Science fiction film as art

Rating: 9/10 (11 October 2017)

In the last few years we've been treated to a string of superb sf films that have totally penetrated into the mainstream: Inception, Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, Arrival, and now Blade Runner 2049. (Notice that two of these are by Christopher Nolan, and two by Denis Villeneuve. No coincidence!) These are exceptional -- not just the idea-driven stories that good sf films usually are, but high-production works with first rate actors that in some cases are nothing less than works of art.
Blade Runner 2049 fits "work of art" very well indeed. For me the essence of it was not the story line so much as the ambiance of this doomed world and its visual presentation. The original Blade Runner (1982) had the same emphasis, but this new one spends more time away from the ugly, crowded ground-level city streets, in favor of bleak landscapes and overwhelming Metropolis-style architecture that the shadowy controllers operate from.
And bleak it certainly is. The city-scapes and landscapes are about as dystopian as you can imagine from beginning to end: supremely ugly ruined factories, bare fogbound lands with dead trees, red windswept deserts. The only change of pace is not much help: geometrically clean and superficially beautiful interiors where this society's rulers carry out their genetic programming with the Replicants that they hope will save the future. A single scene of a sunlit green forest turns out, agonizingly, to be a simulation, and it just drives home the point that simple greens and blues are almost totally absent from the color palette of this movie.
The music score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch is similarly monumental. Landscape scenes in which nothing is really happening are accompanied by massive, foreboding music that becomes a feature in itself. This reminded me a bit of Arrival, where Villeneuve uses Johan Johanssen's score for similar purposes. (A surprisingly fun contrast to this persistently grim mood is offered, oddly enough, by the ring tone on K's phone, which we hear several times when someone is trying to contact him. It's a cheerful little six-note tune that is from Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" -- the start of the theme for the young boy Peter. What that means, I don't know. Maybe it's what Villeneuve uses for his phone and it's just a little inside joke??)
Parts of this film are like Arrival, parts of it like 2001: A Space Odyssey, other parts like Interstellar (all good comparisons). But above all, it's most like its own predecessor, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. In that sense it's not the totally original vision that the first film was, but it's a worthy successor to a classic.
I'm rating this "just" 9 out of 10 because I thought the plot line was just a bit unclear at times -- why were the characters doing what they were doing and how did that fit in with what happened earlier? Moment by moment the action holds your attention but it was the longer arc that was a bit muddy. Maybe it will clear up with a second viewing. Still, that gives you lots to talk about later, which a good piece of art ought to.