Special K

Rating: 8/10 (8 October 2017)

So Blade Runner gets a remake, the hero is called K (and indeed he is partly on Trial) and we still don't know or care whether Deckard is a replicant. But the journey is wonderful.
Of Hollywood directors, I thought it was only Tarantino who believed that film making was more art than business. While all the narrative is in service to the story, the film has enough space to lets things unfold. (Yes, it is bloody long too)
The first 10 minutes of Blade Runner 2049 are already better than most films I've seen from that last few years. It focuses on no more than a cooking pot. The cinematography throughout is stunning, but not in the hamfisted throw it at the screen way of the remake of Ghost In The Shell for example. The budget and the imagination are actually in sync with visions of vast desolate eco corrupted landscapes and cityscapes. It was a reach in the original, but in this film it is complete.
I'm not actually a big fan of the original. It was far too stagy even with the bits of philosophy sewn into the action plot. One thing the remake manages well is not to keep digging into the original source for meaning. Where they do meet the remake comes off better. The signature Voight-Kampff test for instance has a truly unsettling equivalent. K's sexual relationship is embarrassingly modern, not noir romantic.
The most pivotal scenes are all brief and between women (though they all fail the Bechdel test quite dramatically) and in fact the plot revolves around birth giving the film a kind of Children of Men vibe.
The elan showed by the film is remarkable even for such a high profile remake. Everything has a heft and quality. The design is great. We get a few glimpses of other sci-fi hits (a lot of Matrix type scenes, a few Minority Report fixations) but all in service to something, not just a fancy trailer. The film drops hints, but then muddies them leaving quite a few things mysterious. Another film could follow, but there is no feeling of incompleteness to power a franchise.
A remake is a remake, but this has enough about it to be a classic.