by Ryan Andrews
The seemingly anachronistic ubiquity of smoking in Blade Runner 2049 may be intended as nothing more than a tribute to the neo-noir original, just like the Pan-Am and Atari billboards. But perhaps it also symbolizes something psychological about the society it depicts: the feeling that it has no reason to live. The replicants, of course, do not have souls or free will. They have no past, and, because they can not breed, no collective future. Meanwhile, the humans are staring down-the-barrel at their obsolescence as a species. Ensouled or not, the replicants are so much smarter and stronger, and so even if they lack the agency to conquer or destroy humanity, what is the point of going on?
