The ingenious geopolitical detail Denis Villeneuve added to ‘Blade Runner 2049’
With the task of continuing one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, it’s fair to say that Denis Villeneuve more than stood up to the challenge with Blade Runner 2049. Taking place 30 years after the original movie, the sequel focuses on Officer K (played by Ryan Gosling), a blade runner tasked with retiring older models.
With the stunning cinematography by Roger Deakins, which immerses audiences in a neon-lit dystopia, and a narrative that explores the nature of humanity in a world dominated by technology, Villeneuve’s version is a faithful homage to the original movie by Ridley Scott.
While Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel is well-admired, further credit ought to be directed his way in that he had to consult a film made in 1982 that dealt with our modern society today. Of course, there is a great disparity between the society of Scott’s original film and that of 2019.
Villeneuve’s challenge, then, was to take the world of the first Blade Runner film and extend it far into the future. During an interview with Time, the Canadian director explained that he had to scour Scott’s film and Philip K. Dick’s original novel to examine the finer details of the world and transpose them into his own narrative.
“I needed to deal with an alternate universe, to start with the world of the first Blade Runner and extend it into the future in order to create continuity between the films,” he said. “I went back to all the cultural references of the first movie and imagined how they would evolve in the future. And then I went back to the Philip K. Dick novel and explored the geopolitics of the book.”
It was this geopolitical exploration that led Villeneuve to realise the existence of the USSR in Dick’s novel, which led him to include the Soviet State in his version of Blade Runner. “What if the U.S.S.R was still alive?” he pointed out. “What if it was as strong a cultural and economic force as the US, but with different political laws?”
The director continued: “You see McDonald’s in Moscow. What if you saw Russian products in the streets of Los Angeles? I thought that would create an interesting distorted reality that would tell my audience right from the start that they’re in a different world with different laws from a geopolitical point of view.”
And that’s precisely what Villeneuve did – create a vision of 2049 where the Soviet Union not only still existed but had asserted a cultural dominance over the rest of the world, much in the way the United States has in real life. Throughout Blade Runner 2049, audiences can indeed spot various products of the “CCCP” – the Russian abbreviation for the Soviet Union, which proves Villeneuve’s commitment to creating an accurate version of the narrative faithful to the original.
