blade

"Blade Runner: 2049" is a brilliant extrapolation of screenwriter Hampton Fancher's brutal corner of the Philip K. Dick universe. 

By way of explanation ...

When a good screenwriter adapts a novel, they get into the mind of the author who wrote it. This is a dangerous occupation if the mind is visionary and/or insane.

PKD was a straight-up gnostic. He believed the physical universe was the Black Iron Prison. A trap created by a Demiurge—a fake god, putting on Daddy's shoes and feeding on souls ascending to the light. 

That's the mind Hampton Fancher got into. And the worldview that poured out of Fancer's typewriter. But not unedited.

A great screenwriter's never passive. "How can I make this better?" is the heresy in the back of your mind. 

Dick's original androids were soulless, unempathetic things. Roy Baty pulled the legs off a spider ... because why not? Humanity is empathy. Fake humanity has none.

Fancher retained that idea with a tweak. His replicants were a new model. Childlike, not soulless. Four year olds in adult bodies. They were learning empathy ... and on the verge of becoming truly human. This explained their four year life span. They had an expiration date, that shut them off before they became effectively human.

Aside from that change, and a tighter story structure, Fancher kept Dick's original ideas. The world he created was a hell realm of psychic cannibalism, eploitation and sickening utility.

Hamton Fancher's first draft was brutal.

Roy Batty sneaks into Tyrell's compound. Under the pretext of a gryphon his he's giving his daughter for her birthday party. Batty begins by crushing the pelvis of a butler, then slaughters everyone at the party. grabbing the butler in the groin then shattering his pelvis in his vice likke grip. Deckard kilsl raachel.

The movie is the Care Bears Happy Birthday funtime in comparison.

blade runner 2049 unfolds in the same universe. of Fancer's original scripty.