On how Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and its sequels handle the question of what makes something real.

Blade Runner poses a philosophical question — how do you know if you're human? — through a narrative mechanism. The replicants have implanted memories. They believe they are human because they remember being human. The question the film raises is whether those memories are 'real' in any sense that matters.

Roy Batty's death speech — 'all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain' — is the film's emotional climax precisely because it's delivered by the being whose reality status the film has been questioning. He is dying and he knows it and his memories, which are not 'real' in the sense that they did not happen to a human being, are precious to him.

Blade Runner 2049 extends this question in a different direction: if you live in a world of artificial memories, does it matter whether a specific memory is real? The film's answer is careful and earned: it matters to the person whose memory it is, which is a different claim than the claim that it is factually real.

Both films are finally about the relationship between memory and identity: whether you are the sum of what you remember, regardless of where the memories came from.