Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017)
What has changed in the thirty years between the end of Blade Runner and the beginning of Blade Runner 2049? The details are thinly sketched in the sequel proper and across several shorts that have become standard operating procedure for any project involving Ridley Scott. The Tyrell Corporation released a new line of replicants with an open-ended lifespan and are no longer restricted to off-world colonies. A massive blackout disrupts or destroys most electronic records. The company collapses and is bought out by Niander Wallace (Jared Leto [1]), an industrialist whose mastery of genetics and farming techniques staves off a total breakdown of society. The Los Angeles Police Department begins employing replicants as blade runners, hunting down and ‘retiring’ their own kind.
Our protagonist is now K (Ryan Gosling), who we are introduced to as he goes about retiring a replicant named Morton Sapper (Dave Bautista), who has become a farmer after leaving a life as a slave and soldier. A chance discovery at the farm reveals an ossuary containing what we learn to be the remains of a woman who died while giving birth. This would be an ordinary tragedy except that it is ‘a miracle,’ as Sapper puts it. The woman was a replicant. Under orders from Joshi (Robin Wright), his commanding officer in the LAPD, K must located and suppress all evidence of this child that would ‘break the world’ if revealed. Along with his artificial intelligent holographic companion Joi (Ana de Armas), K discovers links pointing to his own past—one that he always thought was artificial like all replicant memories—and a vanished blade runner from thirty years ago named Deckard (Harrison Ford).
Blade Runner 2049 continues in the vein of the original film by being composed of a mishmash of influences and motifs. It is naturally indebted to the 1982 film and feels like a visual evolution on it. Los Angeles no longer resembles Hong Kong, but instead Eastern Europe with its wintry conditions and Brutalist architecture [2]. While the original was no slouch in the culture department, Blade Runner 2049’s screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green references Franz Kafka—K, also known as Joe, is an allusion to the protagonist of The Trial—and Vladimir Nabokov—Pale Fire is incorporated into a test to measure the replicant’s ‘baseline’—and Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins draw visual inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is positioned as an art house picture rather than an entertainment like Scott insisted Blade Runner was.
As for the film noir influence on the plot of Blade Runner 2049, it is an extension and expansion of the first movie. The events of Blade Runner, as monumental as they are to the audience, were small. Deckard tracks down fugitive replicants, becomes involved with Rachael (Sean Young), and learns more about his and their humanity. Its sequel effectively retcons this self-contained story into something much larger. At times the film is as much a conspiracy thriller as it is a science fiction detective story. The closest point of reference I can make is to James Ellroy, whose novels expanded noir plots into whole secret histories of Los Angeles and America across the L.A. Quartet and Underworld USA trilogy. Blade Runner 2049 lacks the scope of those books and has an oddly underpopulated cast for what it is trying to do, but the intention remains the same.
As social commentary, Blade Runner 2049 has the mixed success of its predecessor. The relations between the events of the film and real world issues of reproductive rights are evident. Though I would like to think that the all-male team of Villeneuve, Fancher, and Green are well intentioned, having them tell this particular story at the very least doesn’t have great optics. The women in the story are somewhat more developed characters than those in the 1982 film, but still tend to fall into certain stock roles of love interest, sex worker, and femme fatale. That said, the filmmakers do at least seem a little interested in examining just why these archetypes exist. I just wish that they would have done more with that, even if that means adding additional minutes to an already lengthy runtime.
I believe Blade Runner 2049 succeeds as a film. It is arresting to look at and—I know it’s sacrilege to say so—I prefer this score by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer over than of Vangelis. Ryan Gosling acquits himself well as K, using the same blankness as his character in Drive to similar effect. Harrison Ford is the most engaged I’ve seen him in years. All of the actresses—Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Hiam Abbass, and Carla Juri—are good in parts that could have been thankless in a lesser film. Its flaws are largely the same as those of the first film—sketching plotting and genre tropes bordering on cliche—but the story still works.
[1] Originally the character was envisioned by Villeneuve as being played by David Bowie, who died before production began. Possibly the only noble use of deepfake technology would be to replace Leto with the clearly better choice, and let James Urbaniak dub his voice. To the credit of the filmmakers, though, Leto is a natural and prescient choice to play a megalomaniac with a cult of personality around him.
[2] It was filmed in Budapest, Hungary.
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