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Young Blade Runner K's discovery of a long-buried secret leads him to track down former Blade Runner Rick Deckard, who's been missing for thirty years.
Oct 6, 2017 | Theatrical Wide (4,058 locations)
Other Key Dates
Oct 3, 2017 (Los Angeles, California premiere (USA))
Oct 4, 2017 (Zurich Film Festival (Switzerland))
Oct 5, 2017 (Haifa Film Festival (Israel))
Oct 24, 2017 (Tokyo premiere (Japan))
Oct 30, 2017 (Leiden International Film Festival (Netherlands))
$100,018
$92,071,675
$175,613,534
$267,691,236
Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos
Aspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1
Country of Origin: United States
The story opens in 2049, thirty years after the events of the first film. An on-screen text states that the Tyrell Corporation has collapsed decades before, in the wake of violent revolts involving their Nexus-6 through -8 Replicants, forcing the company into bankruptcy. After the world’s ecosystems collapsed in the mid 2020s, famine swept the Earth, killing millions. With his invention of synthetic farming, a wealthy businessman named Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) ended food shortages and acquired Tyrell’s remaining assets to form his own corporation. The Wallace Company has reinvigorated the Replicant industry by mass producing the Nexus-9 Replicants, a new generation of artificial humans with modified behavior to make them more obedient than the older models. These Replicants have implanted memories and open-ended lifespans, and are still used for slave labor on the off-world colonies (the Moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, etc.), but some are also used as Blade Runner units, hunting down and “retiring” (i.e. killing) the few remaining older model Replicants that are still at large.In the opening scene, Agent K (Ryan Gosling), one of these Nexus-9 Replicants, travels to a protein farm outside Los Angeles in his flying Spinner vehicle, where he has tracked down an older model Replicant called Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), who is part of a group of Series 8 Replicants that have gone AWOL. Morton tries to fool K by playing dumb, but his satchel betrays that he is a combat model from the battle of Calantha. After a brief but violent fight, Morton chastizes K for killing his own kind and doing the humans’ dirty jobs because he has never witnessed the kind of “miracle” that he has. K retires him and takes his eye for identification. He is just ready to leave when he notices a flower placed beside a dead tree in the desolate landscape next to the farm. The tree is supported by wires, so someone has gone through some lengths to preserve it. This prompts him to thoroughly scan the area, which reveals a chest buried in the ground under the tree. He requests his office to send a forensic team to unearth it.K returns to the LAPD office, where he undergoes a standard ‘baseline test’ for Replicants and passes it. He then goes home to his apartment in a seedy area of town, enduring a lot of abuse from neighbors for being a “skinjob”. He spends his time at home with a holographic woman named Joi (Ana de Armas), a futuristic form of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and has apparently formed a deep bond with her, despite the fact that they cannot physically interact. For this reason, he has bought her a mobile hologram projector which allows him to free her program from its home-based console. He can now take Joi outside on the top of his apartment building in the pouring rain, and it also allows her program to touch objects. Joi is extremely happy, but K is called back to the station before they can experiment with Joi’s new capabilities any further.Downtown, the Forensics team has discovered that the chest contains a human skeleton and a lock of hair. They belong to a female who most likely had complications during childbirth 30 years before. Superficial cuts in the bones suggest an emergency Cesarean section as the cause of death. Upon closer inspection, K locates a serial number engraved on one of the woman’s bones, indicating that the skeleton wasn’t from a human, but a Replicant female. The identification causes quite a stir since Replicants were previously unable to reproduce. K’s superior, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), reminds him that if the public knew that the line that separates humans from Replicants is blurring, or disappearing altogether, it would tear apart what remains of civilization. She commands the team to destroy the evidence, and orders K to burn down the farm, track down the Replicant child, and retire it, despite the mixed feelings he may have about retiring something that was born – and has a soul. Before leaving, K takes some of the female Replicant’s hair.K goes to the Wallace Company to inquire about the serial number and hair of the female Replicant. It is housed in the old Tyrell pyramid, although now much more austerely lit. A clerk tells him that the number belongs to an older model Replicant; information