Let me tell you about my mother
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Yesterday I went to see the movie Bladerunner 2049, and promised some folk on
Mastodon that I'd post my thoughts here to help them decide whether or not they
should do the same. This review is coming from the perspective of a massive fan
of the 1982 original. I am going to keep the review free of any major spoilers
for the new film, but obviously won't do the same for the original. So if you
haven't seen the original, stop reading now. Actually, stop reading now, and
put down whatever else you had planned for the day and go watch the original,
then spend some time questioning the life choices you made which resulted in you
getting this far without already having seen it.
I went into the film highly skeptical, expecting it to be the latest in a long
line of well-loved 80s film franchises needlessly ressurected in 201x to squeeze
money out of nostalgic fans. At the same time, I tried to keep an open mind and
not fall into the stereotypical role of the grumpy old fan with impossibly high
expectations. As a result, I was ultimately disappointed, but also not
outraged. I won't defend the new movie from accusations of being unecessary or
of failing to fill the very large boots left by its predecessory, but if
somebody said they thought it was a genuinely terrible film with no thoughtful
content at all, I think I would probably feel obliged to disagree.
A lot of things made the original Bladerunner movie incredible. One of these
was the visual asthetic. BR's dark and gritty dystopian Los Angeles, where a
dramatically multi-cultural (but strongly Japanese influenced) society scrapes
by in a dilapidated and increasingly abandoned city dominated by giant neon
advertising, while low-flying blimps blare down the promise of a better life in
the off-world colonies that few who are still left on Earth can ever hope to
reach, is nothing short of iconic. It literally defined the visual cyberpunk
asthetic that decades of subsequent films have relied on. Another was the
fantastic synth-heavy soundtrack by Vangelis, which complemented the visuals
perfectly.
If these are the most important parts of BR to you, then you will probably not
be too disappointed in Bladerunner 2049. The parts of the film which are set in
LA do a great job of recapturing the same look and feel of the original setting
without recycling all of precisely the same imagery. There are obvious nods to
the original, but they are not overdone. The soundtrack has plenty of brooding
synth pads that feel contiguous with the original.
But the 1982 film had a lot more going for it than just look and feel. The main
story was infused with a fantastic moral ambiguity. Was Roy Batty really the
main villain, or was that in fact Eldon Tyrell? Even if you believe the latter,
Tyrell is not a cartooney evil supervillain, and when he talks to Batty in his
final scene it's easy to believe that he really does feel a kind of fatherly
pride in and affection for Roy and genuinely wishes he could help. Beyond this,
the film raises a whole host of fascinating philosophical questions about the
nature of being human and the relative importance of memory and objective
reality in what we believe. Not only this, but it raises these things *subtly*
and is rarely in your face about them. If you're not too philosophically
inclined, or you're not paying too close attention, it's easy to parse
Bladerunner as a futuristic noir detective film and miss a lot of the depth,
especially if you happened to watch one of the far too many different versions
which is lighter on hints. The film doesn't beat you around the head with any
of this, and it rewards rewatching, and thinking, and reading and discussion
with other fans. Finally, the most popular cuts are nicely open ended. Is
Deckard a replicant or isn't he? Do he and Rachael escape LA and live happily
ever after, or are they hunted down by Gaff or another Bladerunner? Does
Rachael have the standard limited lifespan of a Nexus 6, or is she special as
Tyrell tells Deckard she is in one cut? We get pretty much zero strong evidence
one way or the other on any of these questions, and far from being disastisfying
a lot of people really treasure the ability to consider and debate these
options.
If *these* are the most important parts of BR to you, then you *will* be
disappointed. Bladerunner 2049 is not a film of moral ambiguity or beautiful
and subtle subtext. The main villain is a cartooney super villain who is
obviously evil. He is a successor to Eldon Tyrell in some sense, CEO of a
company manufacturing the latest generation of replicants (Nexus 8), but he
views his replicants as disposable slaves, places precisely zero value on their
lives and is only interested in making them more human to further his business
goals and feed his own ego, not out of anything resembling compassion. If one
of his own creations drove their thumbs right through his orbital sockets,
frankly I'd cheer them on. The quintessential Bladerunner themes of humanity
and memory are still there, unavoidably, but rather than hinting at them, the
film drives a rusty nail through the middle of your hand and you can't miss
them. It is made quite clear from early on in the film that Ryan Gosling's
character has doubts that his memories originate from where he's been told they
do, and it is obvious that him finding out the truth about these memories is
going to be a major part of the story.
I feel like these things make the film a bad sequel to the original Bladerunner.
I have read reviews online where people claim Bladerunner 2049 surpases the
original. Make no mistake, those people are wrong. But a bad sequel to
Bladerunner is not necessarily the same thing as a bad film in and of itself.
