By The Movie Psychic
Ryan Gosling plays a lonely guy, looking for friendship, wandering the streets of LA, hoping to find love in a world where everything is manufactured. He’s desperate to touch something real.
His name is Epicure (obviously named after Greek philosopher, Epicurus, who believed that humans were happiest in groups, so we could share each other’s experiences).
Epicure is a Blade Runner, a replicant killer, the last remaining human on earth, who has been told that if he kills the last remaining replicant, Rick Deckard, he’ll win a ticket to Mars so he can see his days out in opulence, surrounded by humans and pleasure models
In the year 2049, replicants are built without emotions. Companies like Tyrell Corp. learnt from their mistakes. High bred, intelligent replicants like Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) no longer exist – they were found to only cause problems. For a while, Roy was remembered as a God, but since the fall of the human race, his more human than human life is mostly forgotten.
Only pleasure models for humans on Mars, or worker bees on earth, exist in 2049. They all look human, but are hard wired to be stone cold robots. So now, the world is full of emotionless droids going about their daily routine, consuming, working, consuming, working.
When Epicure starts to dream of Troll dolls, he starts to lose his mind. The fluffy, fluoro haired dolls haunt him day and night, and he’s unsure why. With the promise of a life on Mars, he sets off to find this last remaining replicant that they call Rick Deckard. But really, he yearns for human touch, and he’s aching for compassion, to be understood, to be loved. He’s the loneliest man in the universe.
Rick Deckard, who knows that he’s a replicant, has been in hiding at an abandoned health spa in Wyoming. Rachel, his love, is long gone – she self destructed after a fight with a security guard in Hollywood. Deckard has spent his days maintaining his house in the mountains of Wyoming. He’s a stickler for Victorian era fashion, so he has the place just how he likes it.
These two men find each other, and bond over their commonality, and in the process realise what it means to be human. Their friendship will be a staple for cinema in the years to come. We haven’t seen such a strong bond since Riggs and Murtaugh.
The last third of the film is very emotional. Rick is an old man, a replicant, nearing the end of his life, grateful for being able to pass his knowledge onto a younger man. Epicure is a conflicted young man eager to learn from Rick, not kill him. He’s fearful of his future, and desperate not to lose his best friend.
Then at the end, Epicure is wandering down a long hallway, overcome with the urge to kill his best friend, Rick. The troll dolls are driving him crazy. He gets close, Rick’s back is turned, and then Epicure turns the gun on himself and fires.
BOOOM! Epicure had to kill the last replicant and he kills himself? It turns out that Deckard isn’t a replicant at all – he never was! BOOOOOM! How do we know? Because in the last scene, he’s holding a troll doll and boards a spaceship for Mars. The Vangelis theme swells as we realise that Rick would rather live a life of opulence than endure one more day of Epicure’s pouting and moody looks into the light. And if he tried to play that piano one more time…..
Blade Runner 2049 is about being human, about empathy, compassion, and the self realisation that the world is over-run by sociopaths and megalomaniacs.
