(SPOILERS FOR NEXT GEN AND BLADE RUNNER 2049. If you haven't seen Next Gen, it comes highly recommended. Great animated film, top notch kids film)
One of the most identifiable pieces of Blade Runner, aside from the name itself, is the origami unicorn.
77 picks an origami unicorn out of Mai's backpack as one of the first items he finds. The first time 77 is alone, he picks up the origami unicorn. Throughout the film, this thing can be seen interacting with the characters at multiple points, the most notable of which being when Mai is constructing another unicorn, this time a bit more worn in appearance than the last, at the very end of the movie.
That kinda tipped me off, but one thing struck me: the focus on memory as something innately human. As 77 goes from a typical, totally blank slate robot, to one with personality, he does so through memories. And one of the biggest philosophical points in BR 2049 was how memories are what make us human. It is explored as a theme of how even someone with false memories can still be "human." The memories being fake don't make them moot. The memories simply give the person previous emotional experience to draw from. K literally makes the decision to save Deckard based on a combination of all his memories, which only existed because of the false ones. He did the most human thing out of anyone, despite the foundation of it being false. This movie was essentially the logical conclusion to the question, "what makes us human" that was raised in the first film, and it even provides different perspective than the first.
Next Gen paints an eerily similar picture. As 77 develops into a personal being, one with emotions and feelings, he does it all because of his memories. The ones he made give way to new experiences, and they allow him to feel, and express, and communicate beyond basic sentences. The emotions he feels are *because* of his memories. What makes him human in the most intimate sense is his past. And that's where this movie simplifies the core themes of BR 2049; explaining these concepts to five year olds is no easy job.
Mai hates her negative past memories, and that hatred spawns acts of violence. But the first thing 77 does when he decides not to delete any more memories is to cherish even the bad ones. The movie's core message, is of course this. The good and the bad both are what make us great. What make us... us. And hating the bad for being bad leads to cycles of the same hatred. Ares is the prime example of only ever focusing on the bad. What ends up happening, is that even when the good happens, Ares is blind to it, and simply sees it as futile. That's what this movie does so damn well. It takes a concept like basic humanity and brings it down to a child's eyes. It allows children to see how the bad and the good both create something special, not just one or the other. Lean it too far one way, and you are unsatisfied and angry.
Easily Netflix's best film this year, and one I will probably revisit a lot, simply because it is so wholesome.
Submitted September 17, 2018 at 08:52AM by El_Chapos_Cousin https://ift.tt/2NN5DTi
