Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Lando B — 08 Jan 2018
If you spend $150 million building a world in Hollywood, chances are you're going to blow it all to hell. Demolition plays easy backdrop to heroism.
Denis Villeneuve, however, seems a more sentimental director. In Blade Runner 2049, he builds a world in order to regard it. These sets aren't meant to crumble; they're meant to suggest a value system and ecosystem that already has. These are the lasting monuments to a ravaged earth and a ravaged humanity alike.
Long stretches of the film's 164 minutes are devoted to taking in the sights and pondering the decay. Audiences can be forgiven for expecting more flying car chases and less slow creeps down a corridor. Past-tense ruminations aren't typically the stuff of blockbusters, but it's the stuff of Blade Runner 2049.
Villeneuve's sentimentality extends back to his source material, as well. In fact, if BD 2049 has one flaw it's that it leans too heavily on the original for its dramatic impetus. For those not familiar with the original, formidable swaths of the sequel will either be nonsensical or dramatically uncompelling. But fans of the first Blade Runner will be relieved to see the name not bastardized or trotted out for cheap thrills and easy marketing.
Villeneuve's updates to the mythos of Blade Runner are conscientious and well earned. The first film complicated the question of what makes humans human by introducing synthetic organisms, known as "replicants." Blade Runner 2049 doesn't resolve any of those complications; it only deepens their mystery.
The new film blurs not just the organic and the synthetic, but also the transcendent and the translucent. Digital holograms flicker at the border of the human and non-human, the real and unreal. Appearing in various forms throughout the film, holograms act as the immaterial containers for all that a society might rightly hold dear: history, memory, desire, companionship, even love. All that was solid, now merely glints in the air.
In a world of holograms, how to tell the truth from a projection? The social fabric from a fabrication? The light from an LED?
This review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was written by Lando B on 08 Jan 2018.
Blade Runner 2049 has generally received very positive reviews.
Was this review helpful?
