Blade Runner 2049 is a visually sumptuous, conceptually understrength film with some of the strengths and flaws of its aesthetically influential predecessor, but without the defining performances and lines that made the earlier film great.
For a lab grown Ron Fricke documentary, it really does look so good. I want to say that it's technically brilliant, and I'm fairly sure that it is. It has to be.
The problems start with the writing. Where the original Blade Runner had such timeless lines as "If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes", Blade Runner 2049 provides the painfully flat method accents of Jared Leto intoning, Bond villain style, "You do not know what pain is yet: you will learn".
Blade Runner 2017 had a fear-inducing, sympathetic and beautiful antagonist in Roy Batty. Blade Runner 2049 has a dominatrix-cum-terminator called Luv whose level of agency is unclear—but not in the interesting way which at one moment we seem to be promised.
For all that, it really does look so good. At one point Ryan Gosling's duster-coated "K" wanders, armed, through the ruins of Las Vegas, a radioactive wasteland populated by fifty foot high plaster naked women. K also features in an unsettling AR sex scene that's a smart comment on internet-enabled eroticism. Establishing shots in the rhythms Villeneuve developed for Sicario depict a Burtynsky-esque post climate change future consisting of blasted prairies, horizonal trash piles, and looming sea walls.
In the end it's the opportunities 2049 misses, and the dull sensibilities of both its dystopian speculation and its deeper philosophical inquiry that make it a limited film.
Fancher and Green's script, reportedly heavily modified by Denis Villeneuve, lacks awareness of the cultural terrain it could exploit. It is harsh but fair to suggest that a million Reddit users have probably thought harder about the themes of freedom, self-actualisation and consciousness on which this film ostensibly dwells. We get a clunky Kafka reference for the lead character, and painfully heavy-handed Pinocchio references. Pale Fire trails through the first act, perhaps with some elusive significance. We get patriarchal plot hooks that lie thoroughly beside the point of the script's workaday re-investigation of the strong AI hypothesis, and shunt the women characters away from interesting development, or shut them down altogether.
2049 retains the first film's huge problem with suspension of disbelief: it is made achingly clear that (both hardware and software) replicants are human for all practical purposes. And although one has to respect the loving attention of the writers and designers to the future past of Blade Runner 2017, which is one in which the Soviet Union did not collapse, and Atari is still in business, the disconnect of this timeline from the real future decisively shrinks its dystopian potential. A historically unmoored subplot about revolution feels bolted on from the DVD extras of the Matrix sequels.
As a parting shot, it's barely acceptable to set this film in California in 2049, to mention neither China nor India in the script, and give it an almost entirely white cast. Not because of the metrics of diverse casting, because of the metrics of reality.
But it really does look so good. I guess it's good. I guess.
