BLADE RUNNER 2049

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Jared Leto, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Lennie James, Dave Bautista, Hiam Abbass and Sean Young.
Writers: Hampton Fancher and Michael Green.
Director: Denis Villeneuve.

Rating: 3.5/5

Having muddied to the point of audience disinterest the mythology of one blockbuster property in the quest for ‘something deeper’, Ridley Scott’s existential musings on origins and creation continue in Blade Runner 2049. Thankfully, in the hands of self-proclaimed disciple Denis Villeneuve, the themes that consume the creator's mind are granted a more finely-attuned grace and depth than they were in the Scott-helmed Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.

Bleached bleak yet breathtakingly beautiful in the hands and eyes of DOP Roger Deakins, the sequel that seemed entirely unlikely to Warner Bros and Ladd Company backers who saw red on the first film ultimately befits the legacy of its origin. Blade Runner 2049 embraces the enormous shadow cast by Blade Runner 1982 by crafting a vast immersion in scale and vision, as well as indulging fans the rose-coloured sentimentality with which they fuelled the legend of Scott’s 1982 masterpiece-in-hindsight.

On board as one of the six executive producers (from the somewhat worrying roster of 16 producers), Scott has re-engaged scribe Hampton Fancher to revisit America’s west coast thirty years after the events of his first script; co-writer David Peoples did not return, with Michael Green (Logan, 2017) getting a screenplay credit, having earned Scott’s trust as a story contributor on Alien: Covenant. The writing pair has conjured an expanded setting that recalls key elements from the first film’s neon metropolis aesthetic while crafting new landscapes of desolation and decrepitude.

In 2049, the blade runner cops are themselves ‘skinjobs’, replicants tasked with retiring late model Nexus units deemed too dangerous for mortal relics like the legendary but long-gone Rick Deckard. Blade runners now look like Ryan Gosling’s K, introduced to as he deals with a gentle giant (Dave Bautista) deep in the solar power fields that pass as America’s farmland. In the roots of a long dead tree (‘origins of life’, remember), K makes a discovery that soon reveals a shattering secret that hints at the creation of a new form of life.

That’ll do plot-wise, as most of the critical community have promised the film’s distributors not to divulge key details. Suffice to say (as hinted at in the trailer), Harrison Ford makes a compelling return to his third most iconic character, the script affording him moments of emotion that call on the ageing star to deliver some of the most genuinely moving work he has ever done. Gosling is a sturdy if chilly presence, allowed the time over a whopping (and occasionally testing) 163 minutes to gradually emerge as a more-human-than-human android character (thanks immeasurably to the presence of Ana de Armas as his holographic love interest). As industrialist Niander Wallace, Jared Leto again stumbles as a big production’s central villain, his monologues of sociopathic malevolence sounding a bit too ‘Adam West’ for a film craving deep intellectual connection.

Denis Villeneuve does genre films as darkly-hued psychological explorations, more concerned with the journey than with the destination. As remarkable as it is to reference such films with regards to a Hollywood sequel, Villeneuve’s vision of future-noir hails from 70’s Soviet science fiction, specifically Andrey Tarkovsky’s landmark work Stalker. Under his director, the Oscar-bound Deakins fills every inch of the frame with an artist’s understanding of shadow and light, colour and monochrome, just as Tarkovsky’s lensman Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy did.

His visual obsession with making fleeting moments in time grand experiences means Villeneuve’s storytelling can create issues with endings (see Prisoners, or, Enemy, both 2013; even, for some, Arrival, 2016) and he can’t avoid a sense of anti-climax here. Perhaps that is what drew him to his first sequel - the thought of applying his penchant for inconclusive denouements into a franchise sequel. This is a bridging episode, with character arcs left unresolved and plot developments hinted; all the bluster that the production brings to the closing moments (both physically and, less convincingly, emotionally) can’t hide the fact that after 163 minutes, a satisfying third act eludes him.

One can’t help sense that producer Scott’s true desire is to construct another multi-episode franchise arc driven by origin issues, a la his convoluted Alien hexalogy. In one moment that lasts a mere handful of frames, a bald, muscular Nexus prototype instantly recalls the ‘engineers’ from Prometheus. Does BR2049 share less DNA with BR1982 than it does with recent instalments of Scott’s increasingly irrelevant horror space-opera? (In our Alien: Covenant review, we noted nods to Blade Runner and the replicant mythology).

Fittingly (and, perhaps, thankfully), that’s all in the future; for now, this flawed but ambitious, long but beautiful continuation of a classic can spend its time maneuvering to forge its own lofty genre status.