Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Arthur G — 07 Oct 2017

Do film studios dream of electric fans?

Are you a movie? Cell.

Cell.

Creativity. Cell.

Cell.

Movies have original content. Cell.

Cell.

Congratulations Denis. You are at baseline.

The most sympathetic interpretation of Blade Runner 2049 would say it's enslavement to the original film is a meta commentary questioning whether franchise reboots can ever have feelings.

Blade Runner had a female android who let a single tear run down her porcelain cheek. So Blade Runner 2 has a female android who lets a tear run down her porcelain cheek TWICE.

Blade Runner had a megalomaniac bad guy who sometimes posed his head in a mannered fashion, turned away from the light, introverted by his dark genius; so Blade Runner 2 has a megalomaniac bad guy who CONSTANTLY poses his head in a mannered blah blah you get the picture. You already had the picture. There was only ever one picture. Blade Runner 2 is a massive, painstaking trailer for the first movie.

This is not the Denis Villeneuve of Enemy; full of creeping, surreal ambiguity; it is the paint by numbers Villeneuve who gave us Arrival.

The good bits come from Ana de Armas, channelling Lorelei Leslie's elphin Mamie Van Doren in Pulp Fiction. There is a moment of real pathos when she and K are interrupted by an incoming call. Her inability to touch her partner shines on us through a fractal prism.

The bad bits include some leaden beats, most notably the shift in gears at the end of Deckard and K's brawl. Anyone for tennis? A replicant with her eye removed so nobody can check her serial number; because in a world where androids are identified by their eyeballs nothing says innocent human quite like an empty eye socket. And in Jared Leto a bad guy so heavily wrapped in tired movie tropes he barely registers as a character in the film at all.

The original film built a world. The sequel is set 30 years later yet nothing has changed. A global "blackout," a famine, a renaissance in robot technology so profound that entire planets are newly colonised... but no progress on air pollution; or fashion. Blade Runner 2049 is not world building, it is science fiction wallpaper.