Ridley Scott’s proto-cyberpunk sci-fi noir Blade Runner is revived as a ponderous
Villeneuve somber spectacle in Blade
Runner 2049. Over thirty years after the original, which imagined a
dystopian future L.A. with contours – smoggy rain; polyglot class
stratifications; enormous looming digital neon advertising – setting the stage
for many imitators, the new film digs into the implications of its world.
Before, Harrison Ford played a cop tasked with hunting down rogue cybernetic
beings called Replicants. Decades later, a new model Replicant played by Ryan
Gosling is hunting down the last of the old models who are still hiding out
under the radar, living lives of quiet desperation, their illegal problem
programming allowing them just enough free will to shake off the yolk of their
makers’ expectations. In the opening sequence Gosling flies his hovercar over a
vast dried up terrain to a far-flung farm where a gentle giant of a Replicant (Dave
Bautista) sighs in resignation, fighting back in futile self-preservation
before the younger bot breaks him down and checks him off the wanted list.
Sounds like pulp fun, but look and listen to the film’s atmosphere, director
Denis Villeneuve using the suspense techniques honed on the likes of his Prisoners and Sicario to turn out slow, carefully considered images with
grey-air-and-glowing-screen palates and a soft quiet unsettling as a pot boils
in the background. These filmmakers mean to take a movie about robots,
holograms, flying cars, and corrupted files very seriously indeed.
After last year’s Arrival
found Villeneuve working with a deep, powerful strain of emotional content
– wrapping an egg-headed first-contact story around an effective contemplation
of parenthood, memory, and grief – he takes a step back into ice cold dread.
This late Blade Runner sequel is
merely a speaker-rattling drone, a slow drip accumulation of dread and despair
gorgeously lensed by the great Roger Deakins. He paints in greyscale gunmetal
tones and harsh neon lights gracefully arcing across beautiful faces and
austere jumbles of concrete-and-polymer industrial parks and towering brutalist
architecture. This is a future world at once sparse and ornate, underpopulated
and overstuffed. The place, brilliantly built out from the iconic look of
Scott’s original, is tactile and disturbing in its all-absorbing qualities. The
entrancing score – so often sounding like a window-rattling motorcycle engine roaring
by outside, or like a pitch-distorted, extremely slowed down dial-up modem –
and the beautifully photographed production design does the heavy lifting.
Characters here are poses; worldbuilding is ominous terse monologue; emotion is
as crisp and empty as watching an android kiss a hologram. We’re to be
contemplating the chilly romanticism of digital beings, but it’s hard not to
shake the feeling we’re watching ones and zeroes execute their complicated
programs. That’s partly the point, but there’s a frustrating surface-level
satisfaction to the movie’s long, languorous, cavernous contemplation of its
eerie images. I loved a scene where a hologram slides over a human woman and
syncs to her movements, an imperfect process of digital possession that creates
ever-so-slightly overlapping images. But it looks cool more than it is actually
intellectually stimulating.
The film runs nearly three hours, and its pleasures are
absorbing but fleeting. Its appeal sits entirely in stoic characters wearing
fabulous wardrobe – stiff high collars, starkly starched trench coats – and
inhabiting handsomely striking sets – echoing rooms, windswept irradiated
landscapes, a theater of holographic entertainers on the fritz, thunderous
man-made waterfalls, junkyards exploding in sudden District-9-style bodily harm as sudden death rains from above. It’s
the sort of movie interested in exploring the differences between mankind and
artificial intelligence, probing the deep mysteries of what makes a soul and
what it means to create life, but in which man and robot alike are equally
placid and monotone in demeanor. The ace supporting cast – Robin Wright, Sylvia
Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis, and even Jared Leto (who is fine in his
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn) – are directed to be effective elements of the
art direction, moving and emoting so precisely and mechanistically it makes a
mockery of any sense you could figure out who’s real and who’s created. They’re
all ghosts in the machine. Villeneuve’s style of handsome foreboding is
admirably sustained, putting the script’s grinding inevitability and tangled,
deliberately-paced core who-am-I? mystery plotting through a lens of impeccable
craftsmanship. I was never bored, but never involved, always stimulated but
never fully invested. It’s a remarkable technical achievement, but a hollow
emotional and intellectual exercise. It’s incredibly cool and totally cold.
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