★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It’s the dead of night. Unable to sleep, a man – dressed in his day clothes, a glass clutched in hand – stands watching the city below. Cars roll endlessly past, a thin film of rain trickles streetward and all around, the skyline is lit by the distant diodes of passing aircraft and countless illuminated windows. This is not Los Angeles, November 2019, but Norwich, October 2013. The man is not Rick Deckard, bounty hunter, but me. His reason for restlessness is not the spectre of five active replicants, but five consecutive viewings of Blade Runner, in its various cuts.
Getting so wrapped up in Ridley Scott’s vision, its implications, its warnings and its world was all well and good then for a pretentious film student devoid of a social life, but will serve no good to anyone approaching its newly-arrived sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Due to a combination of hectic working hours, late nights and sheer lack of luck, I had no time to revisit Scott’s troubled, moody masterpiece before diving into Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up. This failure meant that I entered the cinema neither freshly contemplative nor burdened with expectations heaped higher than a dystopian skyscraper.
For months I’ve been confused by Villeneuve’s statement that such a respected artefact of popular culture was impossible to follow, a horrific idea. Having seen it, now I understand why he still dared to take it on. For him (as demonstrated in all his works to date), it’s the storytelling that comes first. Finding a way to step out from under Scott’s near-inescapable shadow – something that took me the first hour of Blade Runner 2049 to accomplish – makes one free to understand the trials of Rick Deckard and his prey on their own terms. No matter the attachments to its predecessor (which are plentiful, necessary, and carry unprecedented catharsis), 2049 stands by itself in a way I could never have dreamed, deftly defying every possible expectation borne upon its back by legions who’ve already decided its redundancy, egged-on by clumsy marketing.
Picking up 30 years since Deckard and Rachel disappeared (during which a Y2K-style blackout all but wiped the records clean), we find ourselves in the shoes of LAPD Officer K (Gosling), deciphering a lead from a long-lost replicant outlaw. Caught between his police chief (Robin Wright) and the hitmen of resurgent replicant-manufacturer Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), K is set on a collision course with Deckard himself (Harrison Ford returns to complete his hat-trick of reprised roles).
It’s easy to crack jokes about Ford resurrecting performances from his eighties heyday, but less so when his latest tops them all by a country mile. Respecting Deckard’s character as originally written – by David Peoples and Hampton Fancher, the latter scribe resurfacing for this film – and Ford’s own doubts about his nature, the screenplay approaches the mystery in a way that not so much extinguishes as pours fresh fuel on the fires of ambiguity.
Gosling, Leto and Ana De Armas (leaps ahead from her turn in Eli Roth’s Knock Knock) were my main sources of contention going in but are cast perfectly by a director who understands how to utilise their strengths. Gosling’s frozen visage is played to unbelievable emotional effect, and Sylvia Hoeks proves herself a scene stealer from the word go as his predator, the ruthless replicant, Luv.
The talent behind the camera shines equally as bright. While many will bemoan the loss of Villeneuve’s long-time collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson from the project, Hans Zimmer and fellow Dunkirk alumnus Benjamin Wallfisch more than step up to the plate with a soundtrack that dips sensibly into nostalgia without extravagant wallowing. And as for Roger Deakins, everyone else previously considered for upcoming best cinematography awards should stay home. His total mastery of composition allows us to finally glimpse what Roy Batty once told us we wouldn’t believe.
For those still put off Blade Runner from its perceived emotional iciness (something I’ve always struggled to understand, despite close friends emphatically claiming a lack of attachment to any of the characters), fear not. Though it begins in a similar lonely place, it grows into something that elicited an array of stricken and adoring responses from the shocked stillness of a murder scene to sobs as tremulous as the deepest earthquake.
In a mode of address more in line with the original, it still doesn’t see itself as an all-important delegate of decades still to come: Villeneuve, Scott and Fancher just want to tell a compelling story, to rediscover the key ideals of Philip K Dick’s source legend for a new generation. 2049 fills its (somehow breezy) 163-minute running time with questions about the aspirations of artificial beings and the nature of memory because such matters are demanded by the story, not out of some portentous desire to occupy the pages of philosophy textbooks for the next three decades. In an odd parallel to Scott’s own Prometheus, this takes the backdrop of a lonely, grimy sci-fi actioner to tell a story more concerned with belonging and promise. Forged in the crucible of an android’s dream, it looks tentatively, beautifully, to a future that may not discard its most helpless children after all.
Getting so wrapped up in Ridley Scott’s vision, its implications, its warnings and its world was all well and good then for a pretentious film student devoid of a social life, but will serve no good to anyone approaching its newly-arrived sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Due to a combination of hectic working hours, late nights and sheer lack of luck, I had no time to revisit Scott’s troubled, moody masterpiece before diving into Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up. This failure meant that I entered the cinema neither freshly contemplative nor burdened with expectations heaped higher than a dystopian skyscraper.
For months I’ve been confused by Villeneuve’s statement that such a respected artefact of popular culture was impossible to follow, a horrific idea. Having seen it, now I understand why he still dared to take it on. For him (as demonstrated in all his works to date), it’s the storytelling that comes first. Finding a way to step out from under Scott’s near-inescapable shadow – something that took me the first hour of Blade Runner 2049 to accomplish – makes one free to understand the trials of Rick Deckard and his prey on their own terms. No matter the attachments to its predecessor (which are plentiful, necessary, and carry unprecedented catharsis), 2049 stands by itself in a way I could never have dreamed, deftly defying every possible expectation borne upon its back by legions who’ve already decided its redundancy, egged-on by clumsy marketing.
Picking up 30 years since Deckard and Rachel disappeared (during which a Y2K-style blackout all but wiped the records clean), we find ourselves in the shoes of LAPD Officer K (Gosling), deciphering a lead from a long-lost replicant outlaw. Caught between his police chief (Robin Wright) and the hitmen of resurgent replicant-manufacturer Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), K is set on a collision course with Deckard himself (Harrison Ford returns to complete his hat-trick of reprised roles).
It’s easy to crack jokes about Ford resurrecting performances from his eighties heyday, but less so when his latest tops them all by a country mile. Respecting Deckard’s character as originally written – by David Peoples and Hampton Fancher, the latter scribe resurfacing for this film – and Ford’s own doubts about his nature, the screenplay approaches the mystery in a way that not so much extinguishes as pours fresh fuel on the fires of ambiguity.
Gosling, Leto and Ana De Armas (leaps ahead from her turn in Eli Roth’s Knock Knock) were my main sources of contention going in but are cast perfectly by a director who understands how to utilise their strengths. Gosling’s frozen visage is played to unbelievable emotional effect, and Sylvia Hoeks proves herself a scene stealer from the word go as his predator, the ruthless replicant, Luv.
The talent behind the camera shines equally as bright. While many will bemoan the loss of Villeneuve’s long-time collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson from the project, Hans Zimmer and fellow Dunkirk alumnus Benjamin Wallfisch more than step up to the plate with a soundtrack that dips sensibly into nostalgia without extravagant wallowing. And as for Roger Deakins, everyone else previously considered for upcoming best cinematography awards should stay home. His total mastery of composition allows us to finally glimpse what Roy Batty once told us we wouldn’t believe.
For those still put off Blade Runner from its perceived emotional iciness (something I’ve always struggled to understand, despite close friends emphatically claiming a lack of attachment to any of the characters), fear not. Though it begins in a similar lonely place, it grows into something that elicited an array of stricken and adoring responses from the shocked stillness of a murder scene to sobs as tremulous as the deepest earthquake.
In a mode of address more in line with the original, it still doesn’t see itself as an all-important delegate of decades still to come: Villeneuve, Scott and Fancher just want to tell a compelling story, to rediscover the key ideals of Philip K Dick’s source legend for a new generation. 2049 fills its (somehow breezy) 163-minute running time with questions about the aspirations of artificial beings and the nature of memory because such matters are demanded by the story, not out of some portentous desire to occupy the pages of philosophy textbooks for the next three decades. In an odd parallel to Scott’s own Prometheus, this takes the backdrop of a lonely, grimy sci-fi actioner to tell a story more concerned with belonging and promise. Forged in the crucible of an android’s dream, it looks tentatively, beautifully, to a future that may not discard its most helpless children after all.
