It May Be Almost Too Good!

Rating: 8/10 (8 October 2017)

This movie shouldn't have worked. Ignoring for a moment that Blade Runner 2049 is a long gestating sequel to a landmark achievement in genre cinema; the fact that this movie is vying for a high-level of complexity and grandeur alone means it's already got a tough road to haul. Not even the original Blade Runner (1982) achieved those ends the first time around. I mean there is seven different versions of the movie out there each boasting varying degrees awesome. So it'd be hard to use the idiom lightening striking twice when technically it didn't even hit once.
This movie could have so easily been Ghost in the Shell (2017). It could have fallen into the abyss of mediocre movies trying desperately to expound on the metaphysical with nary an understanding of the medium of film. Even with director Denis Villeneuve at the helm – the only name I would have trusted if I inexplicably owned the rights to this property – this thing could have so easily gone off the rails.
Well we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. 2049 is decidedly not a disaster. It is in fact, a stunningly beautiful, complex and audacious cinematic achievement. Not only does it reinstate Ridley Scott's original post-apocalyptic vision of Los Angeles but it uses said vision as a great jumping off point. There are piece of the old but at its heart 2049 is a bold new narrative in a beautifully rendered world that seamlessly incorporates a larger even grander design. It's truly is almost unnerving how good this movie is. At least as a standalone feature.
2049 takes place about thirty years after rugged replicant hunter Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly took a bounty job that all but shattered his worldview. Since that time, Wallace Corp, an inheritor of Tyrell's patents has created newer, more abiding replicants, one of which is the unfeeling Blade Runner K (Gosling). But when a routine "retiring" mission leads K to a body buried in the middle of a farm, K's seemingly ordinary investigation leads him to potentially earth shattering implications.
Much like the original, the "mystery" is pretty much there to frame the film's loftier ambitions. No attempt is made to make it more complex than it needs to be, which might irk a few audience members unaccustomed to the film's steadier pace. There's no denying it's a pretty straightforward swoop down the rabbit hole that, like most classic noir tales almost seems beside the point.
The rub here - again, much like the original - is the atmospherics i.e. its unique mix of heavy sci-fi trimmings, tech-noir distinctions and Wagnerian operatics. Villeneuve is no shrinking violet when it comes to this kind of stuff and thanks to impossibly great cinematography by the great Roger Deakins, every frame sits at the perfect nexus of belying information and being just so emotionally satisfying in its beauty.
The film is almost too good! It's technical superiority and pitch-perfect mimicry comes at the expense of soiling some of the original Blade Runner's most enduring elements. Starting with the obvious; Deckard's inclusion in this movie puts to rest the theory that he was himself a replicant. Less obvious is 2049's lived-in quality. Blade Runner was the introduction to this world and as such should be given credit for its thickly laid, almost impenetrable mythology and the enduring legacy therein. But 2049 is the meticulously thought out expansion set that comes at a time when audiences have the ability to really geek out over the franchise in universum. It basically has Empire Strikes Back (1980)-syndrome. It took a fluke of an idea that shouldn't have worked but did and improved on it.
The ultimate irony is if you change around a few names and places 2049 could have been its own thing. The narrative pencils in obligatory homage where it works and lord knows Harrison Ford turns in the best performance he's given since Witness (1985). But every time Mackenzie Davis was channeling Daryl Hannah or Jared Leto was doing his King Herod routine I kept thinking, "Boy wouldn't it be cool if Rutger Hauer showed up?" "Wouldn't it be cool if Joe Turkel showed up?" If 2049 was introduced as a completely original idea "inspired" by Blade Runner, there'd be less distraction. Then who knows how much further we could have gotten.
Luckily the cast of 2049 is game to fill the void placed by long deceased characters. Sylvia Hoeks is quite a find as the cold, vamping villain at-large. On the other side of the emotional divide Ana de Armas channels a refreshing amount of vulnerability as a hapless projected AI who provides K with much needed emotional support. As K, Gosling isfine. He's basically pulling the same instinctively driven, vacant-eyed shtick he debut in Drive (2011) which I guess is how the character is written. Rest assured if every leading white guy in Hollywood but him got the plague, the mononym-ed antihero trope would still remain well tended.
Much like Deckard and K at the close of this beautiful looking epic, my world has been thoroughly wrecked after seeing 2049. Granted, I was hopeful that this movie was going to be good. But if it wasn't, I could always fall back on the self-satisfaction of knowing what I thought was obvious – making a sequel 30 years after the fact is not a good idea. I may have to rethink my life but I'll hold off on critical paradigm shifts until the director's cut comes out.