Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
IMDB Rating : 8.5 ( as on 29.10.2017)
R | 2h 44min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller
A young blade runner's discovery of a long-buried secret
leads him to track down former blade runner Rick Deckard, who's been missing
for thirty years.
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Hampton Fancher (screenplay by), Michael Green
(screenplay by)
Stars: Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas
IMDB link here
Movie Rating : ★★★★★
A future classic
Mark Kermode,
Blade
Runner may have shaped the future, but it’s easy to forget its past. Now
universally accepted as a classic, Ridley Scott’s future-noir fantasy (from an
android-hunting novel by Philip K Dick) flopped in 1982, widely dismissed as an
exercise in ravishing emptiness, as eye-catchingly hollow as Rachael, the
glamorous “replicant” played by Sean Young. Late-in-the-day recuts didn’t help,
adding an explanatory narration and dopey happy ending following negative test
screenings. Indeed, it was only when Blade Runner was reconfigured via a 1992
Director’s Cut, and later Scott’s definitive Final Cut, that its masterpiece status
was assured, sitting alongside Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Kubrick’s 2001 in
the pantheon of world-building sci-fi.
No
such tribulations await Blade Runner 2049, which has opened to the kind of
critical adoration that sorely evaded Scott’s original. Yet Arrival director
Denis Villeneuve’s audacious sequel, co-written by original screenwriter
Hampton Fancher, really is as good as the hype suggests, spectacular enough to
win over new generations of viewers, yet deep enough to reassure diehard fans
that their cherished memories haven’t been reduced to tradable synthetic
implants.
Existential
anxieties are at the heart of Villeneuve’s movie, which has the confidence to
proceed at a sedately edited pace utterly at odds with today’s rapid-fire
blockbusters. Mirroring and inverting the key themes of its predecessor, Blade
Runner 2049 swaps unicorns for wooden horses while retaining the visual
grandeur that fired Scott’s film. From vast landscapes of grey rooftops and
reflectors, through the rusted shells of post-industrial shelters, to the
burned-ochre glow of radioactive wastelands, cinematographer Roger Deakins
conjures a twilight world that seems to go on for ever. Bright candy colours
are restricted to the artificial lights of advertising and entertainment.
Architecturally, the production designs evoke Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari,
all angular lines and expressionist shadows. Elsewhere, we encounter statuesque
nods to Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, along with a self-referential
homage to Kubrick’s The Shining, outtake footage from which was incorporated
into the original release of Blade Runner.
The
sights are staggering, yet the real triumphs of Blade Runner 2049 are
beautifully low-key. Carla Juri injects real magic into a heart-breaking,
dream-weaving scene; Sylvia Hoeks rivals Rutger Hauer as Luv, the ass-kicker
with terrifying tears; and Ana de Armas brings three-dimensional warmth to a
character who is essentially a digital projection.
Narratively,
Fancher and co-writer Michael Green pull off a remarkable narrative sleight of
hand that leaves the audience as devastatingly wrongfooted as Gosling’s cosmic
detective. As for Villeneuve, he teases away at the enigmatic identity riddle
at the centre of Scott’s movie, brilliantly sustaining the mystery of a blade
runner’s true nature (“It’s OK to dream a little, isn’t it?”) while chasing the
spirit of Philip K Dick’s electric sheep.
Composers
Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer dance around memories of Vangelis’s themes,
creating a groaning, howling soundscape that occasionally rises in horrifying
Ligeti-like ecstasy. The first time I saw Blade Runner 2049, I was overwhelmed
by its visuals and astonished by its achievements. On second viewing, a sense
of elegiac sadness cut through the spectacle, implanting altogether more
melancholy memories. Both times, I was reminded that Blade Runner editor Terry Rawlings
had described Scott’s original as “a grandiose art movie” and marvelled at how
perfectly that phrase fitted Villeneuve’s new dreamy vision. How’s that for a
miracle?
Read full review at The Guardian
Movie Rating : ★★★★★
The most spectacular, profound
blockbuster of our time
Robbie Collin
Blade Runner 2049 mulls one of the meatiest questions
around: is surface all that there is, or do life’s currents run deeper than the
things we can see, hear and touch? Denis Villeneuve’s film toys with both
options, making neither a comfort – and in the process, maps out one of the
most spectacular, provocative, profound and spiritually staggering blockbusters
of our time.
Like its forerunner, everything about it says
slow-burning art film apart from its budget. Half a week after seeing it, I
still can’t quite believe it exists.
If you’ve encountered the trailers, forget them.
Villeneuve’s film isn’t a wham-bam slab of save-the-world sci-fi – the Blade
Runner world is and always was long past saveable – but a future-noir mystery
about a missing child, and the existential crisis the case triggers in its
investigating agent.
That’s Ryan Gosling’s Officer K, an LAPD sleuth whose
beat, like Harrison Ford’s Deckard three decades earlier, involves tracking
down and ‘retiring’ (i.e. executing) old replicants: bioengineered androids,
almost indistinguishable from humans, who were manufactured as slaves, but got
other ideas.
K himself – brilliantly played by Gosling in his
magnetically inscrutable, Only God Forgives mode – is a new-model replicant,
hard-wired for compliance.
But it’s also there in Roger Deakins's head-spinning
cinematography – which, when it’s not gliding over dust-blown deserts and teeming
neon chasms, keeps finding ingenious ways to make faces and bodies overlap,
blend and diffuse. Characters gaze at each other through glass screens and see
the ghosts of themselves gazing back – just as some of K’s actions seem to
reflect Deckard’s across the 30-year gap (his voice commands to a photography
drone echo Deckard’s to the Esper Machine in one of the original film’s
simplest but most memorable scenes).