may be hard to find, given the fact that an EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) event called the ‘Blackout’ in 2022 destroyed almost every digital file the company had before that date. All that remains is some raw hard-copy data, but fortunately, there appears to be something left. K is helped by a Replicant woman called Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), who gives him access to what appears to be an old memory file containing an audio recording. It belonged to an experimental Replicant named Rachael, who went missing 30 years before. She can be heard talking to a Blade Runner called Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). K detects a very strong connection between the two. Luv thanks K for finally being able to close the case on Rachael.K does some research on Deckard, and finds his old colleague Gaff (Edward James Olmos) who is now living in a retirement home. Gaff tells him that Deckard and Rachel fell in love, and eloped. K asks if Gaff knew that Deckard would one day leave society; Gaff confirms, saying that there was something in Deckard’s eyes that told him he was finished hunting Replicants.Luv reports what she has learned to Wallace, who is blind but can see with the help of small drones. He is just witnessing the activation of a new female Replicant, which looks a lot like a crude birthing from a gestation bag. He muses sympathetically to his creation how he was able to make new Replicants who have helped colonize nine worlds, yet he shares his frustration about that small number, stating that humanity should “own the stars”. He poses that every leap of civilization was done with the aid of a disposable workforce, and Replicants have replaced slaves in that matter, but his production capacity for them is limited. He laments that the female Replicant cannot bear children, and carelessly slashes the woman’s abdomen. In order to conquer the stars, millions more Replicants will be necessary, but he cannot get them to procreate, despite all his efforts. Tyrell obviously learned how to do this, but this technique was lost, and the only way to learn Tyrell’s secrets is to find Rachael’s child. He commands Luv (who is emotionally shaken by his actions but remains obedient) to obtain Rachael’s remains and follow K to locate the child.Meanwhile, K is walking through the city’s entertainment district to buy dinner, where a mysteriously cloaked woman commands three Replicant prostitutes to find out what he knows. One of them, Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), tries to seduce him for sex, but noticing he carries a holographic projector, she figures that he is not into “real girls”, and leaves. In the meantime, Luv has entered the police station to retrieve Rachael’s remains, coldly killing the forensic agent who discovers her doing it.K returns to Sapper’s farm and locates a hidden box, containing a baby sock and a picture of another woman holding the baby in front of the tree, implying that Sapper and several other Replicants have been protecting Rachael’s secret for decades. He also finds a date carved into the bottom of the tree, 6-10-21, which visibly upsets him. He burns the farm and returns to LA. Reporting his findings to Joshi, she tells him about the death of their forensic colleague and the disappearance of Rachael’s remains, and asks him about his most precious childhood memory. Even though he knows that it must be an implanted one, K says that he clearly remembers being chased through an old factory as a kid by a group of older boys. They wanted to take away his wooden carving of a horse, so he hid it inside an old furnace. K remembers that the horse had a date on it, the exact same date that was carved into the tree, a fact that he doesn’t share with Joshi. Joshi suggests he try the DNA bank to identify the child.Assuming that the date carved in the tree and the horse is meant to be a date of birth, K starts to dig into the DNA bank to find someone born on June 10, 2021. Again, only raw data remains, but he finds records of two children born that day, a boy and a girl. They have the same DNA… which is an impossibility (only identical twins can have the same DNA, and they should have the same gender). The DNA data came from an orphanage outside the city where the girl later died from a genetic disease, so K suspects that the data from the girl is a fake copy of the other. He theorizes that the surviving boy may have been hidden by the Replicants in the orphanage, which is in the ruins of San Diego.He travels there in his Spinner but is shot down by a tribe of feral scavengers who live among the ruins of a massive old ship breaking yard. They try to attack him, but Luv, who is keeping an eye on him from above through remote drone surveillance, uses precision bombs to repel them. After repairing the damage to his spinner, K proceeds to the orphanage, an old, overturned telescope dish, where the caretaker (Lennie James) is clearly using the children as cheap laborers. He coerces the man into showing him the old administrative files, but finds that the