Blade Runner 2049 will re-ignite the debate over Deckard’s humanity

By Katie Rife | December 7, 2016 | 6:02pm

Aux Features Film

Now that the long-gestating Blade Runner sequel has a title (Blade Runner 2049), a release date (October 6, 2017), and at least one way things could go wrong (Jared Leto, who else?), now the time has come for us to channel our free-floating anxiety into more esoteric concerns. For example, there’s the mystery of whether Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard is a replicant, a question that director Ridley Scott has always answered in the affirmative. Ford disagrees, though, as Ford is prone to do. As he said at a 2013 AFI event honoring the film, “Well, I never got a straight answer. Which is okay, I guess. But I thought it was important that the audience be able to have a human representative on screen, somebody that they could have an emotional understanding of. Ridley didn’t think that was all that important.”

So now—depending on your views on cinematic authorship, of course—the mystery has been passed down to Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villenueve, who says in an interview with the French cinema magazine Allocine that he’s not interested in providing answers to the questions raised by the first film, even those that have arguably been answered in the decades since. Asked outright whether the film will explore the question of Deckard’s humanity, Villenueve says, “not necessarily.” In other words; Why ruin 34 years of perfectly good speculation with one interview?