Blade Runner 2049

SPOILERS

I was the first to arrive on a Monday evening at the 7:00 P.M. showing of this season's BLADE RUNNER 2049.  It was in an IMAX auditorium at a local multiplex that's been around for seventeen years.  I went to see the movie alone as my wife was not exactly a fan of the original 1982 film.  I looked around the theater and thought of the many times I had attended movies by myself since my teen years.  To me, the activity lends itself to going solo.  Especially movies like BLADE RUNNER, which in fact my father had taken my thirteen year old self to witness.  As it turns out, this new film also seems to be one best viewed by one's self, to process without commentary from another.

I felt lonely during the new film's two and one half plus hours.  This was a favorable reaction.  Just like before, for that old film I'd seen dozens of times.  The sense of dread for a not so far off future positively saturated Ridley Scott's art/sci-fi that was based on Philip K. Dick writings and involved humans and artificial intelligence.  It was always night.  Usually raining.  Neon signs for familiar corporations, which likely owned everything by that point, threw off a luminscence that was blinding.  The Tyrell Corp. created products known as "replicants" that looked like humans but were entirely engineered by man for slave labor.  A Los Angeles cop named Deckard was an expert at identifying and "retiring" rogue replicants, ones who dared to try to escape their plights and choose their own paths.  Not in the blueprint. 

That was 2019.  In the years that followed, L.A. suffered a long blackout that erased all the hardrives.  As one character quips, only the paper survived.  As time progressed, the Tyrell Corp. went bankrupt, but another company emerged and replicants were now being bio-engineered at a faster rate to keep society on Earth functioning.  Someone had to fill all the jobs those lucky enough to have secaped for the "off world" (mentioned numerous times in the first movie) left vacant.  Positions within the LAPD, for example.

The protagonist of this new film is a lonely cop/blade runner (and new style replicant) identified as "K", the name derived from his serial number.  His mission - dispatch the old remaining "skin jobs", the Nexus 6 replicants who were not necessarily programmed to blindly obey orders.   K is good at his job, much as Deckard, now long missing, was before.  K returns nightly to a dreary apartment in a dreary building in the shadows of those neons.  His companion is a holographic image of a female called Joi, manufactured by the new replicant corporation, led by Niander Wallace (Jared Lehto).  As BLADE RUNNER 2049 opens, K (Ryan Gosling) hunts down and dispatches an older model replicant who lives long enough to inform his murderer that he feels sorry for him, that he "has never seen a miracle."

But soon, K will see one, perhaps more. Maybe he himself is one.  Hampton Fancher returns to create this new story, with additional work by Michael Green, and updates us on the fate of Rachel, the replicant with whom Deckard (Harrison Ford) fell in love in 2019.  Her bones are found in a box buried on the farm of K's dispatch.  Forensics reveal she died during childbirth.  Replicants were not supposed to get pregnant. Where is the child? Was there more than one? Is Deckard still alive?

These questions are answered, but many more are asked.  This frustrates many audience members.  As I write this review, there are several articles describing what a big box office failure BLADE RUNNER 2049 is.  Surprising? Not at all. The first film tanked as well.  Too cerebral.  Did the studios expect anything different this time?

Does anyone under the age of 40-45 care about BLADE RUNNER? I'd like to think so, but there aren't enough of them. Some of the reviews I've read, from otherwise very insightful and intelligent critics, call 2049 "dull", "plodding", "confusing". Really inconceivable, to me.  Again, it's history repeating itself. Folks don't want to think, to work for answers.  To see connections.  To consider what is beyond the visuals, which again are simply astounding.  They may well outdo the original film.  Roger Deakins' photography ranks with some of the most awe inspiring and beautiful I've ever seen, especially in IMAX.

The score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch is appropriately dissonant and frightening and includes cues from Vangelis' original work.  The overall sound editing adds to this effect.  Given the striking visuals and aurals, along with its feast for the mind, it is no exaggeration to say that BLADE RUNNER 2049 was one of the greatest filmgoing experiences of my life.  I was entirely engrossed and could've easily watched another hour.  I did not find the film confusing at all.  If anything, it's less ambiguous than the original.  It's a challenging narrative, with deep ideas about humanity, politics, theology, technology, sexism, sexuality, and identity.  Love, too.  The scene in which Joi and a prostitute named Mariette "merge" for K won't flee my memory anytime soon (likewise the "birth" scene with Wallace and his hatchet woman, Luv). But despite the darkness and chilliness of the film, there is also warmth.

I will revisit BLADE RUNNER 2049 again and again and again, as I've done with the thirty five year old original.  I know I will post additional blogs, probing themes and offering interpretations.  I could already spend a day discussing implanted memories and their creation, again a large element of this world. We even meet a character whose job it is to create them for replicants.  How those memories define a man, or a replicant made to look like one will haunt you long afterward.  Many of the struggles Deckard faced in BLADE RUNNER are mirrored here, although from a different perspective.  Many ideas are turned inside out.

Director Denis Villeneuve, you have done a "man's job", and should be proud.  You've orchestrated a film just as - and possibly moreso - thrilling, exciting, and contemplative as that of Ridley Scott, who I am now not so sorry did not resume the chair.   How daunting a task it must've been.  This film will likewise eventually find its audience.