Replicant Protagonists in First Man + Blade Runner 2049
Parallel emotional profiles and... hovering aircraft and high-G maneuvers
I was struck by the similarities between the protagonists Agent K and Neil Armstrong in Blade Runner 2049 and First Man. I made the video above to show the movies’ parallel themes, situations, and imagery.
Both characters have similar emotional profiles and affects, and, strangely, both movies use strikingly similar, unusual situations and visual motifs to explore the same themes and challenges:
- Piloting, crashing small hovering aircraft
- High G-force maneuvers
- Flight
- Extreme physical, emotional testing, vetting by employers
- Extremely hazardous work
- Calm under pressure
- Perseverance despite danger, injury, bloody face
- Blunted affect
- Extreme physical endurance
- Gravesite, small wooden coffin
- Emotional outburst; broken glass in hand, indifference to pain, bloody wound
- Isolation, quarantine behind glass
- Face to face through glass
- Extreme emotional distance
- Touch
- Longing to connect
- Violent, unpowered aircraft landing
- Loss
- Emotional crash, crying over lost, missing child
- Small token of lost child
- Novel, world-changing mission
- Mission accomplished
Cosmo Wenman is CEO of Concept Realizations. He can be contacted at twitter.com/CosmoWenman and cosmo.wenman@gmail.com
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