And, you know, you have these flares rising up in the background, as you have Decker, um, flying through and in, in. 2049, they show that they’re going to be taking a bit of a different spin on this because the world has changed.
So instead of black, we have a ton of gray, uh, and you have just gobs and gobs of endless this endless grid of high density housing that really sets the mood. There are these endless people, really nothing in the city, rather than a series of concrete blocks. Um, it’s almost like a. [00:08:00] It’s almost like an ant farm kind of thing, except that people don’t look very busy.
They look pretty idle. So there’s jammed in there. They’re just cleaning on to survive. There’s no luxuries of any sorts. And the other notable thing is that it’s, since it’s gray instead of black and you don’t see those flares, it tells you already that, okay, we’ve changed something. We’re no longer out putting a bunch of hydrocarbons.
We’re no longer. And industrial wasteland where now more environmentally stable, um, and the, the population hasn’t plummeted the way that it had in the original blade runner, um, where there were a lot of empty buildings, but instead we’ve, we’ve got this population surging back, but no prosperity, no lively.
The, the city’s not alive, even though there are a lot of people live in. Some of the themes have carried over though. And then the very next scene that they show somebody who’s a bug farmer and just a complete wasteland. And we find out that that’s actually [00:09:00] one of the replicants that K is sending. To kill let’s maybe just quickly talk about what were your impressions of Kay, because he’s a very different character than Deche