Officer K (Ryan Gosling), the protagonist of Denis Villeneuve’s long-awaited sequel Blade Runner 2049, has the same job Deckard did. But at the start of the film we’re told he’s a replicant—a more compliant model designed to hunt and kill his own kind. At first glance it feels like the screenwriters Hampton Fancher (who also wrote the original) and Michael Green are making the subtext text by acknowledging K’s artificiality. After all, Blade Runner leaves its audience wondering whether Deckard’s understanding that Roy is more than a machine is simply a humane realization, or some deeper self-awareness that he is himself a replicant. If the audiences already knows K is a replicant, how interesting can it be to watch him rise up against his human masters?

But Villeneuve’s film has an entirely different goal, which is what makes it so brilliant as a sequel. The philosophical question at the center of Blade Runner 2049 is not whether K is a replicant, but whether any of us is “real,” whatever labels we may be assigned. K’s character arc in the film is one of slowly developing agency, an arc that’s mimicked by the many artificial characters around him (most of this movie’s ensemble isn’t human). Blade Runner 2049 centers on K’s quest to uncover the identity of Rachael and Deckard’s child, the first ever born to a replicant, and for much of the movie he’s convinced he might be that messianic figure. He isn’t, and his suspicions end up being a red herring—K’s heroism, and his consciousness, is not defined by his parentage, but by his gradually evolving free will, which Villeneuve tracks step by meticulous step.

In the world of Blade Runner 2049, the old “Nexus” replicants of the original movie are artifacts, long ago phased out because of their potential for rebellion. K is a newer-generation model designed to obey orders, tracking down remaining Nexuses like Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), whom he kills in the film’s opening sequence. At Sapper’s homestead, K finds the skeletal body of Rachael and realizes she died in childbirth. K’s boss Joshi (Robin Wright), who is human, is horrified by the news. She orders K to eliminate the replicant child, knowing its existence will grant other replicants a notion of personhood that they currently lack, disrupting the repressive caste system that’s in place.

“I’ve never retired anything with a soul before,” K muses when ordered to kill Rachael’s child, positing that if you were born, you must have a soul—something that K lacks, as Joshi reminds him. “Are you saying no?” she asks, incredulously. “I wasn’t aware that was an option,” he deadpans, but that question begins to gnaw at him going forward. Gosling’s performance is a wonderfully nuanced take on artificiality, borrowing some of the ironic, noirish detachment of Ford’s work as Deckard (who he played as a taciturn gumshoe) but mixing in a sense of innocence. K is a walking weapon designed as a tool of the police; he’s deadly with a firearm and appears to possess an ultra-powerful computer brain for quick deduction. But he’s also always eager to please Joshi, and seems to have genuine sympathy for targets like Sapper, whom he plaintively asks to surrender rather than put up a fight.