Moral Ambiguity in the Blade Runner Franchise
- Jules Robinson
- Aug 6, 2018
- 4 min read
*Spoilers ahead*
I’d like to tell you about a character, she’s non-human, a creation. Her name is Pris. We are first introduced to her in the original Blade Runner as a ‘basic pleasure model’, inciting ideas of gratification and fantasy. But when we meet her, she’s stranded, alone and lying in rubbish. She’s scrappy-looking and tender towards her rescuer. Later, we find out that Pris has in fact infiltrated the home of her murderous boyfriend’s lead and has her own violent ideas about the humans sent to track and destroy her. However, the coin flips again in the third act, her fighting a defence to her ultimate demise, her death catastrophic and her partner sent mad by her absence, ultimately humanising her once again.
I wanted to start with a quick overview of the character Pris in Blade Runner because I wanted to demonstrate how complex she is. Not even the main antagonist, Pris has remarkable character development despite only being in a handful of scenes. As a viewer, we’re never fully sure of how to react to her and, more importantly, we are always working out what her angle is, what her motives might be. This is one of the reasons why I enjoyed Blade Runner so thoroughly and why, I believe, Blade Runner 2049 falls short.
A quick summery of the features of Blade Runner 2049 which I did enjoy; the visual elements were truly stunning and arguably, much superior to the first. It was to be expected that the visual effects would out-perform the first movie in the series but I was impressed by how much further emphasis went into the cinematography of the shots and not just the computer graphics. The soundtrack was also mesmeric, taking on the mantle Vangelis set in the first and elevating it through its atmospheric electronic harmonies.
The ambience of Blade Runner 2049 felt effortless and impressive in the same breath, a feat of visual and audio effects that should be commended. But what those surface layers did was cover a story that lacked the characterisation of the first. K is our protagonist and we experience his story and discover his personal revelations at the same rate as him. But never do we question his motives much like we questioned Deckard’s when he, in the final scenes of Blade Runner, enters Rachel’s room with gun drawn. Is he going to kill her? Is she already dead? It’s on her appearing so at first that seems to make up Deckard’s mind to run away with her.
Continuing with the characterization of the original, was Roy Batty the villain or opulent inventor Eldon Tyrell? The fact that we can’t say for sure, that one killed the other but both are of moral quandary, speaks volumes. Jared Leto’s Neander Wallace however, seems practically panto villain compared. He even has the creepy ailment motif and long, drawn out exposition of his evil plans as he disembowels (purely for reasons of metaphor?) a female replicant.
On that theme, it troubled me how many of the female characters made their grotty demise in 2049. The film itself begins with a dead woman, a small collection of bones and hair found in a box that we are told is Rachel. No such nostalgia for her, then. Joshi, a stern, authoritative boss who’s character arc consists of letting K off the hook, meets her demise in so much as she appears to allow herself be murdered without putting up a fight. The relatively two-dimensional assassin assistant Luv stamps out K’s holographic girlfriend Joi just before she professes her love. Having already shown he has a merciless (because he’s evil) attitude towards his creations, Niander Wallace offers Deckard a replicant replicant of Rachel only to then get rid of her immediately as a dud (another nostalgia trip for Rachel fans). And finally, Luv is grappled to death in a high-stakes submersion scene that felt expected but also welcomed considering the length of the movie. Killing off female characters isn’t bad writing in and of itself. The first Blade Runner involves two murdered female replicants which Deckard shoots in equally horrifying ways but what makes the difference here is that these deaths were numbered and had worth to them. By the time Luv is strangled to death at the climax, we as viewers have seen so many other women meet their unfortunate ends that we are numb to it, good, kill her, she’s a baddy anyway and doesn’t that go against what Blade Runner is seen to promote completely?
I love the moral questions the Blade Runner series brings up, it’s what makes it such a great concept and I am a fan of K’s intriguing arc and how he faces his strange, evolving memories and mortality. But I wanted more from the characters, I wanted Deckard to feel complex again and not just another rolling out of Harrison Ford and I wanted to have to second guess the side characters. I wanted another Pris.
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