Review: Blade Runner 2049
"I know what's real," Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) says late in Blade Runner 2049. It's a poignant line in and out of context for the question of what is real is the beating heart of both the current film and its predecessor, Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner.
A hybrid of hardboiled noirs of the Thirties and Forties and the philosophical science fiction films from the likes of Kubrick and Tarkovsky, the original Blade Runner was unconventional from the start and rare in the way it etched itself into the cinematic consciousness. Even if you haven't seen Blade Runner, you've seen it - its dystopian, cyberpunk, Japanese anime, retro-futuristic, and neon- and rain-drenched aesthetic, its sensibility of romantic fatalism, and its themes of what it means to be human coursing through the bloodstream of most films that have come after it.
Arrival was one such film that bore Blade Runner's influence and its director, Denis Villeneuve, has assumed the reins of 2049, and one of the remarkable things about this highly exceptional sequel is the fact that, whilst you can see Scott's DNA in every scene, 2049 is very much a Villeneuve film. This in itself speaks to the themes of both Blade Runners - what makes us who we are, what makes a filmmaker who he is. In many respects, 2049 is a variation of Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Whilst not a frame-by-frame rendering, 2049 significantly replicates the structure and content of Scott's film. Both films speak to one another, mirror one another, inform and affect one another in intriguing ways, and yet also are very much able to stand apart from one another.
Villeneuve re-immerses viewers in the world that Scott created. Very little has changed in the thirty years that have passed in the film's universe. A series of rebellions by the replicants, artificially manufactured humans designed to be slave labour, have bankrupted manufacturer Tyrell Corporation, which has now been acquired by milky-orbed industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who has made the recent and startling discovery that replicants may be able to reproduce. He tasks his favourite creation Luv (a terrific Sylvia Hoeks) to track down this particular half-replicant, half-human miracle. Complicating Luv's mission is K (Ryan Gosling), who himself is assigned to eradicate all traces of this anomaly by his boss, Lietenant Joshi (Robin Wright), who is rightly concerned that this discovery could destroy the already fragile state of affairs between humans and androids.
Like Deckard, K is a blade runner, whose job it is to track down older replicant models and "retire" them. Unlike Deckard, around whom much debate has swirled over whether he is human or replicant, K is definitively an android and, like most androids that populate this universe, he dreams of becoming human. He has a girlfriend of sorts, a hologram named Joi (the enchanting Ana de Armas), who can be seductive, supportive, and deeply loving at any given second, and to whom K is dedicatedly beholden. He has flickers of memories, which he tells Joi are mere implants, but he begins to believe otherwise as his investigation intensifies. K inevitably crosses paths with Deckard, who has been hiding in an abandoned Las Vegas hotel, seemingly whiling away his days drinking Johnnie Walker with only a mutt and his memories as companions.
Ford has been on a resurrection tour in the past couple of years - having reprised Han Solo in 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens and set to portray Indiana Jones in a fifth installment scheduled for release in 2020 - and 2049's Deckard proves to be one of his most textured and dynamic performances. There are moments of piercing pathos, especially during his confrontation with Wallace ("I know what's real"), that stir the soul. He works well with Gosling, who deploys his hangdog deadpan to devastating effect as K's existential anxieties simmer through his implacable facade.
The film is a dream, replete with staggeringly exquisite and unforgettable images which come courtesy of master cinematographer Roger Deakins, who pays tribute to the extraordinary compositions established by Jordan Cronenweth in the original. The same goes for composers Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer, who build beguilingly on Vangelis' iconic score. Blade Runner was always constructed on a foundation of melancholy, its characters, whether human or synthetic, like phantoms in a ghost town yearning for what was and what cannot be. Blade Runner 2049 continues that bittersweet symphony, by turns languorous yet rousing, tender yet ferocious, tragic yet inspiring.
Blade Runner 2049
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Written by: Hampton Fancher, Michael Green; based on characters from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto, Robin Wright, Dave Bautista, Mackenzie Davis, Sylvia Hoeks, Lennie James, Carla Juri, Edward James Olmos, Barkhad Abdi
