Ep. 49 - The Battle of the Blade Runners

Welcome to the Season 2 opener of Fabulous Film and Friends where this week we will be throwing down with a Battle of the Blade Runners , as we compare Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci fi giant Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Darryl Hannah, William Sanderson, M. Emmet Walsh, Joanna Cassidy, Edward James Olmos, Brion James, Joe Turkel and James Hong with Denise Villenueve’s 2017 follow-up: Blade Runner 2049, starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana De Armas, Jared Leto,  Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, , Mackenzie Davis, Dave Bautista, Edward James Olmos and Sean Young. 

 Joining me are the two helped launch this podcast one year ago, Roseanne Caputi and Dave Johnson, DDS. 

Set in a once futuristic, but now alternate 2019 Los Angeles megalopolis, Blade Runner centers around Rick Deckard, a Sam Spade-style, world weary ex-LAPD officer from a unit known as Blade Runners, who is pulled out of retirement to hunt down five artificial humans known as replicants.  Replicants are illegal on earth and used as slave labor in space exploration and colonization and five top of the line, Nexus 6 replicant outlaws led by super soldier Roy Batty, come back to earth in an attempt to extend their life span, which is limited to four years. 

Aiding Deckard in his pursuit of the fugitives is the alluring Rachel, executive secretary to Dr. Eldon Tyrell whose corporation manufactures replicants. Upon meeting Rachel and administering a device on her known as Voight-Kampf, an empathy test used to detect replicants, Deckard learns that Rachel herself is a replicant, and while cold to her initially, Deckard ends up falling in love with her.  After Deckard confronts and kills three of the wanted replicants, -- with Rachel’s help—he is pummeled and beaten by Batty and nearly left for dead until Batty has a change of heart and saves Deckard from a precipitous fall off a towering building. Battered and bruised, Deckard learns the true meaning of empathy and he reunites with Rachel. The pair escape Los Angeles and go into hiding, unsure of how long they have together. 

Set 30 years later --after a great famine and information blackout, as well as a buyout of the Tyrell Corporation by a blind tech giant/savior named Niander Wallace, Blade Runner 2049 follows Blade Runner Agent K, who after a seemingly routine run-in with an erratic old style Nexus 8 replicant named Sapper Morton, discovers a link to events of the past that could change life on earth as they know it: the buried remains of the Replicant Rachel, who died  after giving birth to her and Rick Deckard’s child. With that discovery, Agent K, a new-style tamed replicant himself known as “Joe” to his AI girlfriend Joi, embarks on a journey to find the identity and truth of Rachel and Deckard’s human/replicant hybrid offspring, believing himself to be that very child that will start a revolution. This quest will lead K not only to Deckard but to a face-to-face confrontation with himself and his place in the universe. 

Who is the winner?