‘Blade Runner 2049’: A brilliant, moving sequel
Profound and moving, “Blade Runner 2049” takes the genius of the original “Blade Runner” and creates something even deeper, more powerful as it revisits themes Ridley Scott explored in his 1982 neo-noir scifi cult masterpiece.
Here directed by Denis Villeneuve, “Blade Runner 2049” possesses that movie’s wild dystopian vision, equally techno-glitzy in its depiction of a Los Angeles where artifice in a world of bioengineered human-like creatures takes on a life (or lives) of its own, literally.
There’s also something bleaker, emptier here in this world, which has survived a Black Out and now has Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) manufacturing replicants, building on the ashes of the Tyrell Corporation’s technological breakthroughs.
To Wallace, replicants are his children, and he revels in the power he can wield through them. To him, they are as clay in the hands of God.
Although in this sequel we revisit blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford, suitably craggy and heartfelt with a bravura performance), it’s really LAPD officer K who serves as the film’s central protagonist, played by Ryan Gosling with a steely calm, feelings just simmering below the surface.
When we meet K, he’s on the job tracking a rogue replicant, just as Deckard did three decades ago. This replicant is a farmer who, he tells K just prior to being shot dead, witnessed something miraculous. Just what that is remains a mystery at first.
K also has a hologram girlfriend, to whom he returns home after a rough day of police work. The interplay between these two initiates themes of just what it means to feel human, to feel desire and to feel love, in much the same way Deckard’s romance with Rachael did in the original.
In this first mission of “Blade Runner 2049,” though, K also uncovers something entirely shocking: the bones of a female replicant who seems to have died doing something no replicant should be able to do. From there, the story unspools methodically, carefully and slowly as K goes on a quest. For some, it will be too slow, but not for me.
The emotional weight of this film is what’s so striking, and the pacing of the movie is what makes that weight gather a quiet force as we walk in the shoes of K, feel his questions soar as he begins to wonder just what he is and who he is.
Villeneuve directs this film with a clean, formal confidence, while the Roger Deakins cinematography is utterly gorgeous. Like all of the best science fiction films, “Blade Runner 2049” is most concerned with what it is to be human, even with its thrilling action and troubling vision of the future, and with the creation of a perfect being in these replicants, here meant to be enslaved. But they have other plans.
The interplay and intersection
between what’s human and what’s nominally not human in “Blade Runner 2049” puts our lives into perspective, as if to hold a mirror up to our essential souls, which is perhaps what we think of as making us most human. Or is it the memories we have, the things we cherish that seem to give us a connection to our own private histories?
And what would it mean to have a memory that’s not yours? Or a memory whose source is a lingering question? These are the kind of heady themes explored in Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner” sequel, sure to join the ranks of top science fiction films ever made.
A heads up: If you can, take a look at the three official “Blade Runner 2049” short films on YouTube, one of which is animated. They’re by no means necessary to see, but they color in some of the story between the original “Bade Runner” and this sequel.