sections he is looking for have been completely torn out. While exiting, he notices how familiar the surroundings feel to him. He walks deeper into the ship section, and is shocked to find the location and the furnace from his memory; the wooden horse is still hidden inside it. K returns to the LAPD station in an upset state for another baseline test, which does not go smoothly.Not knowing what to make of the revelation, he returns home. Joi is convinced that this means that his childhood memory is real, and K is Rachael’s son, suggesting he was born instead of manufactured, and that he has a soul, as opposed to other Replicants who are thought to be ‘soulless’ and thus inferior to humans. She thinks he deserves a human name, and starts to call him ‘Joe’. K is still not convinced that the memory is real, so Joi suggests that he should contact an expert on implanted memories.K arrives at the lab of Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a freelance designer who creates memory implants for Wallace’s Replicants. Dr. Stelline is happy to see someone, being kept inside a dome at all times since she suffers from a compromised immune system, and can’t be exposed to other people. Her parents left Earth for one of the off-world colonies, but she wasn’t allowed to come along because of her disease. Her youth was lonely, but this caused her imagination to flourish, making her one of the best creators of artificial memories, since using real memories is illegal. K asks how fake memories can be discerned from real ones. Dr. Stelline says that fake memories tend to be too detailed, since real memories are ‘messy’ as they tend to reflect an emotional rather than a photographic recollection; but a good fabricated memory always contains something personal of the artist. K asks her to take a look at his memory, and give her thoughts. A special device allows Dr. Stelline to see the memory inside his head. Overcome by emotion, she says that “someone has lived this”; K leaves in a fit of anger and confusion. As he goes outside, he is apprehended by the police.K is confronted by an angered Joshi for hanging around a facility where he has no business being, and failing his last baseline test, which is normally reason for immediate retirement. K tells her that he is in his current state because he succeeded in his mission: he has killed Rachael’s offspring, who was so well-hidden that even the man didn’t know who he was. Joshi agrees that this is a valid reason for a failed baseline test, so she suspends him, giving him 48 hours to get his emotions under control, because his next baseline test will be out of her control. Going home, he finds Mariette in his room. Joi reassures him that this is her doing, because she needs Mariette for something. She synchronizes her holographic program with Mariette, so she is able to steer Mariette’s body and make love to K. The next morning, K takes a shower and clearly feels awkward about the unexpected threesome, while Mariette places a tracking device in his coat. As she notices the wooden horse, Joi appears and tells Mariette to leave; Mariette scoffs that, having been inside Joi’s consciousness, she noticed that not much was there (showing that Replicants are not above feelings of superiority either).K tells Joi that people will be coming for him, so he needs to go. Joi insists that he take her and delete her program from the home-based projector completely, so that her memory files cannot be used to find him; K is reluctant, as transferring her solely to the mobile projector puts her at risk of being lost if it gets damaged, but he ultimately agrees. He destroys the antenna in the projector so that she cannot be moved to another device, thereby also removing any chance of tracking it. Luv, who is monitoring the position of the projector, is no longer able to track K.K takes the wooden horse to a specialist, Doc Badger (Barkhad Abdi), who finds traces of radioactive tritium in the wood. They deduce that there is only one area nearby that can account for the type of wood and such high radiation readings. K leaves the city, taking care not to be noticed.K arrives in the abandoned ruins of Las Vegas and finds a beehive, indicating that there must be people in the abandoned area. He enters a deserted hotel/casino, and judging by the booby traps, he figures he is in the right place. It doesn’t take long for Deckard to show himself, keeping K at gunpoint in the supposition that he is there to kill him. They fight for a while before Deckard becomes convinced that K is only there for answers, so he invites him for a drink.In the meanwhile, Luv has arrived at K’s apartment, disappointed to find that he is gone and that the mobile projector can no longer be tracked. She proceeds to the police station, asking Joshi to cooperate and tell her where K is. Joshi refuses, telling her that K succeeded and fled after killing the Replicant child. Luv’s initially friendly disposition changes drastically, hissing in anger that they killed a wonder out of fear for a change that is inevitable anyway. She tortures Joshi for