“Real” is a slippery word that grows slicker by the day, as technology grows and tangles around us like an invasive weed, changing our perceptions of ourselves and others as we gawk at each other on screens of ever-increasing pixels. Where will we go from here? Will we tumble down the hole of artificial intelligence, building slaves (for labor, sexual, and other purposes) out of beings that look much like us but are constructed rather than born? Will those independently thinking machines seek rights, and will we give them? How will they be integrated into the new definition of what it means to be human? And what will humanity’s home look like after ecological disaster ravages it? Will we abandon Earth?
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| Photo credit: Blade Runner 2049/IMDb |
These are the questions on the mind of Blade Runner 2049, much as they were in the original 1982 installment in the franchise, the genre-defining sci-fi-noir Blade Runner.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) and shot by the world-class cinematographer Roger Deakins (who lensed many of the greatest movies of the last 25 years), 2049 often comes across as the world’s most beautiful and evocative essay writing prompt. It grapples with heady themes related to our dependence on technology and evolving relationship with it, plus it expects the audience to ruminate on these ideas like adults — it believes in its audience’s brain power, and that is something to celebrate.
But the film’s questions about what it means to be human often get in the way of telling its simple missing-person detective story, led by a police officer named, simply, K, played by Ryan Gosling as a glum and exhausted spoke in a wheel that had long ago rusted into borderline uselessness. K is a blade runner, the same job Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford, who returns in 2049 as an in-hiding Deckard) had in the first film. Blade runners “retire” androids who have gotten less docile than they had been in their prime and have made lives for themselves outside of humans’ original forced-labor uses for them. Blade runners are slave hunters, in other words, and they live in a hopeless world.
Until, that is, one of K’s robotic targets leaves him a clue that there is still hope to be found in the world. In fact, there are miracles, in the form of an android who had once given birth to a living, breathing humanoid creature that grew up as a human would. At least, that’s what K is told. It could be the kind of hokum told by oppressed peoples to make themselves believe that a brighter future lies ahead. Or it might be the truth, which would be a game changer for all of the human race. K can answer that question if he can find that miracle baby.
The plot cooked up by screenwriters Hampton Fancher and Michael Green is lean, clear, and offers Blade Runner 2049 plenty of opportunities to streamline itself and focus on its most impactful themes. In execution, though, the film clocks in at a bloated and often meandering two hours and 43 minutes. One may expect that such a runtime would allow Villeneuve and Deakins to speak in visual terms about technophobia, the expanding notions of what personhood can become as we introduce new species, and our poisoned planet. But instead, they deliver something that only intermittently satisfies.
There are scenes that become exquisitely uncomfortable, among the best of Villeneuve’s storied career. In one such sequence, Ana de Armas, who plays a computer program and girlfriend of K, grafts her holographic self on top of a prostitute (Mackenzie Davis) so that she can know what sex is like with the man she has grown so emotionally close to. These figures who all know each other in weird and limited ways approach each other gingerly, unsure of every movement. They work out glitches along the way, and nothing is ever entirely seamless — de Armas’s and Davis’s faces become more of a blended amalgam rather than Davis wearing a de Armas mask, as was intended by the character. For once, it’s the characters mirroring the cognitive dissonance that film audiences have grown accustomed to feeling each time they attend a blockbuster with CGI characters who look extremely close to reality without quite getting there. Seeing the uncanny valley at work within the film’s world rather than a function of the audience’s reaction to the screen is a rich and rewarding experience. It acts as a metaphor for the exciting possibilities of new technology and also a warning about how frustrating those innovations can be before they are fully realized.
And there are also moments where the visual maestros fail to marry image to theme in a meaningful way. This is most apparent in 2049’s statements on climate change, which grow increasingly muddled as the movie lurches along. While the film mostly takes place in a version of Los Angeles decimated by punishing acid rain caused by shifting weather patterns from a changing climate, it complicates this message too many times to make much sense, shifting confusingly between locations with wildly different weather, including snow storms and dusty deserts. This impressionistic approach detracts from what is a clear message in the film’s opening moments — including shots of enormous solar farms standing in smog-choked fields, showing tech’s impotence to get us out of our planet-destroying pollution. The later imagery is only a vaguely threatening vision of the future that says, nihilistically, “Good luck,” while chuckling at the doom facing our planet.
And so, Blade Runner 2049 crafts a reality that fits awkwardly, never quite feeling right. And so, we must continue to think on it, chew on it, and wish it could be more satisfying. And so, the essay writing prompt reaches its conclusion.
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Hampton Fancher, Michael Green
Starring: Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto,
Rating: 3/5 stars
Available in theaters now
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