Blade Runner (1982) has gotten a sequel. Anyone who has seen Ridley Scott’s film is probably wondering why or even how a sequel could have been made. Oddly, Blade Runner 2049 (2017) does work as a sequel, surprisingly so in many respects, though what problems it runs into stem from what seem to be the portions of the narrative designed to launch a franchise off of this film, presumably with a focus on the Ryan Gosling character K/Joe.
What works in the film is its pacing. Director Denis Villeneuve’s direction allows a lot of time for the characters to just exist in a space. This tactic not only serves to permit the audience time to invest in the humanity of a character (and thus play into one of the central themes of the film), but also gives the audience a chance to immerse themselves in the world of the film with all of its grandiose science fiction imagery. Regretfully, and I am unsure who is responsible for this, there is a good deal of replaying previous scenes and previously heard dialogue in voice over that creates a series of flashbacks which give the impression that the filmmakers do not trust or even believe in the intelligence of their audience. The character of Joi (Ana de Armas), Ryan Gosling’s hologram girlfriend, is also enlisted to articulate K/Joe’s character subtext in just as many scenes. Together, these two tactics successfully subvert Villeneuve’s pacing, betraying the aesthetic he is clearly trying to preserve from Scott’s Blade Runner for his sequel.
Joi, though often just a device for exposition, does feature centrally in the most provocative and, I think, successful sequence of Blade Runner 2049; the sex scene. This scene realizes, visually, more concepts and motifs inherent not only in the works of Philip K. Dick (whose novel inspired the first Blade Runner film), but science fiction in general than the entirety of the rest of the picture. Here, Joi has hired, though it is unclear how a hologram can do so, a hooker named Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) to be an avatar of sorts to enable Joi to approximate intercourse with Gosling’s K/Joe. Visually, the double exposure effect of Joi and Mariette competing to inhabit the same female form is astonishing. The fact that their forms are, in effect, interchangeable as sexual objects speaks volumes to the commodification of the female form in cinema and society. This is taken further within the overall conception of Blade Runner 2049 by the fact that neither K/Joe nor Mariette are human in the traditional biological sense. Thus the entire exchange between the three characters is an act of artificial approximation whose very impulse is at work today in online avatar communities and dating sites. One could also assume that Joi, given the evidence provided later in the film, is mass-produced while K/Joe and Mariette each represent a singular production, thus reflecting the precarious assumptions we as a society make about ourselves as individuals in terms of our uniqueness, importance, and our sense of entitlement.
The worst parts of Blade Runner 2049 are those which ignore, or should I say that they do not even pretend to address, the philosophical questions investigated by the scene described above. These scenes favor instead genre mechanics whose familiarity to the audience and whose use as signifiers do little else than to suggest that another Blade Runner film will be in the works shortly. Of course these are the scenes of the “replicant resistance”. Villeneuve’s blocking during the scene in which the “resistance” is introduced has been so overdone, is so old hat, that it bordered on the comical. Upon reflecting on this subplot, which seems like it was shoehorned in, I couldn’t help but feel that Paul Verhoeven’s classic Total Recall (1990) had somehow snuck into Blade Runner 2049 to create a terrifying Philip K. Dick narrative fusion.
The real question that Blade Runner 2049 asks despite its success as a sequel film, and it has nothing to do with science fiction, is: what is the necessity of the sequel? Could Hampton Fancher and Michael Green have written this film without mentioning blade runners at all? Does Ryan Gosling need Harrison Ford as a sidekick to attract an audience? The answer is simple: Blade Runner 2049 does not need to be a Blade Runner sequel for any other reason than to exist.
This review was first published in 2017.