Meanwhile, outside, the swarming streets are stalked
by enormous, incorporeal dream-women, as if the animated geishas of the
2019-set original had climbed down from their billboards like giantesses
descending a beanstalk.
It’s worth noting, and savouring, that Blade Runner
2049 isn’t set in a newly forged dystopia, but the world of Blade Runner three
decades on – almost, but not quite, real-time progress. The walls of elite
citadels still glimmer with that strange and trembling water-light, while Pan
Am, Atari and the Soviet Union are all still in rude health. As indeed – the
posters and trailers gave this away long ago – is Deckard himself, who’s now
living as a hermit in the wreckage of Las Vegas, but who seems to hold a
crucial puzzle piece in K’s unfolding case.
Harrison Ford’s recent Star Wars homecoming was pure
and glorious fan-service, but this is something very different, and
unexpectedly unsettling, musing on matters of ageing, legacy and death. It’s an
extraordinary part, extraordinarily played, and reminds you just how much more
Ford can do than dog-eared charisma.
A sequence involving Deckard, the megalomaniacal
industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) and his replicant enforcer Luv
(Sylvia Hoeks) showcases the actor’s best dramatic work for years, while a
confrontation with Gosling in a forsaken Vegas concert hall, overlooked by
flickering projections of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Liberace, has a
dazzlingly spooky thanatotic charge.
That Blade Runner 2049 is a more than worthy sequel
to Scott’s first film means it crosses the highest bar anyone could have
reasonably set for it, and it distinguishes Villeneuve – who’s masterminded all
of this, somehow, since making Arrival – as the most exciting filmmaker working
at his level today.
The film crackles with a thrilling finality: in the
foyer afterwards, I felt like I’d just seen the last blockbuster ever made. But
like Mad Max: Fury Road before it, it shows you just how much further this
medium has to go.
Read full review at Telegraph
Movie Rating : ★★☆☆☆
Ryan Gosling
may do his best but the overblown, over-written and massively over-long Blade
Runner 2049 fails to deliver the iconic power of the original
MATTHEW BOND
At the request of its
director, Denis Villeneuve, I am supposed to tell you as little as possible
about Blade Runner 2049, the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982
classic. But, having given the matter some thought, there are at least three
things I can tell you about a film set 30 years after the original – it’s still
raining (at least when it’s not snowing), you wait a very long time for
Harrison Ford to appear and… what was the third thing? Oh, yes, it’s really,
really disappointing, which, for any fans of the original, like me, is
heartbreaking.
What goes wrong? It’s
tempting to say nearly everything, but that wouldn’t be fair, particularly on
Ryan Gosling, who does his handsome best in the central role of LAPD officer K
who, just like Ford’s Deckard all those years ago, is a ‘blade runner’.
Retiring so-called
‘replicants’ is an easier job than it used to be, apparently – these days the
new models of bio-engineered humans produced by the inevitably sinister Wallace
Corporation, successor to the Tyrell Corp of the original, know what they are
and cannot lie about it.
Heck, even K knows he’s a
replicant, a level of self-awareness that might have saved a lot of time – and
decades of internet speculation – had Deckard been similarly blessed. At least,
I think it might have… still not entirely sure.
Anyway, a blade runner’s
job in 2049 is chasing down the earlier, more cunning and mendacious models,
and it’s while K is busy doing just that that he makes a discovery. What he
finds is buried deep underground and provides the first strong link between the
first film and this one.
The hairs on the back of
my neck stayed firmly in place too, with any nostalgic emotional response
dampened, to put it mildly, by the first of several plot twists so complicated
that you’re almost scratching your non-replicant head. What? I mean, what?
In its well-intentioned
efforts to somehow match the impact of the original, this is a film that has
become overblown, over-written and massively over-long.
It’s two hours 43 minutes
in its entirety, for goodness’ sake, and after the first hour there wasn’t a
single moment when I wasn’t hoping that Villeneuve and his scriptwriting team
were about to pull the Blade Runner equivalent of a rabbit out of a hat.
But the movie magic never
comes. Instead, their ponderously slow new picture just goes on and on and on.
Scott’s original hardly bounced along but this makes it look positively pacey.
Ford, when he does finally
appear, briefly lends gravitas and a sense of cinematic occasion but,
eventually, even he – surely the film’s unbeatable winning ace – feels wasted.
The visual effects are
decent but only really reinforce how brilliantly Scott’s team did all those
years ago, while the production design is both duller and poorer, depicting a
greyer, dirtier, less bustling Greater Los Angeles. There’s a level of detail –
an overall vision – that just seems to be missing.
Robin Wright is excellent
as K’s boss but she inhabits a world where prostitution is rife, giant
holographic nude female figures stalk the streets looking for men to pitch
their services to, and even K is having an affair with a digital female he’s
bought online.
This sort of sex-bot
subplot is so familiar (Her, Ex Machina etc) and milked so endlessly here that
Villeneuve – the director of the excellent Arrival, of course – and
screenwriters Hampton Fancher and Michael Green should be hanging their heads
in collective shame.
I love the stylistic
echoes of Sean Young and Daryl Hannah from the original, but some of the other
similarities – the sinister, monolithic corporate headquarters, for instance –
now border on cliche, while the plot is eventually uninvolving.
The original was full of
iconic moments; I can’t think of a single one here.
Read full review at The Daily Mail
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