If you were to watch it without expecting something as brilliant as the first,
and especially if you were to judge it by the standards of modern day Hollywood
films. The acting is solid, and some of the roles were very well cast. It's
not a boring movie, and even if it's not on the same plane as the original, it's
also certainly not mindless or unintelligent. There are some minor but
well-executed plot twists in there, and there's also a tense fight scene between
Gosling and Ford that takes place in an abandoned Las Vegas theatre that was
visually stunning and really well done and captured some of the same feeling as
Deckard and Batty hunting each other in the Bradley building. There were only
two points in the flim where I groaned to myself a little. One was a cheesy
line by Ford, delivered at the end of the above-mentioned fight scene, which
just felt really out of place and unecessary. The other I'll say a bit more
about later. There was a little too much gratuitious action for my tastes. One
review I read online spoke about the movie's "sparse action scenes", which
shocked me a bit. Perhaps by modern day Hollywood scifi standards they were
sparse, but for a Bladerunner film it was too action driven for myself. Not
that the original film was devoid of action - Zhora desperately running in slow
motion through pane after pane of plate glass window while being shot at by
Deckard is a cinematographic highlight of the first film. But the action in
Bladerunner happens when it needs to happen for the sake of the story, and if
I'm not mistaken it's a film with exactly zero explosions and it's also a film
which has flying cars but zero flying car crashes or shoot downs. BR 2049 has
no shortage of these things, and they feel out of place to me in the Bladerunner
world.
If it sounds like I'm going easy on the movie, well, I am a bit. While using
YouTube to listen to the original soundtrack back at home after leaving the
cinema, I found the following comment:
"When I first watched this movie 5 years back I had no idea what was really going
on in the entire movie. I was so deeply bored and thought it was way too arty
stuff for me. After two years I thought to give this movie an another chance but
before watching it for the second time I read some articles about the
explanation of this movie. I absorbed the basic storyline in my head and when I
started watching it for the second time I was completely speechless when it
ended because the realization of how EPIC this movie was extremely strong with
me."
I don't think this is likely to be an uncommon experience with the first
Bladerunner film, which *is* slow moving and at times hard to follow. This
probably discourages a lot of people from giving the film the consideration it
deserves. I am trying not to fall into the trap of not giving BR 2049 the
consideration it deserves simply because, rather than being slow and confusing,
it is sometimes a little too fast moving and heavy on explosions that don't
need to be there. There is probably thoughtful stuff in there that I didn't
catch the first time around, and I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of
commentary, if any, might appear around the flim in the future. I think the
most likely place for interesting discussion to coallesce is around Ana
de Armas' character. She and Gosling share what is the closest thing in the
film to a romantic relationship, the twist being that she is an artificial
intelligence who manifests via some kind of holographic projection. She is
thus even more synthetic than the replicants, who at least have corporeal
bodies. Furthermore, she is actually a product produced by the same company
that makes the Nexus 8s, presumably marketed for the purpose of being an
ideal emotional companion. None of this is made explicit in the film, but I
assume that anybody can buy a copy of her "off the shelf" and she is programmed
to convincingly fall in love with that person. This, of course, makes us at
first think that the love isn't genuine, but one has to ask how much that
matters, or if it is even true, from the perspective of the artificially
intelligent being, who presumably feels the love to be as real as it can be. It
seemed to me that the AI companion actually genuinely cared a lot more for
Gosling's character than he reciprocated, which is an interesting subversion
of the old "robot girlfriend" trope, and, I think, a little sad. If I were to
watch the film again, I'd pay more attention to her.
So, in short, a disappointing sequel which we didn't need, and which diehard
fans certainly need not feel like they have to see, but at the same time not a
terrible movie and perhaps the best we realistically could have hoped for.
Certainly not as disappointing as anything that has happened to the Star Wars
franchise. It may reward a careful second viewing if you have the stomach
for it.
However, I am worried that the reappearance of Bladerunner in cinemas is not
going to end here. Aside from Ford's one cheesy line, the other scene in the
film which made me groan was an overly dramatic declaration of a big event
brewing below the surface of this film. No further mention was made of it, but
I worry that a third movie is planned and I worry that it is going to be even
less cerebral and even more action-driven than BR 2049. I'm trying really hard
not to give anything away, but I have the feeling they want to take the
franchise beyond stories that focus on a solitary Bladerunner hunting a small
group of targets, to some kind of large-scale Terminatoresque "replicant
uprising vs all of humanity" story. I hope I'm wrong, because if that happens,
I'm out. I just don't see how that could be done without devolving into a
straightforward action film without enough nuance to be worthy of carrying the
Bladerunner name.