information, but to no avail. Luv tells Joshi that contrary to what she may believe, Replicants are capable of lying, so K may not have told her the truth. Getting no more cooperation, Luv kills Joshi and uses her computer to locate K in Las Vegas.Deckard tells K that Las Vegas used to be a sprawling center of amusement, until a dirty bomb made it unlivable for decades. After initial hesitation, he confirms that Rachael was pregnant, but he has never seen the child, nor does he know its whereabouts. Deckard was still actively hunted, so out of love for her and the child, he left a still-pregnant Rachael in the care of people who could protect her. He taught the other Replicants how to scramble records and cover their tracks, but after the Blackout, so much information was lost that not even Deckard could have found the child if he wanted to. He never tried, hoping that his ignorance was the best way to keep everyone safe; if the wrong people had followed him, the child would be dissected: “Sometimes to love someone, you’ve got to be a stranger.” Deckard is done answering questions about this painful subject.After a while, Deckard notices that someone has entered the area. Convinced that K has been followed, they proceed to Deckard’s Spinner to flee, but a rocket grenade destroys the Spinner and incapacitates both Deckard and K. Luv enters with a few henchmen, and although K dispatches some of them, Luv fights back and badly injures him. She notices K’s mobile projector and destroys it, effectively killing Joi, to K’s anguish. Leaving him for dead, she kidnaps Deckard and takes him back to Wallace.Fading in and out of consciousness for a time, K’s wounds are tended by a group of Replicants including Mariette, who have found him through her tracker. When he finally wakes up, he learns they are part of a Replicant freedom movement. Their leader, Freysa (Hiam Abbass), is the woman in the picture holding Rachael’s baby, and the one who sent Mariette onto K. She is an old battle comrade of Sapper from Calantha, and she reveals how she was there when the living miracle of Rachael’s child was born. Rachael herself died in childbirth, so the rebellious Replicants went to great lengths to hide the baby and keep it a secret; Sapper actually died to protect it. Because if Replicants could have children, the human world could no longer deny them their rights and freedoms, so they have built an army for the coming revolution. No individual – K, Freysa or Deckard – is more important than this cause, and dying for it is the most human thing they can do. Since Deckard is in Wallace’s hands now, K needs to kill him to prevent Deckard from giving information that will lead them to Freysa; in fact, she is convinced that Deckard would happily sacrifice his life for his daughter, who will be shown to the world and lead their army when the time is right.K gets confused, stating that the lost child was a boy, since he found evidence that a girl died in the orphanage and a boy was hidden there; Freysa answers enigmatically that this is “just a piece of the puzzle”, and that she witnessed the girl being born. Thinking back on all he has discovered so far, K is flooded with a series of memories: Dr. Ana Stelline saying how she always puts something of herself into her work; her emotional response to his memory, stating that it was real and not fabricated; the DNA readouts, one real, one fake; Deckard telling him how he taught the Replicants to scramble records and cover their tracks; the memory of the child hiding the wooden horse. Suddenly, all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place: Dr. Stelline is Rachael and Deckard’s lost daughter; the implanted memory about the wooden horse was not fabricated because it was hers, and she put it in other Replicants as well. Freysa notes K’s apprehension, realizing that he believed he was Deckard’s and Rachael’s child; she comforts him by saying that every Replicant wishes they were, and that it is the reason they believe.At the Wallace Company, Deckard wakes up inside Wallace’s office, who is happy to finally meet him. He shows him Rachael’s skull, calling it the lock and Deckard the key to unraveling the mystery of Replicant reproduction; however, it has been insufficient, and he really needs Deckard’s child to create his self-perpetuating army of slaves. He starts an audio playback of Deckard’s first conversation with Rachael, which emotionally affects him. Wallace insinuates that their instant connection wasn’t coincidence: their first meeting was set up from the beginning, with the intention that they would end up together and reproduce; either because Deckard himself is a Replicant, or because Rachael was designed to his preferences with mathematical precision. Wallace praises Deckard for keeping himself empty of the information that could lead them to the child, but he can still name the people who helped him and the places they visited. He tries to entice Deckard with something that he really covets: a woman walks in from the shadows, and she appears to be an exact copy of Rachael as she appeared