Blade Runner 2049: A Review

[mallorys_camera]

The original Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies. It is quite unlike the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from which it was loosely adapted: Dick writes chatty novels; I think because he’s interested in the integration of bizarre technologies into everyday life and the effect they have on ordinary people.

But everyday lives and ordinary people don’t really work as cinematic subjects. Ridley Scott had the brilliant idea to transform the novel’s plot into a noir narrative. Thus Blade Runner is one of the few films that’s much, much better than its source material.

Blade Runner not only defined a visual vocabulary that moviegoers would see over and over again, it also fused a new dimension onto the Frankenstein myth, which – let’s face it – had begun to fray a bit around the edges. The key issue is no longer that Man is attempting to compete with God in the creation of new life; the key issue is that Man is creating a line of slaves. Prometheus’s sin is not that he steals fire but that he roasts a pig over it.

I’d heard they were doing a Blade Runner sequel – they! [insert smiley] – but was somewhat surprised to see it playing this weekend at my local movie house. (Believe it or not, you can actually see first-run movies at the Roosevelt Hyde Park theater for five bucks! It’s very cheap! The people who run the theater must own the property the theater is on.)

So I went.

Sorry to say, though, Blade Runner 2049 is a big pile of steaming meh.

Which is not to say that it’s not worth seeing, particularly if you like odd imagery. The art direction is very fine.



The plot, though, is more or less incomprehensible.

Ryan Gosling plays a replicant named K. (Ding! Ding! Ding! Kafka allusion!) K is a blade runner i.e. a cop whose job is to hunt down renegade replicants, and somehow he gets caught up investigating the mysterious case of a replicant who 30 or so years before actually gave birth, and implanted memories make him think he is the progeny. He runs around eluding various Big Baaads including Jared Leto who’s wearing weird contact lenses –

(Dear God,
Please lock Jared Leto in a little box so he can never make a movie again.
Thank you!
Your pal,
Patrizia)

-- and Robin Wright who still thinks she’s Clair Underwood and a strange female replicant who defies all the laws of replicancy by harming humans – though we’re never told why she can defy the laws of replicancy, and not harming humans is one of the immutable assumptions of this particular universe.

Two hours or so into the movie – make sure you grab a comfortable seat because you are going to feel each and every one of those 120 minutes – we go to Radioactive Las Vegas!

We’re supposed to know it’s Las Vegas because there’s all this gargantuan statuary of naked women in the orange radioactive dust except that I don’t remember gargantuan statues of naked women anywhere in the vicinity of Las Vegas. Did I miss something somewhere? I so often do.

Harrison Ford – Deckard! (Swoon) – lives in Radioactive Las Vegas. (Can I just say that well into his 70s, Harrison Ford remains a fine-looking man?)

Harrison Ford entertains himself by watching holograms of Elvis Presley. Sorry, Denis Villeneuve, but Deckard is so obviously not an Elvis fan.

Harrison Ford has a dog! And it says something about Blade Runner 2049 that the dog was the only character I was truly interested in. (Wait! Is the dog a replicant? They have replicant dogs? How can I get a replicant dog? Etcetera, etcetera.)

There was an obvious attempt to set up franchise lust in the last ten minutes of the film, but I hope future producers can resist it. Blade Runner 2049 is bombing at the box office. And there’s a reason for it. That should make resistance easier.

Comments

[angiereedgarner]

Thank you for the review. I am not surprised we would have the same movie on a short list of favs. If you have time, I'd love to know the rest of your list!

[mallorys_camera]

A few others right off the top of my head:

La Strada (Federico Fellini) The Go-Between (Joseph Losey) The Third Man (Carol Reed) The Man Who Would Be King (John Houston) Holes (which is a Disney movie I just totally, totally love)

[mallorys_camera]

Oh! And Bertolucci's The Conformist!