Among the most curious visions of the future in Blade Runner 2049 is one that's practically guaranteed not to come true.
Blink and you'll miss it, but there in the hologram and LED-saturated streetscape of Los Angeles in the year 2049 is the logo of Pan Am, the once-mighty Pan American World Airways. The thing is, the airline collapsed in December 1991. So why is it there?
The simple answer is because it was there in the first Blade Runner film, released in 1982 when the future of Pan Am seemed assured, and the sequel is utterly committed to honouring the world-building of the original, even the bits it got wrong.
But the more complex answer, I believe, is that the central obsession of Blade Runner 2049 is the notion of obsolescence, and that Pan Am logo is a little nod to that.
In predicting what life would be like in 2019, the original Blade Runner got a lot of things right, but a fair few wrong. The big cities of the Western world are indeed increasingly polyglot, advertising is everywhere (including, through product placement, in movies such as Blade Runner 2049), climate change is upon us. But we don't yet scoot around in flying cars, androids are not doing the dirty work for us, and we have not yet established human colonies "off world". Then again, it's only 2017, so there's a little time left.
Some of Blade Runner's passing touches now seem almost laughably misguided. In one scene, Harrison Ford's private detective Rick Deckard makes a video call using a touch-button payphone in the street; when did you last see one of those, let alone one with Facetime?
In another, he tries to look inconspicuous by hiding behind a newspaper. Not only that, but it's a broadsheet. Even today, it's hard to imagine a tactic more likely to make a shady character in a trenchcoat stand out more.
But progress, even of the technological sort, can be a stop-start affair. The God-like creator of the replicants, Dr Eldon Tyrell, wears strange spectacles that may or may not be precursors of Google Glass. That real-world technology went on sale to the public in 2013, was withdrawn in 2015, and re-emerged as a business-focused product in July. Even with a computer on your face, accurately seeing the future can be tricky, it seems.
Atari is another company whose logo features in both the original and the sequel, and its story is similarly non-linear. The company was at the forefront of the emerging computer games industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but by the late '90s was virtually extinct. But thanks to nostalgia, ownership changes and a crowd-funding campaign, it could soon be back in the game with an all-new Ataribox console. Who saw that coming?
In the original film we also see logos for Coca Cola (still going strong), TDK (ditto), and RCA (defunct as of 1986). In the new film Sony figures prominently, as you might expect given it part-financed the movie. You'd imagine it will still be a going concern 35 years from now, but then again ??? Pan Am.
The point of all this is not that Blade Runner 2049 is obsessed with the rise and fall of real-world corporations. But it is more than a little interested in the rise and fall of corporations generally, and with the way they have all but usurped the role of governments.
The opening titles for the first film establish the importance of the Tyrell Corporation in this brave new world. Early in the 21st century, it "advanced robot evolution into the Nexus phase - a being virtually identical to a human - known as a Replicant".
These Replicants, which did most of the dirty work in the new space colonies, were "superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence" to the humans who had created them. Their only obvious flaw was one deliberately created by Tyrell's engineers - a lifespan of just four years.
Understandably, they rebelled against that cruelly short turn at the plate, seeking answers from, and ultimately vengeance upon, their creator. But in finally accepting his mortality and extending the hand of empathy to Deckard, lead Replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) came to seem more human than any human.
Blade Runner 2049 similarly opens with a crawl of background information, telling us that the Tyrell Corporation collapsed, with its IP being bought by a new company headed by the blind (but digitally sighted) Niander Wallace (Jared Leto).
His Wallace Corporation has developed a new breed of Replicants engineered to be entirely passive, though they no longer have an expiry date. Some of the old ones are still out there, being sporadically knocked off by Blade Runners such as K (Ryan Gosling).
Though he is himself a Replicant, K comes to believe he may in fact be real. It's a brilliant inversion of the dilemma at the heart of the first film (or at least the Director's and Final Cut versions of it), in which it is hinted that Deckard may in fact be a Replicant, though he doesn't know it. It means Blade Runner 2049 plays as a sci-fi noir version of Pinocchio, with a man-made central character who dreams of being a "real" boy.
The Earth of 2049 is virtually devoid of humans. Those who can afford it have left for the colonies, where life is presumably more appealing. It's hard to pick who really is human here, but all signs are that it's only those assigned to uphold the law (the police, and especially Robin Wright's Madam) and those so poor that they largely live outside it. And, maybe, Wallace.
Whereas the first film centred on the hunt for Replicants who did not want to die, this one is about the hunt for a Replicant who may have been born, not made. If true, that represents a major evolutionary leap, one that would effectively demolish the last remaining distinction between humans and Replicants.
And that's the vision of the future at the heart of Blade Runner 2049. An Earth so close to abandoned that, as far as humanity is concerned, it's all but obsolete. A system of governance so corrupted by corporate interests that it's all but obsolete. And a vision of humanity - already inferior to replicants in strength, intelligence and even empathy - that's now in danger of losing its one advantage, the ability to reproduce of its own accord.
There's really only one word for that. Obsolete.
Here's hoping this is one prediction they've got wrong.
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