Blade Runner 2049
“I did Ridley Scott’s job once. I was good at it.”
+: true to the original, in both plot, tone and characterisation
-: maybe too tied to the first one, too?
A live-action Ghost in the Shell happened earlier this year. A Snow Crash TV series is in development, as is, apparently, a Matrix reboot. And right now, there’s a sequel to Blade Runner. All of which points to an uptick in interest in cyberpunk — maybe a revival, but in truth more likely an extinction burst or (unkindly, but not inaccurately if certain box-office results are a guide) a dead cat bounce.
Which is fair enough. It’s been 35 years since the original Blade Runner (1982), and as this film reminds us, we’re supposedly two years away from the events of the original film. Treating science fiction as prophecy is an idiot’s game, but pushing the setting of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 25 years on and accounting for 14 years of technological and social trends made Blade Runner no more accurate. The Japanese aren’t taking over. The Soviet Union, as we are bizarrely reminded in this sequel, aren’t around anymore. California is getting less, not more rain this century. And actual replicants, as portrayed in this film, are as fantastical as they were in 1982 or even 1968. For judging the year 2049, you might as well watch Game of Thrones.
So can you make Blade Runner work in 2017? Yes. And how do you? By leaning right into the aesthetics. Denis Villeneuve’s direction aspires, oddly, to a sort of 1970s feel — all slow pacing, gentle editing and evil bureaucracies in antiseptic environments — but of course, Villeneuve can’t quite keep the camera pointed for a minute at a time, and his concessions to modernity make it a sort of Nolanised take on the likes of Logan’s Run (1976) or THX1138 (1971).
Even so, this is a film that revels in every possible audiovisual detail — the boom of every taiko hit, the shadows looming in mist, the crawl of rain up windscreens, and the cityscapes, which reconstruct Los Angeles as a sort of drenched hybrid between Tokyo and Mexico City. It’s this latter detail which puts Blade Runner 2049 over the top, exposing Ghost in the Shell (2017) as a poundstore version. Villeneuve knows what he has here, visually, which is probably why he decided to give us two hours forty-five of it.
In amongst this, the acting almost seems irrelevant; I needn’t tell you that Ryan Gosling, for example, is utterly controlled throughout, although the mastery of tone throughout means he could breakdance in every scene without interrupting the mood. Robin Wright wrangles whatever nuance exists out of a standard police-chief role, and Ana de Armas is a find playing a genuinely weird love-interest role.
True, other critics have noted the largely-white cast, and the fates of pretty much all of the female characters. Maybe I’m rationalising, but in this case I’m not entirely sure this is a black mark against the film. This might not be a macho film — even the most action-film parts of it are light-years away from Michael Bay, and the kind of crowd-pleasing we might get in a Marvel Studios film doesn’t happen here (want to see the off-world colonies hinted at through both films? You almost do, but tough shit) — but it is a masculine one; there’s a grim repression of feeling almost entirely throughout, and this is ultimately a sad, lonely vision of California. I’m not sure what it would say about diversity if a Los Angeles filled with black, Asian and Latino citizens in 2049 was portrayed like this. I’m not convinced it would be a positive message. I’m not sure if women thriving in the Blade Runner universe — or the parts we see, anyhow — would be tantamount to feminism, either.
Plenty of other reviews have insisted that either a) this film is a masterpiece, and matches the first one, or that b) it’s not a masterpiece, and hence doesn’t. I’m going with c): it’s not a masterpiece, and it matches its predecessor, which wasn’t really one either (the original is, for one thing, too slow and muddled). The sequel adds focus, but also loses innovation (those little asides at the end of a scene in the first, for example, don’t happen here). Still, it’s a bold vision, even if it’s not the future — of the world, or of Hollywood.
