In the 2000s, a missile attack on Los Angeles was prevented. A dirty bomb was intercepted and detonated outside of the city, dousing Las Vegas in nuclear fallout, forcing the city's abandonment. Replicants were mostly blamed for the attack.
First to be fair Los Vegas is radioactive but it always was. Yes nuclear fallout fell on the city many times. The State of Nevada is full of Uranium ores and more. The State is also fairly high altitude in many places making it get lots of cosmic rays.
When the Replicant Registration database leaked to the public, human supremacists began hunting and killing every replicant on Earth. This culminated with the Blackout in May 2022, causing the destruction of the planet's digital technology and economic collapse. Common citizens then gravitated toward analog technology.
After finishing his assignment, he left Los Angeles with the replicant, Rachael, who later died during a caesarean section delivery of their child. Deckard left the child in the care of a replicant freedom group and helped to scramble the birth records to protect her identity. He then went into hiding in Las Vegas.
Much like the original, Blade Runner 2049 became a cult hit but failed to thrive financially due to pacing issues, murky stakes and zero fun factor. Ridley Scott followed up the tremendous success of his science fiction horror film Alien with his cyber-noir thriller Blade Runner.
Las Vegas was a city in the state of Nevada, United States. The city later became uninhabitable due to a dirty bomb going off and dousing the city with harmful radiation.
Villeneuve uses yellow as a source of information and enlightenment for our hero, K. Anytime a major plot point gets revealed or a new twist happens, yellow is in the composition somehow.
Because of this memory, K became convinced that he was Rachael and Deckard's child, but was eventually informed by Freysa that he was not and that the child was female. With this revelation, K soon determined that Stelline was the child. K took Deckard to Stelline's lab as she interacted with a snowfall hologram.
He tries to choke her as Luv tries to drown him, but K fights back and holds Luv underwater until she drowns, leaving her replicant lifeless body to be dragged to the depths of the sea.
In a 2023 interview, Ford stated that he "always knew" that Deckard was a replicant, but wanted to "push back against it", adding that a replicant (or at least, Deckard) would want to believe that they are human.
The second film further develops Rachael's origin, and gives significantly more details about her radical design. It revealed that she was an experimental model of replicant with a high percentage of human organs, including human reproductive organs, and that Rachael conceived a child with Deckard.
K then used the situation to fake Deckard's death, saying he drowned. Afterwards, he took Deckard to Stelline Laboratories, urging him to meet his daughter. As Deckard went into the lab, the severely injured K laid down on the steps outside and succumbed to his wounds.
Despite this, it was one of the biggest box-office bombs of the year, grossing just $267.5 million worldwide against a production budget of $150–185 million and failing to reach its estimated break-even point of $400 million.
Today, the city of Hiroshima explains on its website, the city's level of radiation is “on a par with the extremely low levels of background radiation (natural radioactivity) present anywhere on Earth” and has no effect on humans (here).
It is estimated that nearly 150 million curies of radioactive material was released through the atmospheric tests conducted from 1951 to 1962. This amount of radiation equates to about twenty times the amount of radiation released during the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
In Dick's original version of the blade runner universe, nuclear fallout from the catastrophic World War Terminus has contaminated the planet, and the United Nations has begun encouraging mass emigration to off-world colonies to preserve humanity's genetic integrity.
During the final fight with K, after subduing him, she smugly kissed him and retorted "I am the best one!", as if trying to prove her superiority over not just K, but all other replicants, further hinting at her deep-seated insecurities that she kept well-hidden.
She weeps when they suffer and is heartbroken when they die, but is incapable of acting to stop either. Like so many people who feel helpless in today's society, Luv is a prisoner to her programming. Luv's first very-human tears come as she witnesses a murder.
Wallace himself wanted to discover the secret to reproduction in replicants in order to support interstellar colonization, and to this end he sent Luv, now his assistant, to steal Rachael's remains from the LAPD headquarters and follow K to find Rachael's child.
However, he later learns that, even if the memory is real, it was not his own but Dr Ana Stelline's. Through her work, Dr Stelline shared her memory with K, and this allowed him to understand what it was like to walk in her shoes, but most importantly, to believe himself a free, loved replicant.
Deckard's eyes glow briefly in one scene, which was used in the film to subtly suggest his replicant identity. However, Ford denies this was an intentional effect and he may have caught some of the light intended to fall on Sean Young's eyes.
Later at K's apartment, he informed Joi of his conclusion that his memory was indeed real. This overjoyed her, as she always believed him to be special, insisting that he now be called "Joe." Unsure, K sought further information and Joi suggested finding the one responsible for creating memories for replicants.
But there's also a plot-centered justification. Blade Runner has a glib view of the future in which corporations wreak untold damage to the lives of civilians. This recurring theme is reflected in its constant rain, which is intended to illustrate the effects of LA's dangerously high levels of pollution.
Blade Runner 2049 shows viewers a future in which humans have implemented an unethical approach to Artificial Consciousness. It is morally wrong to enslave K and the other replicants just because they are sentient beings.
One of the most significant – and moving – sequences in Blade Runner 2049 arrives in its third act, when K learns that he is not, in fact, Deckard and Rachael's missing child. K is what he was told he was all along: a replicant, nothing more, nothing less.
