‘Blade Runner 2049’ (2017) ****/*****
More ‘Blade Runner’ than ‘Blade Runner’ is our motto
Just because something isn’t appreciated in its time doesn’t mean that it isn’t any good. Case in point, Blade Runner didn’t make any money when it was released in theaters, but in the decades since it’s slowly accumulated a legion of fans and there’s been nary a sci-fi film that’s come after that hasn’t been influenced by it. That first Blade Runner was unique in its aesthetic vision of the future, it was moody, it was atmospheric, it asked important questions about what it is that makes us human. It’s a classic — something highly unlikely to be replicated. That’s why nobody has ever asked for a sequel to it. You know how modern Hollywood feels about sequels to past successes though — even if you don’t ask you shall receive — so now we have a 35 years later sequel that nobody has ever wanted and that’s very likely to suck. Have any of these decades later sequels ever worked out?
Yes, one has worked out now, because Blade Runner 2049 is awesome. Blade Runner director Ridley Scott is back on board as producer, original screenwriter Hampton Fancher is back on board to help pen the story, and Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Sicario) has taken over the duties of director. Together they’ve made something that feels very much like more Blade Runner, but that avoids the trap of becoming a pointless retread. As a refresher, the first Blade Runner is about a future world where lifelike androids called Replicants have been invented as a form of more moral slave labor, a police force of “Blade Runners” has been invented to identify and dispose of dangerous Replicants whenever they go rogue, and the whole struggle takes place in a future version of LA that looks like a rain-soaked Film Noir that got thrown into a blender with a Cyberpunk novel. Blade Runner 2049 is more of the same, but it takes place decades after the first, and this time around our Blade Runner is an Uncle Tom Replicant who hunts down his own kind, called K (Ryan Gosling). While hunting down a rogue Replicant played by Dave Bautista he stumbles into a mystery involving a hidden Replicant body that was pregnant with an unprecedented Replicant baby, a coverup that goes back decades, and a potential Replicant uprising that would have to happen if the automatons ever learned that they have the ability to create “life” the same as humans.
Not enough can be said about how nice this movie looks. Any time Villeneuve makes a movie, it’s breathtaking, but whenever he’s working alongside Roger Deakins as his director of photography, as he is here, things get taken to the next level. Deakins is probably the best working DP, Villeneuve makes movies that are dense with production design and very fluent in using visual language to tell stories, and they’re both at the height of their powers while working in this universe. From the actual framing and composition of the shots, to the movements of the camera, to the lighting, to the production design, every aspect of Blade Runner 2049’s visuals are on point and working together to create lush, gorgeous, iconic images. Every frame of this film is closely considered, dense with visual information, and just a delight to study and appreciate. One of the things that the original Blade Runner is best known for is its visual style, and Blade Runner 2049 has possibly bested it on that front. Maybe.
The pacing of 2049’s story is calm, cool, deliberate, and very much in line with the original Blade Runner. Despite all of the science fiction naval gazing going on, it tells what’s mostly just a procedural detective story. The filmmakers didn’t give in to the temptation to add in a bunch of action or thrills and make this thing fit in better with all of the big budget superhero movies that are burning up the box office these days, and in the process they’ve managed to make a very authentic-feeling sequel. But, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like they’re being slavish to the first film either. It feels more like this movie was made by people who love Blade Runner, who get why it worked, and who are now having a ton of fun playing around in the Blade Runner sandbox. They’re like adults who have pulled out their childhood toys and are having complex, emotionally mature play sessions with them. They even gave the new Blade Runner a distinctive coat to wear. They get it. The love that went into this movie is always visible up on the screen, and that’s one of the main reasons that such a dark, contemplative story set in such a bleak, ruined world can be such a joy to watch.
One possible problem with the film is that it’s very long. By most accounts it’s too long. There are certainly places I can point out where it’s clear that time could have been shaved off of it. I love movies about giant, sprawling, post-apocalyptic cities so much that I probably would have been content sitting in this world for another five hours though. When you factor in the way that the Blade Runner universe seamlessly integrates the coolest bits of the Noir aesthetic with the coolest bits of a Cyberpunk aesthetic, this is probably my favorite cinematic world that’s ever been created. I’d love to live in it. Even the gross parts.
The world-building here doesn’t just stop at the design though. Blade Runner 2049 also dives deep into the themes of humanity and reality that got introduced in its predecessor. What is real, and what isn’t? How real does an experience have to be before we consider it to be authentic? How much does a being have to think and feel before we can consider it to be human? These sorts of questions get explored from multiple angles over the course of the film. There are several scenes where very human-seeming beings who are either Replicant or holographic begin to glitch out, and it’s very jarring to see something so human begin to act this way. It makes you come face to face with your own imperfection and mortality. There’s a scene where a holographic girl utilizes a street walker so that she can try to have as close a recreation as possible to an authentic sexual experience, and the scene is beautiful, loaded with thematics, and totally rooted in character.
Not only is this a world that’s rich with beauty and design, it’s also rich with ideas, and one gets the sense that an infinite amount of stories could be told here (though I hope that notion doesn’t end up tempting studio executives too much). The beautiful, bleak, noir-appropriate third act of 2049 explores the idea that none of us are important enough in this universe to have any kind of impact on it, so the idea of being “real” is an illusion. There is no self other than the one we hallucinate (hilariously represented here when K takes the generic “Joe” as a name after he decides he’s human, as if one is anymore meaningful as a signifier than the other). That’s clear enough to practitioners of all sorts of Eastern faiths. But the movie is also clever enough to flip the script on these “truths” (the scene where K’s date is interrupted by an incoming call is superb). It’s clear that these digital recreations of social lives we’ve all concocted on Facebook and Twitter in recent years are so much more hollow than the real ones that proceeded them, and that they’ve left us all more isolated, detached, and alone as a result. How “real” does an interaction have to be for it to leave us feeling connected? Could we ever be fulfilled only interacting with beings that aren’t flesh and blood?
To bring this thing to a close, let’s address Blade Runner 2049’s performances. This movie is full of all sorts of interesting character actors. Pretty much every face that shows up in it is an interesting one. That’s another thing it has in common with the original. There are also really strong supporting performances throughout, which was another hallmark of the first film. Bautista only shows up for a few minutes, but he makes an impression. Robin Wright steals the movie as our new Blade Runner’s gruff commander. Ana de Armis is hypnotic to watch as his holographic companion. Harrison Ford is doing some of the most nuanced work of his career while revisiting the character of Deckard. The list goes on. One of the ways that this movie bests the original is that it has a better lead though. Ford had yet to fully mature as a performer when he originally played the Deckard character, who was very reserved in the first place, and the results were a performance that was a little bit bland. Comparatively, Gosling is a much more versatile performer at this stage of his career, and the range of emotions and the tectonic level of life changes K goes through in this movie gives him so much more to do than Ford had to do in the original. If there was one thing that didn’t work about Blade Runner it was the relationships that Deckard developed in the film, but that can absolutely not be said of K. If anything, they’re the biggest strength of 2049. I’m not going on record in saying that Blade Runner 2049 is a better movie than Blade Runner, but there’s definitely a case that could be made that it is.
