"Blade Runner 2049" (2017)

There is a kind of wit that is universally recognised as wit but is neither funny nor particularly clever. Instead, it is exact and understated. Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner is like that: remembered as substantive but stitched together from tasteful platitudes.

The world of the Blade Runner is alive and full of intensity, to which replicants and humans contribute alike. This world is saturated with its inhabitants' dreams and aspirations. It may not have turned out to be the best of all possible worlds, but at least the affairs today are not the way they used to be yesterday; at least there has been change, an attempt to design a better world---a distinctly human and humanising attempt.

The movie is not about a story. (Each character is more interesting than the story he tells.) Instead, the movie is a platform where to develop one's own thought experiments and onto which to pin one's own experiences, of solitude and intensity, accumulated by traversing and inhabiting the many laboratories of human experimentation and design.

The movie is a postcard from the civilisation, which this season is brought to you by Canada, a country with no identity and, hence, welcoming of all identities.

Memories and the instincts to act on these memories comprise consciousness. One is human if one is valued by and values other humans and contributes to their narrative. Just as a patient cured of a decease remains human, so are replicants---thoroughly overhauled instantiations of man---human, too.