10 Greatest Unspoken Sci-Fi Movie Plot Points
5. The Soviet Union Still Exists - Blade Runner 2049
Both Blade Runner movies are absolutely cram packed full of fascinating world-building, and Blade Runner 2049 offers up an especially fascinating morsel that's never engaged with verbally - the Soviet Union never collapsed.
Throughout the film, adverts for various products are visible with mention of them being produced by the "CCCP," which is the Russian abbreviation for the Soviet Union.
It suggests that the USSR is still very much an entity more than 50 years after it fell in reality, though the circumstances which allowed it to thrive remain completely ambiguous.
By director Denis Villeneuve's own admission, this was a carry-over from Philip K. Dick's original Blade Runner novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Published as it was in 1968, almost 25 years before the Soviet Union fell, Dick could've never anticipated anything other than the USSR continuing to exist, as makes for a rather fascinating slice of alt-universe futurism. In an interview with Time about the subject, Villeneuve said:
"I went back to the Philip K. Dick novel and explored the geopolitics of the book. In the book, the USSR was still present. I thought that it would be interesting to think - what if the USSR was still alive? What if it was as strong a cultural and economic force as the U.S., but with different political laws?... What if you saw Russian products in the streets of Los Angeles? I thought that would create an interesting distorted reality that would tell my audience right from the start that they're in a different world with different laws from a geopolitical point of view."
Well, there it is.