Movie Reaction: Blade Runner 2049

Formula: (Blade Runner * Tron: Legacy) / Tron

Blade Runner is hardly a SciFi touchstone for me. I saw it late enough that I couldn't fully appreciate its influence*. I liked it. I could grow to love it, although I'm not there yet. I've always been turned off by Ridley Scott and everyone's inability to quit tinkering with it. There's at least three different canonical versions of the movie and it's all about answering that final question: Is Deckard a replicant? It's gotten to the point that the question has outsized the film, which I find tedious. I suppose this has kept discussion going about this film long after many of its contemporaries. It's also nice to have this zag in Harrison Ford's career right when he was in peak movie star form. That said, I'd argue that the reason that movie has survived so long is Ridley Scott's direction and the world created through the production design, photography, and effects. If one thing needed to feel right in a sequel to Blade Runner, it's the recreation of that world. Thankfully, Denis Villeneuve nails it.

*Unless you've lived through it, you can't really appreciate the influence of something. Maybe if you devote a lot of time to researching it, you can approximate it, but to really understand how things shifted as a result of something else, you need to see it for yourself. At least, that's my take.

Blade Runner 2049 (I'm just calling it 2049 after this), takes place 30 years after the original Blade Runner. It follows K (Ryan Gosling), a newer replicant who works as a Blade Runner, destroying older replicant models. While on a mission retiring a replicant living in a secluded farm, K stumbles on evidence that suggests a replicant woman actually gave birth to a child. This was previously thought to be impossible. The knowledge that a replicant could give birth could throw the whole world into peril. After all, replicants have been thought of as high functioning slaves until that point. For that reason, K's boss, Joshi (Robin Wright), assigns K to track down all traces of this birth, including the child (now at least 30 years old), and destroy them. Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who now runs the corporation making all the replicants, learns of this as well, and assigns another replicant, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to find the child first, so he can experiment on him/her. From there, it's a race to see who can solve the puzzle first, a puzzle that inevitably leads back to Deckard, because if Harrison Ford agrees to reprise his role, you make room for him.

For all its SciFi effects and machinations, 2049 is a crime mystery at heart. I even detected some traces of noir in it. Given how much I liked this movie, it surprises me that I think the weakest part of it is the story. The plot isn't that complex. There is a lot that needs to be explained though, and I'm willing to admit that I didn't catch a lot of it. The film is aware of this too. Otherwise, it wouldn't flash back to shots from earlier scenes to remind the audience of things to help put together the puzzle. It really didn't help that I haven't seen the original movie in nearly a decade. It's possible to follow the movie if you haven't seen the original, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I was completely sucked into the world of this movie. Villeneuve took every queue he could from the original film and added a slickness to it that's you'd expect from 35 years of inspiration and developments. I don't recall which shots were exactly aped from the original and which were wholly new to this film, but they all felt of a piece. The shots of rooms lit through moving water are hypnotic. I love how everything seems to have a haze around it. It's like the world is sterilized but not clean. Like painting over a wall that keeps cracking. The music is sparse and loud. A single note will play out for several seconds and dominate that moment. If you cut out all the elaborate establishing shots or moments when Villeneuve just wants to stop and look at statue for 15-30 seconds, the film, which is nearly three hours, could be cut in half. But why would you want to do that? A lot of movies I like because I enjoy tracking the machinations of the story. Others I just want to hang out with the characters. 2049 I enjoy because I just like being in that world.

That's not to say the performances are nothing. I like that Gosling spends the whole movie holding back, sometimes visibly. He's an actor who is best known for being talkative and charming. However, he's pretty good when he shuts up too. Something like his performance in Drive comes to mind as a comparison. His work in 2049 didn't blow me away, but it's sturdy. That's what this film needs. I liked a lot of the supporting performances too. Harrison Ford plays it like he just stepped off the set of TheForce Awakens for his nostalgia tour, and that's all I really wanted anyway. Sylvia Hoeks is nice and intense as Wallace's replicant enforcer. Like she did in Wonder Woman, Robin Wright immediately grounds things as the authority figure that makes the rest of the world seem plausible. I even liked watching Jared Leto be weird for a few scenes. Ana de Armas pulled off a tricky role as K's hologram girlfriend (a step up from ScarJo in Her). She's playing a fantasy girl who is clearly programmed, but she needs to feel real enough that the audience can believe K would care for her. I felt myself emotionally invested in the characters more than I expected.

I'm not blown away by Blade Runner 2049. It hasn't rewired my brain in any way. It's not jumping to the top of my 2017 list, necessarily. I did  love this movie though. I liked being in that world so damn much. It was a treat. I mentioned that the movie is almost three hours, and one of my most common complaints about movies is that they don't need to be so long. I didn't mind it at all in this case. I would've gone wherever it wanted to take me for as long at it wanted. As the movie ended, my first thought was, "No! I want more". If that's not a sign of a good movie, I don't know what is.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend