Blade Runner 2049

seen on 13 October 2017

Denis Villeneuve directs Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford in this long awaited sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner.

The original film had an extraordinary visual aesthetic, one of the last science-fiction films to have its special effects created without digital technology. It also had a story which, though leaving some important matters ambiguous, seemed impossible to follow without denigrating its effectiveness. Curiously, the film was set in an imagined 2019, and so the close approach of this year, without the developments foreseen by the film, also made a sequel problematic.

The problem has been solved by again setting the new film a generation or so in the future, in 2049. The world of the new film is 'descended' from the world of the original (not from our current situation) - the polluted city of Los Angles has only got worse; the use of replicants (suitably modified to be more controllable) has continued; older models are still being 'retired' (that is, eliminated) by police agents called Blade Runners. A new business venture has taken over the assets of the Tyrell Corporation, manufacturer of the replicants of the original film, and has extended its activities into artificial food production to combat the desolation of agricultural land. The stage is set for an intriguing new story, in which K (Ryan Gosling) is tasked with pursuing a particularly difficult and sensitive problem arising from events presumed to have happened shortly after the original film. Eventually this leads him to Deckard, played, as in the original film, by Harrison Ford.

Beyond this it is not especially fair to disclose further narrative details, as part of the pleasure of seeing the film is discovering how it has solved the problem of being the sequel to a highly esteemed and very idiosyncratic film. However, it is fair to say that Denis Villeneuve and his team (both behind and in front of the camera) have answered the challenge: this is an intriguing sequel, pursuing many of the questions raised in the original without being stale, sentimental or repetitive. The visual aesthetic is not duplicated, but rather built upon just as one would expect over a number of years. It is painly the same world, but it has also moved on. 

The film is well paced, with a languorous delight in showing the impact of revelations and deductions on the main character, interspersed with some visceral explosions of violence, and some great scene setting in the decayed and polluted world of the city. The score is good (though possibly not as evocative as that provided by Vangelis in 1982), and Villeneuve wisely knows when to do completely without a background score - there are some quite long scenes filmed in almost total silence.

There have been complaints that women are sexualised and fantasised over, with no corresponding approach to men (we see a computer generated female companion for K, but no woman in the film appears to have a male companion of this sort; and the giant advertisements in the city are more obviously aimed at men than at people in general). But the world view is very male-oriented, as the original film was based on a story written in 1968 in classic male sci-fi mode; there is not much to be done about this, though it should be noted that K's police boss is a woman (Robin Wright). 

It is a strong film in its own right, and the more remarkable for being a sequel that does no disservice to its original.