to Deckard 30 years ago, down to the clothing and hairstyle she wore. Deckard is shocked and moved, but through the emotional anguish and against all his instincts, he ultimately dismisses this Rachael as a fake, stating that the real one had green eyes. Frustrated by his failure, Wallace immediately has Luv execute the fake Rachael. He orders Luv to take Deckard to one of the off-world colonies, where they have people experienced in torture with the means to make him talk.K finds himself back in LA, observing a giant three-dimensional ad for the Joi hologram with great sorrow, knowing that the Joi he loved is gone forever. In the meanwhile, Luv takes off with a hand-cuffed Deckard in a Spinner with two escorting vehicles, and flies along the LA shoreline. K catches up, using his Spinner to destroy the escorts and blow Luv’s vehicle from the sky, forcing it to crash onto the beach. K lands next to it and after an exchange of gunshots that kills the pilots, he gets into a fight with Luv. He receives severe wounds from Luv’s relentless punches and knife, and Luv leaves him for dead. She re-enters the vehicle, trying to free Deckard from his cuffs as the Spinner is being dragged into the sea by tidal waves, but then K enters. He fights with Luv and pushes her down under water with all of his power, finally drowning the life out of her. He manages to release Deckard just before the vehicle sinks completely. Deckard says that he should have let him die; K states that he did: the world will believe that Deckard went down with the vehicle.K takes Deckard to Dr. Stelline’s office. He tells him he is free to meet his daughter now, and that all his best memories are hers. Deckard asks him: “Why? Who am I to you?”; K simply urges him to enter the office. As Deckard goes in and meets his unsuspecting daughter who is enjoying a cloud of artificial snow, K lays down on the steps outside, slowly succumbing to his wounds. He looks at the real snow falling down, apparently at peace with the part he played.
Thirty years after the events of Blade Runner (1982), a new Blade Runner, L.A.P.D. Officer “K” (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former L.A.P.D. Blade Runner, who has been missing for thirty years. — Warner Bros. Pictures Los Angeles, 2049. With idealistic scientist Niander Wallace now in control of the powerful Tyrell Corporation, the innovative, bio-engineered Nexus-9 replicants seem to have integrated into society. As a result, outdated Nexus models threaten the community. Now, the latest generation of bounty hunters is on a crucial mission: seek and destroy the rebellious androids. And as LAPD’s Officer K stumbles upon a dangerous secret hidden in plain sight, the taciturn agent must piece the evidence together to locate a ghost, the most vital element in this knotty case. However, is K destined to find the truth and the long-lost Blade Runner (1982) ? — Nick Riganas Rick Deckard has vanished. The notorious Blade Runner has been missing since 2019 when he and Rachael escaped from the authorities, and in the process, also avoided the economic and social downfalls of the early 2020s. It’s now 2049. Replicants are now closer to humans than ever before, and Blade Runners are still used to “retire” the older models that went into hiding from the notorious “Blackout” of 2022. In Deckard’s place, “K” has taken the mantle of Los Angeles’ top Blade Runner. However, his world turns upside down when he discovers a box. — Johnny 2049. It’s been approximately two decades since the Tyrell Corporation, the creators and original manufacturers of replicants (bioengineered superhumans), went bankrupt, a new generation of replicants manufactured by industrialist Niander Wallace who saved the world with his replicants in establishing synthetic farming in light of collapsing natural ecosystems. While the replicants of the Tyrell era are now outlawed in they having violently rebelled, they “retired” (aka destroyed) by blade runners, the Wallace era replicants, which have been programmed to obey, are seen as necessary to society. Many current day blade runners are Wallace era replicants. K, short for his serial number KD6-3.7, is one such blade runner working for the LAPD under Lieutenant Joshi. On one of his assignments, K discovers what he believes are human remains, but on forensic examination are actually the remains of a female replicant who has signs of having given birth during her life, presumably to a human baby. Joshi, fearing the worst of what this finding actually means and it getting into the wrong hands, orders K to discover and destroy any evidence of this finding, which includes locating the baby, probably now grown, and destroying him/her. As K discovers some further evidence to this story concerning his own history (each replicant which is implanted with a manufactured and thus not real history), K begins to suspect that this story may be a little more than just a professional assignment to him and which may jeopardize his future beyond that information getting into the wrong hands with which he will also have to deal. — Huggo