Bleak beauty
Followup to the 1982 classic Blade Runner brilliantly continues the story of the hunt for artificial humans
Blade Runner 2049 is a movie of beautiful disorientation.
Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi stunner digs deep into the essential mystery about who is real and who isn’t, in a future Earth populated by humans and bioengineered “replicants.” Even dreams cannot be trusted to be natural and not manufactured.
The film, one of the year’s best, makes us wistful for a past that hasn’t happened yet — the year 2019 of Ridley Scott’s original from 1982, Blade Runner — while also contemplating the world three decades hence with awe and dread.
The sequel reacquaints us with familiar faces, including a few from real life. They include Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra, who make spooky brief appearances in holographic form. We are also introduced to new faces where the smiles could mean anything from rapturous joy to deadly menace.
Blade Runner 2049 is one of the brainiest films to come out of Hollywood in a long while, asking more questions about the meaning of life than it answers. The screenplay, by returning scenarist Hampton Fancher and Logan’s Michael Green, evokes cerebral authors (Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov) and directors (Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Spike Jonze and many others). The film demands close attention but also rewards it, especially when contemplating the vibrant dystopian cityscapes captured by cinematographer Roger Deakins, the Oscar-worthy lenser who previously collaborated with Villeneuve on Sicario and Prisoners. Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer join forces on a score that recalls the majestic gloom of the Vangelis original.
Blade Runner 2049 grandly builds on ideas from its more linear (and shorter) 1982 predecessor, which overlaid deep thoughts onto a noir action film about a cop named Deckard (Harrison Ford) seeking to violently “retire” four off-world replicants, who had gone dangerously rogue and returned to Earth.
This time, Ryan Gosling is Officer K, a member of the LAPD’s recently reactivated Blade Runner unit, which we learn had been out of commission for most of the 30 intervening years, as the world coped with global famine and a power failure that erased most digital memories.
Replicants were blamed for these calamities, but an unlikely corporate saviour emerged: Blind industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the Elon Musk of his day, whose genius and innovations solved both the energy crisis and the famine, greatly inflating his ego in the process.
His Wallace Corp. has taken over defunct replicant builder Tyrell Corp. He’s now manufacturing a new model of “obedient” replicants, making them even more like slaves than earlier versions. That’s not how Wallace sees it, of course: “I make good angels,” he brags.
A few older-model replicants still exist and pose a threat to the new world order. Hence K is dispatched by his unsmiling and hard-drinking LAPD boss Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright) on a grim task of roundup and elimination.
K’s quest will put him on the path of the long-missing Deckard. It will also lead to a discovery that could shatter the fragile divide between humans and replicants.
More than this you don’t want to know going in, especially with Villeneuve and studio Warner Bros. insisting that advance knowledge of many plot points and character reveals would constitute spoilers.
Here are a few safe observations. Gosling is perfectly cast as the dutiful cop K, but Ford’s cranky Deckard steals every one of his late-breaking scenes, as he grapples with a world that has grown colder than in his heyday, both figuratively and literally — some very Canadian snow now falls, along with the incessant rain.
Blade Runner 2049 has a generous number of female characters, the most interesting being Ana de Armas’ empathetic Joi and Sylvia Hoeks’ efficient Luv. Both stake a claim to awards consideration and bigger roles to come.
The world of 2049 is even more depleted than it appeared in the 2019 of the first Blade Runner, with all trees gone or petrified and food protein now derived from commercially farmed maggots. But some wellknown corporate entities (and product placements) remain, among them Peugeot (who knew they made flying cars?), Sony, Coca-Cola, Atari, and Johnnie Walker (and even Pan Am, long defunct in our world).
The pop songs heard in the film are the opposite of sonic wallpaper. Listen to how cleverly Villeneuve uses Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love” and Sinatra’s “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”
There’s very little humour in the film, as you’d expect, but there’s a visual gag that really works: a moment of passion that gets abruptly terminated. Some things never change, no matter how far into the future you look.