Blade Runner 2049

They forgot to add the Dolby Vision, but this Ultra-HD Blu-ray release still delivers the darkest of noirs for the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic.

Afew years ago I was looking forward to the remake of RoboCop. Respected Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha had come on board to direct. The cast seemed good. But, well, 6.2/10 on IMDB (the original stands at 7.5/10) says it all. So I was cautious when it came to Blade Runner 2049. Ridley Scott’s 1982 original is rightly seen as a classic melding of the darkest of noir with semi-dystopian science fiction. It stands at 8.2/10.

Respected French Canadian filmmaker Dennis Villeneuve came on board to direct. His most recent film — Arrival (2016) — showed that he could handle very complex science-fiction themes and deliver a mood. And that he has done with Blade Runner 2049.

So thirty years have passed in the Blade Runner world since Deckard’s pursuit of replicants. Since then there has been a civilisational collapse and somewhat of a rebuild. The Nexus androids have moved up a couple of generations, and been better tamed so that they can’t go awry. Nonetheless, some of the old androids are around and ‘K’ (Ryan Gosling) is an up-to-date Nexus android tasked with ‘retiring’ them. The movie opens with one such action, and that in turn reveals a mystery which Gosling must chase down.

Along the way he meets a now much older Deckard (Harrison Ford). In real life there has been an ongoing argument over whether Deckard was himself human or a replicant. In this movie, the question is resolved in favour of the latter. Indeed, the central plot depends on it.

With a string of successful movies, Villeneuve could have gone his own way. Instead in this movie he has honoured the original material, the original film maker and, most importantly, the fans of the original movie (or one or more of the three official versions of it). The world of 2049 is different but organically connected to that of 2019. It is dark and overcast and almost entirely devoid of plant life. The neon signs and advertisements show many of the same products (Atari!).

And the score. When it came to the end I carefully scanned the credits looking to see the name ‘Vangelis’. It wasn’t there. Instead the music was by Hans Zimmer and relative newcomer Benjamin Wallfisch. Did Zimmer (he’s credited with ‘synth programming’) manage to resurrect some of Vangelis’

original synthesisers? Or are synths now so good they can synthesise earlier synths? I think it might be the music — the sound of the music — that does as much as anything to connect this movie with the earlier one.

Which isn’t to say that the sound is 1982 standard. The Ultra-HD Blu-ray version scores a proper Dolby Atmos sound track (the BD gets DTS-HD Master Audio). It is fully encompassing, occasionally thrilling, and packed with some of the deepest and most powerful bass committed to a movie soundtrack. A few other languages are provided in Dolby Digital. As usual, the Polish version is a voice-over translation rather than a dub.

The picture is gorgeous in a dark and foreboding way. There is almost limitless detail in the dark scenes. Which is just as well, for this is a movie composed almost entirely of dark scenes. The back of this disc proudly proclaims that this title, in addition to using the video version of Sony’s Super Bit Mapping, features Dolby Atmos, Dolby Audio and Dolby Vision! I’d forgotten about that when I went to watch it, and so I used the wrong Ultra-HD Blu-ray player. I used one with HDR, but not Dolby Vision support. When I realised my error, I went back to watch a few selected scenes using a Dolby Vision player.

But when I started playing the disc, my LG OLED TV popped up a message which said... HDR. That was weird. I put one of the Westworld discs into the player (see next review), and the TV said ‘Dolby Vision’. I returned Blade Runner 2049 and HDR it said. Then I took to Googling the issue — and found that apparently the Sony release has been mislabelled.

There was one quirk in the special effects. Right at the opening when K’s car is flying over the solar farms, it briefly looks artificial. Or it did in the Blu-ray version, but not so much in the Ultra-HD version. Some quirk of resolution?

Apart from ‘Moments’ — four playlists which hook into and out of the main feature on the UHD — all the extras are on the Blu-ray disc. According to the software I use to scan discs for technical data, it has three ‘Angles’ for the main feature. Remember them? They allowed the same thing to be shown from different points of view. They’re even quite an old technology, being brought in with DVDs. Further investigation revealed that these three ‘Angles’ only lasted for the first 1:48 of the movie, and were not user selectable. I’d guess that which one is used is keyed from the player language, allowing the opening text prologue to be shown in a couple of different languages.