Movie Review—Blade Runner 2049

Theatrical release poster

by Peter J. O'Connell         

Blade Runner 2049. Release date (USA): Oct. 2017. Runtime: 163 mins. MPAA Rating: R for violence, some sexuality, nudity, language. 

For about the past 40 years, science-fiction films generally have fallen into three lines of descent. There have been the Star Trek pictures, which have been, well, Star Trek pictures. Then there have been the Star Wars pictures, war and adventure stories with an overlay (underlay?) of mysticism. And there have been the Ridley Scott pictures, directed and/or produced—sometimes “de facto”--by that British auteur, or influenced by his work. Some of the “Scott pictures”--the Alien franchise, for example—link science-fiction and the horror genre. Others, like Blade Runner (1982), with its enormously influential production design, link sci-fi to film noir and a dystopian vision of the future. Such films also may have convoluted plots that involve abstruse concepts of space and time from post-Newtonian physics and/or recondite philosophical speculations about such things as being and nothingness and what it really means to be human.  

This year has brought forth Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the 1982 film. The sequel is directed by Denis Villeneuve, with Ridley Scott as eminence grise. Set 30 years after the time of the original, the movie puts us into the teeming, polyglot, polluted, neon-lit Los Angeles of K (Ryan Gosling)—hat tip for that name to a certain Prague author! K is a “replicant” (android). He is also a “blade runner” tasked with hunting down rebel replicants and executing them. K's bleak existence is given some cheer by Joi (Ana de Armas), his lovely “girlfriend,” who is actually a hologram that can instantly change from one type of woman to another.

On one of his assassination assignments, K comes across some items that set him off on a convoluted quest for Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the blade runner from the 1982 movie, who has gone into hiding. The quest eventually becomes one for K's actual identity. Along the way K becomes the hunted as well as the hunter, for the corporation that manufactures replicants pursues him for its own evil ends. 

Much of the movie takes place outside L.A. in the deserted ruins of Las Vegas, where K finds Deckard. One extraordinary sequence there involves an encounter between K and Deckard while giant holograms of  of Elvis and Sinatra perform. The production design of the film doesn't feature the rain of the 1982 film or the heat of global warming projected by many for the future but instead fog, mist, and snow—the objective correlatives, as it were, of the mind of K and the themes of the work. Eventually, however, after much violence, K, well played by Gosling with a kind of stony soulfulness, finds meaning for his existence.

Blade Runner 2049  is an impressive film in its performances and its visuals but rather tedious in its speculations about what memories are real and what aren't, etc., etc. At a certain point, in fact, one may long for the cinematic equivalent of Dr. Johnson's famed refutation of Bishop Berkeley. It seems rather unlikely that there will be a sequel to this sequel. 

“Footnote” to the film: Where does the term “blade runner” come from? It's never explained in either the 1982 movie or the current one. It's origin is as convoluted as the origins of some of the characters in the movies. It never appears in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for the films. Online The Verge of Oct. 4, 2017, explains: “So Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel to a movie [Blade Runner] based on a book [the Dick novel] but named after a completely unrelated film treatment of yet another book [Alan E. Nourse's 1974 novel The Bladerunner, about efforts to secure scalpels in a dystopian future], which was itself published as a third book [William S. Burroughs' Blade Runner] with the subtitle “A Movie.” In case that's not confusing enough, the latest issue of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is also titled Blade Runner. And we won't even get into the three Blade Runner sequel books by K.W. Jeter.”