Connectivity: Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 shares the bold visual direction and philosophically-rich narrative of Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi classic, picking up the story thirty years later. Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 film follows K (Ryan Gosling) , a replicant “blade runner” tasked with retiring older models. K’s discovery of a long-buried secret leads him across a desolate future landscape in search of the long-missing former blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) . As K navigates this neon-soaked dystopia, the film layers its mystery with larger questions of longing and intimacy. Ana de Armas appears as Joi, K’s holographic A. I. girlfriend, whose programmed affection raises complicated ideas about desire and the porous boundaries between real and artificial connection. Blade Runner 2049 deepens its predecessor’s inquiry into connectivity in a world engineered to deny such bonds. This screening was accompanied by a critical and historical introduction by Carsey-Wolf Center Assistant Director Miguel Penabella, who discussed this film’s relationship to our yearlong programming series Connectivity. Miguel Penabella is Assistant Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines conspiracy, spectrality, and melancholia as theoretical frameworks for examining historical revisionism in the Philippines and the links between former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte. He is also interested in theorizations of cinematic temporality and slowness. He is a former coordinating editor of Media Fields Journal. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center. The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue.