Major spoilers ahead.

Sweeping adventure stories utilize a common trick to help audiences better identify with the epic circumstances a hero must face. They start with a relatable personal struggle which gradually turn into a global or epic conflict. This transition can make the viewer feel more directly invested in situations they would never have to deal with in reality.

In Star Wars ep IV viewers are dropped headfirst into a literal galaxy of alien locations, tech, characters, and political dynamics. It’s a lot to take in, but its all just set-up for the main plot most of the film follows: a simple boy’s yearning to escape the farm. This personal longing then becomes intertwined with the greater conflict between the Rebellion and the Empire. The viewer is more emotionally invested in the bigger conflict because the film started small and zoomed out. When the climax rolls around, “Will the good guys win” is conflated with the much more relatable question of whether Luke has finally found where he belongs and can make a difference.

The following movies bring in the big guns: Daddy issues.

While it’s hard to relate to sinking a proton torpedo down a ray shielded exhaust port no wider than a womp rat, everyone knows what it’s like to grapple with an inescapable sense of insignificance in the greater scheme of things like Luke must. Thanks to this early investment, when Luke blows up the Death Star and saves the day, we’re right there with him. His triumph is ours.

Blade Runner 2049 breaks away from this sort of structure. Instead of events that graduate from the main character’s personally motivated endeavors to a grander scope, it does the opposite. By the end of the first act the grand scheming of governments, mega-corporations, and revolutionaries is made secondary to focus in on the protagonist K’s more intimate and personal struggle.

After the starting exposition is over and we have a decent picture of the film world and a baseline for how K operates within it, the first and most wide ranging of three different conflicts is introduced. A replicant has given birth and the implications of this knowledge could, as K’s superior Lt. Joshi puts it “break the world”.

K has a limited opinion about all this. But at this stage he has no agency. He makes no decisions based in any sort of values judgment. He just does as he’s told like a good boy; a machine within a machine. He’s even constructed an entire life revolving around his never having to make a decision for himself or leave his comfort zone.

Pictured: Part of his Comfort Zone

As he keeps digging, the clues indicate he himself might be the lost replicant child. When this starts happening, his mission is no longer just a matter of following orders. He’s personally invested now. Unraveling this mystery is no longer a matter of following orders or maintaining the status quo. Instead he’s out to discover where he came from and why his family deserted him. Abandonment issues and reconciling lies from one’s past are a whole lot more relatable than chasing after a macguffin baby, so we feel more invested and strapped in along with K on this emotional roller-coaster.

So now we’re at the point where, like the last half of Star Wars, the personal and global conflicts are interlinked (within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, wi…). But then we peel back another layer. It’s revealed K is not in fact the special miracle baby on who’s shoulders rest the decision to either preserve the social order or upend it. He’s exactly who he was at the beginning of the story. A nobody drifting through life without a real home or family.

He also has a uniquely awkward run-in with his ex.

Ostensibly he’s tasked with eliminating a captive Deckard to keep him from being used to root out fugitive replicants, but it’s clear he’s not at all invested in that. He doesn’t care about the about the idealism of revolutionaries or the hubris of industrial demigods. He has no reason left to really do anything but lie down and die.

This is where the third most personal and to me the most important conflict is revealed. K must decide, for himself, based solely on his own experiences both real and artificial, what he values, why, and what he can do to honor that. There’s no orders, obligations, incentives, or rewards. Just a lonely soul looking for something worth doing.

This gets to the heart of what Blade Runner is all about and why this was such an amazing follow up to the first film. Affairs of social, corporate, or criminal significance are secondary to exploring the idea of what makes us human and how we decide what’s important to us. Critics and audiences always rave about how the setting is presented, and rightly so, but that’s all just a canvas of vivid bleakness in which the characters search for their better selves.

In the final scene, after K’s made his choice to save Deckard and reunite him with his daughter at the cost of his own life, Deckard asks him “Why? What am I to you?”. K casually shrugs off the question with a smile, but I think the answer is something Lt. Joshi said to him earlier:

“We’re all just looking out for something real,”

When K thinks he’s the lost child, he believes for the first time he has something real in his life. Even when this turns out to be false, it is because of his experience and shared memories with the actual replicant child, that he can make the noble decision to sacrifice himself in service to that very real longing to feel that sort of connection (even if it’s on another’s behalf), rather than disappear back into a system he can no longer delude himself into being a part of.

And this is the big takeaway I got from the film. The world feels like it is run by powerful forces ranging from merely self-interested to gleefully malevolent. In the face of this, it’s easy to accept one’s inability to make any positive or lasting difference. But the braver and more difficult choice is to continually examine what it is you care about and find some way in your life to put those values out into the world. To find and nourish whatever glimmer of hope you can find.

To look out for something real.