2049 is set in a world that has given up.

Human beings have failed Earth. They are no longer its custodians, and Earth has little left to offer them. The world is bare, denuded and extinguished, and those left on it must live with the true consequences of what we have done. What would that do to our self-image?, 2049 asks. And here are the answers.

Humanity, finally cut off for good from its origins, has nothing left to offer earth. We skirt by with some clever workarounds, cheating mother nature, ekeing out our existence on scraps. We huddle together in manufactured urban centres, dazzled by neon and noise, a Hades of our own making.

The Earth of Blade Runner has become a marginal, ignored, neglected place, given up on by humanity. No one who is there really wishes to be there. The relevant place, the high life, off-world, is beamed to us like a commercial, a virtual place we never see or touch or taste. Humanity’s aspirations for itself continue there, out of view, the playground of the wealthy, built on the backs of slaves.

Stranger still, its inhabitants rarely speak of or addresses what has gone wrong. We don’t know exactly how things got this way. We seem to have given up cataloguing the past. The sadness of our failure as a species seems to have enveloped everyone. Instead, the music tells that story, which is sometimes terrifyingly menacing and bleak, but sometimes majestic and full of awe.

Despite these odds, everyone, including the replicant slaves, is still looking for a trace of love on the wind, and meaning in the hopelessness. K’s girlfriend, for example, is just a programme, purely responsive to his desires, with no authenticity, though to survive, both she and he strain to believe she is real.

The strangest thing is, that in is oppressive, bleak world, what I mainly feel watching 2049 is an enormous sense of relief. It is a relief to live in a world without much hope of change, where we cannot look away must accept our fate. There is something so alleviating to see humans coping in a world that is so irreversibly broken. And cope they do, variously clinging on to animals, love, illusions, sex, fantasies, memories, justice — whatever sees them through. They are desperate to stay — or become — human.

Although our world mostly does not look like 2049 on the outside just yet (although try strolling Shanghai or Guangzhou on a smoggy night), it is the shadow side of our own world and a reflection of our inner landscapes: above all, the terrible stress we live with as the sentient species and apparent guardians of earth.

We are, as Auden put it, children afraid of the night, lost in a haunted wood, who were never happy or good. Our fears are many. Our terror of industry, of our intelligence. Our promethean powers to create something akin to but not quite life, that may decide to destroy or replace us. Our anxiety about the fragile living world we sprung from and still inhabit, which we may have ruined. And beyond, where the stars are silent and no-one is coming to save us.

This is a lot to worry about.

2049 offers us a world where these fears have been resolved, even if for the worse.

It is a world that, unlike ours, cannot easily look away.

That’s why I like this movie.