Finding a Kindness // Blade Runner: 2049
There is a version of Blade Runner: 2049 which exists inside what was committed to film.
Where although the world is in its death throes, and everyone is lonely and violent and traumatised and without hope or comfort, that a perfectly unremarkable replicant discovers that a small act of kindness to a perfect stranger feels like a radical symbol of defiance in his dying moments.
That all any of us can do against the unwavering ravages of terminal-stage extinction capitalism is to be kind and forgiving and to love one-another.
I feel like I had to painfully tease it out of the audiovisual barrage of leering misogyny, uncritical product placement and ugly, clumsy metaphor that a megabudget Hollywood production demands.
But it’s there. A story that exists in spite of the medium to which it is committed.
Bravo.
This scene never appears in the movie.
