Blade Runner 2049

This review contains spoilers, as do most reviews or op-eds of any intellectual value for that matter.

Roger Ebert described PEARL HARBOR as, “a two hour movie squeezed into three hours.”  That is precisely how Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049 plays.  While the 163-minute sequel to Ridley Scott’s rather loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, succeeds in more complex world building, it doesn’t achieve a depth of story that couldn’t have been told in half the running time.

In a future where synthetically-engineered humans called Replicants were banned and purged from Earth, a police unit of so-called Blade Runners is tasked with hunting down and “retiring” them.  K (Ryan Gosling) is assigned to this unit.

While pursuing one, Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista featured too briefly in a role that showcases a real talent for subtle acting), K unearths a corpse of particular novelty, the discovery of which sets off his boss, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), and attracts intense interest from Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the blind, eccentric founder of Wallace Corporation, which acquired the assets of Tyrell Corporation.  Inventors of the replicants, Tyrell Corp fell into bankruptcy after the death of Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), a more believable corporate profiteer who saw himself as more engineer than demigod.  Real villains never see themselves as the villain.

Wallace sends a lieutenant of his own, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), to follow K and acquire the corpse.  I feel like Hoeks has something to say, but it’s muddled by the writers’ tendency to relegate her to glowering looks and lots of leather-clad Bad Girl/Fighting Fuck Toy high kicks.  In the end, she’s still a servant, just like Joshi, but Villeneuve and writer Hampton Fancher have little, if anything, to say about it.

In spite of daily “baseline resets”, a mantra designed to clear the mind of emotional disturbances (think of the Mentats in DUNE), K sets upon a journey to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the old-school Blade Runner who supposedly holds the key to this mystery.  His partner in this journey is… a sexbot named Joi (Ana de Armas).  And this is where the problems begin.

Betwixt a technocratic allegory to Ancient Egypt and the Let’s Go Find Harrison Ford plot, there’s so much dead space.   It isn’t used, however, to establish any sort of social commentary about the enslavement of females save for a couple tears shed by Luv.

See how meticulously the scene compositions of BLADE RUNNER 2049 are crafted:  Inside the catacombs and chambers of what appear to be the leftover Ziggurats of the defunct Tyrell Corp., golden light dances and follows Luv and Niander, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere.  Roger Deakins, who famously commented that films today tend to be overlit, gorgeously captures the fantastic textures of character actors like Bautista with barely anything but a rim light curling around his cheek.  Gosling’s face, bruised and beaten, the cobalt light turns the blood and dirt black—similar to the look of a Day-for-Night scene in MAD MAX FURY ROAD.  But this too is child’s play for Deakins.  Recall the glowing lanterns in SKYFALL.

Especially at a time when geek and film culture is beset by scandal after scandal, one would hope that filmmakers take as conscientious an approach to character and story design as the lighting and cinematography.  Gosling’s K evokes a familiar everyman, whose troubles are assuaged by his holographic sexbot.  That the entirety of her personality can be contained on a device the size of an Amazon Fire stick says as much about technological advancement as it does about female disenfranchisement.  But to the average viewer this will merely come off as a plot convenience.  There’s no deeper commentary on K’s dependency on a mindlessly-devoted, sexy female companion to define and enrich his humanity.

Let’s count:  The Macguffin is a dead woman.  The protagonist has a generic sexbot.  The mustache-twirling villain has a generic Fighting Fuck Toy, and a penchant for unnecessarily murdering his disposable women.  Mackenzie Davis (HALT AND CATCH FIRE) is completely wasted as a hooker.  The police Lieutenant seems to be written as a man cast as a woman—where either they have femininity or they are leaders, but can’t have both.  If you marvel at the casting but not the story, consider that all the casting directors are women and the creative team all men.

Even with its many locales in and around a future Los Angeles, the film is surprisingly shallow on diversity unlike its predecessor.  As I noted in my review of Ridley Scott’s original BLADE RUNNER, street scenes show us a hodgepodge of races, many speaking a sort of hybrid language similar to Esperanto.  Rain-soaked streets and alleyways are bustling with people like Osaka at night.

Yes, BLADE RUNNER 2049 alludes to environmental chaos sown by overpopulation, but are we to believe it only wiped out all the nonwhite people?

Intelligent storytelling would have more deeply examined the nature of the differences between male and female enslavement, rather than conveying them nakedly (literally in one case).  On message boards and in discussions about Hans Zimmer’s rushed score replacing Jóhann Jóhannsson’s, many readers remain transfixed on Vangelis’ vaunted accompaniment to Rutger Hauer’s brilliant Tears in Rain soliloquy.  One of the most iconic scenes in science fiction, and reportedly improvised on set by Hauer himself, it shows a male slave resigning to his fate, almost naked, clutching a dove.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…

Regard that image for a moment.  Think about its femininity, its vulnerability, its defiant transcendence.  Then watch the mindlessly physical work of the male slaves in this film from beginning to violent end—its slapdash coda constructed as afterthought.

In the 35 years since BLADE RUNNER opened, I can think of one instance alone that reminds me of this scene.  In Spielberg’s massively underrated film, A.I: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE—arguably his masterpiece—Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), when taken away by police, exclaims, “I AM.  I was!”  Just shy of utter brilliance, the scene plays in the safe space of heteronormativity rather than taking a more subversive route, yet Steven Spielberg remains one of the few, if only, directors who gave the sexbot the humanity the protagonist couldn’t find.