It’s difficult to overstate the influence of a film like
“Blade Runner,” Ridley Scott’s classic 1982 science fiction neo-noir. Though it
received mixed reviews upon its initial release, the film has risen in esteem
over the passing decades, as its impact truly began to be recognized. We have
it to thank for every other pop culture vision of a gloomy, dystopian future,
and its visual aesthetic is one of the rare examples that deserves to be called
“visionary.” It redefined a genre while giving rise to a new one (tech-noir),
and solidified Scott’s place as an icon of science-fiction filmmaking.
There’s long
been rumblings of a possible sequel, and finally after 35 years, “Arrival”
director Denis Villeneuve has taken a crack at it. Like its predecessor, the
somber and stylish “Blade Runner 2049” emphasizes mood and atmosphere over
story, and it even manages to pack some legitimate emotion into its narrative.
The result is a fascinating melding of blockbuster filmmaking with an arthouse
sensibility.
In Los
Angeles of 2049, Agent K (an excellent Ryan Gosling) is a blade runner, a
police detective trained to identify, hunt down, and “retire” renegade replicants (bioengineered androids virtually
indistinguishable from human beings). There’s never a question that K is
himself a replicant, as the humans he encounters
never hesitate to remind him, hurling the epithet “skin job” at him and
managing to remind him at every opportunity that they believe he lacks a soul.
K’s existence is a lonely one, and his sole companion is a holographic
girlfriend, Joi (Ana de Armas) whom he dotes on.
In the
process of tracking down his latest target, a peaceful protein farmer (Dave
Bautista, wonderful in a small role), K makes a discovery that has the
potential to break down society’s already hazy distinction between man and
machine. Under orders from his superior (Robin Wright), K pursues the case — which
is connected in some way to the fate of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) — but the
investigation soon leads him into an existential crisis, questioning the nature
of his own identity.
Along the
way, K crosses paths with the megalomaniacal Niander
Wallace (Jared Leto, in his first performance in a
long while that didn’t make me want to tear my own eyeballs out), whose Wallace Corporation has succeeded where the original
film’s Tyrell Corporation failed, and created a line of replicants
who obey orders without ever asking questions. Eager to protect his investment,
he sends his replicant servant and enforcer Luv (a
terrifying Sylvia Hoeks) after K.
“Blade
Runner 2049″ picks up the themes and ideas from the original — what makes us
human, where does our identity come from, the nature of memory and
consciousness — while messing intriguingly with the established mythology.
Its vision
of L.A. is still a city of towering skyscrapers and neon lights on rain-slicked
streets. But whereas the previous film showed us a world teeming with people,
it now seems on the verge of death, as more and more of the population abandon
the city in favor of living “off-world.”
The film is
quiet and chilly; moments of humor are few and far between. It maintains the
original’s deliberate pacing, though its narrative is far more packed with
incident, catering to the audience’s more modern sensibilities. But Villeneuve
brings a sense of stillness that we don’t often expect in our modern
blockbusters.
It’s also
jaw-droppingly beautiful to look at thanks to the
lensing of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins
(doing work here that’s deserving of getting him the Oscar that continues to
elude him after fourteen nominations). The film’s tactile effects and
incredible production design, from Dennis Gassner,
does a marvelous job of making the setting feel like the same world seen in the
original film, 30 years down the line. Benjamin Wallfisch
and Hans Zimmer’s foreboding score nicely fuses new themes with the familiar synthy sound of Vangelis’ work in the original.
What’s
frustrating about “Blade Runner 2049” is that for all the ways it manages to
get the most difficult aspects of following up a beloved property right, it
stumbles doing what should be the simplest of things in rounding out its world.
Its roles for women are a bit of a mixed bag. As intriguing as the female
characters are individually (largely because each of the actresses manage to
bring out more in them than is explicitly on the page), none of them are given
an arc that doesn’t center on the men in their lives. It’s also more than a
little troubling that I can count the number of people of color who apparently
exist in this world on one hand.
As others have
pointed out, it’s reflective of mainstream science fiction’s tendency to
use white, straight male characters as stand-ins for persecuted people while
sidelining the actual groups society most often tends
to persecute. “Blade Runner 2049” is visually dazzling, thoughtful, and
impeccably performed, but when crafting a vision of humanity’s future, how hard
is it to give its world a population that actually, you know, resembles
humanity?
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2017.
