Blade Runner 2049is not a story about the future. Or at least, it's not about ourfuture.

It's set in the year 2049, but it's the year 2049 as extrapolated from the year 2019 as it was imagined in 1982's Blade Runner. Which was never intended as a literal prediction, anyway.

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The original Blade Runner"was very much a nightmare of what might have been or what might come," said 2049screenwriter Michael Green. "But I don't think anyone involved really thought that its landscapes and the flying cars were in our 30-year future. It was representative of the dreams or nightmares you might have at the time."

Likewise, "Blade Runnerisn't Minority Report," said Green. "I think people who are looking for accurate speculation would be disappointed [by Blade Runner 2049]."

The new Sepulveda Boulevard, according to 2049 screenwriter Michael Green.Credit: Alcon Entertainment

What they will find is a film that reflects our present hopes and fears, as filtered through a dystopian dreamscape that will never come to pass. And it's a harsh one – all strong angles, towering structures, and rugged materials. Which, of course, was the idea.

"When I first met [director Denis Villeneuve], I asked him, I said, ‘I have a way of starting a film as a designer. What I’d like you to do, is if you could describe in one word what you want this movie to be like.’" recalled production designer Dennis Gassner. "And he paused and he said, ‘Brutality.’"

To that end, Gassner redesigned the spinner (the flying police car) to withstand harsher environments, and used that as the foundation of the entire look and feel of the film. The Wallace Tower, for instance, was also developed as a structure that could remain standing in a Los Angeles that looks far grimmer than the one we know now.

The brutality wasn't just a reflection of the film's mood, but of the environment in which Blade Runner 2049takes place – one ravaged by climate change to the point that the California coast has been fundamentally altered. "That sea wall, where they have you see in the last act of the film, is on Sepulveda Boulevard," said Green. "And everything west of it is now ocean."

Los Angeles, apparently.Credit: Stephen Vaughan / Alcon Entertainment

Hampton Fancher – a writer on the original Blade Runner, who returned to write the sequel – said it was a simple matter of "deductive reasoning" to figure out how the film's universe might have changed thanks to smog, temperature changes, and the like. "I missed the fires, though," he added.

2049picks up decades after the catastrophic blackout of 2022, which, as one character puts it in the movie, "paved over" the previous world by wiping most of the digital data in existence. But the past is still there, even if it's buried. "The idea of this world being built atop of the mistakes that people had made before it was very real in my head," said Green.

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This notion is never clearer than when K visits San Diego, now a literal dump filled with trash from Los Angeles. The people there sift through the refuse looking for tiny, useful scraps, and live inside bigger ones, like an overturned satellite that's used as an orphanage. Both environment and citizenry alike are "all discarded and not thought about by others in the city," as Green put it.

Two "artificial" beings ponder humankind.Credit: Stephen Vaughan / Alcon Entertainment

Meanwhile, those in the city have a new population to deal with – a third species. Well, kind of. "I put the word 'species' in quotes because the question that the film very much asks is, 'Are replicants species? Is this a speciation moment, or are they just things to be owned?'" said Green. And now, "we have Joi, who represents a digi – a digital construction."

By the time Blade Runner 2049picks up, humans and replicants are essentially indistinguishable. But digis, as represented by Joi, represent something else entirely – a "computer-generated, non-physical entity," as Green described her.

Deckard is either a human, or a replicant so close to being human that he may as well be one. K is a replicant in the process of becoming human. Joi, though, would never be mistaken for human – she's more akin to Samantha in Her, even if she occasionally gets to appear in the "real" world as a hologram.

Over the course of the film, however, Joi appears to exercise something like free will. She has wants and needs, she's capable of surprising K, or sacrificing herself for him. Or is she? Joi's is a story of "questioning whether that consciousness has consciousness, whether she is programming or whether she is capable of emotion and individual evolution as well," said Green.

Honestly one of the most devastating moments of cinema 2017.Credit: Alcon Entertainment

For that matter, how much of what we see as Joi's personhood comes from her physical appearance? "If that had been words on a screen on a computer, it's a non-animated version of that consciousness, would you have felt the same way?" asked Green.

As it is, it's hard to look at the love and pain on Joi's face and not feel for her. Which, Gassner told me, was the goal. "We were looking for the magic of why somebody would want to have one of these characters in your life," he said. "I think that's what technology is. Ultimately, it's a fantasy. Of course, film in general is a fantasy. But having the ability to make it feel real is a real task, and that's the hardest thing to do in our business."

According to Gassner, around "90 to 95%" of Blade Runner 2049was designed and built using practical effects. But Joi (while played onscreen by a real actress, Ana de Armas) was made to look like a hologram. So to make Joi feel "comfortable" – that is, to make the concept feel believable – holographic projections like Joi were used throughout the movie, particularly in the scenes set in corporate neighborhoods.

It probably also helped that artificial intelligence like Joi feels, at this point, less like a theoretical abstraction than an inevitability. "Oh, I think we're right there," said Fancher when asked how close we were to have to facing questions about sentient artificial intelligence.

Harrison Ford, not knowing the future.Credit: Stephen vaughan / Alcon Entertainment

As Fancher sees it, it's going to happen precisely because we're talking about it now. "Everything we dream up, we seem to do," he said. He should know – he's watched as the original Blade Runnershaped the conversation and culture over the past 35 years.

"I don't mean that the movie per se influences everything, but there's a ninth-wave kind of quality," he said. "There's a certain force that occurs in consciousness and unconsciousness that foretells something. If you dream something up, it'll probably happen if you keep dreaming it. And especially if it's a collective dream."

Which isn't to say he – or anyone – can truly know what's next for sentient artificial intelligence, as Fancher readily acknowledged. "I don't think we can even imagine, any more than they could imagine a hydrogen bomb 600 years ago," he said. "Who knows what it will eventuate."

Fancher speculated about a future in which humankind might be replaced by replicants, or whatever the real-life equivalent ends up being. "The replicant would be, maybe, in the long view, an improvement over what we do. It'll be a new kind of art, a new kind of love, maybe. I don't know. But also, it'll be a new kind of trouble."

Trouble? "It'll be trouble, probably, because everything is part trouble and part the opposite," he pointed out. "But there'll be stuff we can't imagine that's wonderful."

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