The most striking aspect, then, of “Blade Runner 2049” was how it explicitly subverted the hero’s journey. From the very beginning, K (and we, the audience) believes that he’s the focus of a vast revelation: the child of two replicants who shouldn’t exist but does, born entirely because of the magnanimity of fate. The miracle Sapper Morton mentioned wasn’t a virgin birth, but it was close, and it brings forth a prophecy upon K.

K was thusly marked, and his life seems to converge upon this revelation. He starts the movie as a docile slave with little more in him besides submission. He starts his investigation after a routine retirement, which uncovered a body of a pregnant female replicant, but as he digs deeper, he starts to realize the child he’s searching for is himself. He starts seeing the same date everywhere, but when he sees the DNA of pre-blackout child, raised in an orphanage, the realization clicks.

And as K races to San Diego with synth-thrums of “Mesa” pulsating in the background, we for the first time in the movie, see hope, in K, in Joi, but above all, in us, the audience. This feeling builds as K then visits Deckard in Vegas, which in 2049 has fittingly been transformed into a monument to female fertility, and finds his identity. This is near the peak of the rising action of hero’s journey: K has found and accepted his identity, and is now marching forward to confront his oppressors.

And then, suddenly, it’s all taken from us. Luv tracks K to Vegas, takes Deckard, destroys Joi, his only respite from the crushing loneliness of 2049, and leaves him for dead. He wakes up with the replicant resistance, but hope is again subverted, as K is then told he’s not the child, but is ordinary, manufactured, not born, required, not wanted. It seems there’s only despair left, and indeed, as K leaves the resistance, the movie gives us little beyond melancholy.

But then, something interesting happens. As K steps along the lonely walkway, with the telescoping holograms flashing on the brutalist skyscrapers, and gentle rain pattering down from the clouds, he looks up and sees Joi. Or at least, he sees an advertisement of her. A towering hologram, nude, suggestive, and she kneels and looks into his eyes. We can see K look back at this parody of the woman he loved, and standing there in all that dark, he makes a choice.