Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Director: Denis Villeneuve

**** (4 stars) review by J.C. Hartley

As Danny Kaye and Frank Loesser would have it ‘The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether’, and so on. I’m not actually saying that Blade Runner 2049 is a case of the Emperor’s new clothes, but despite the display of five stars from various publications adorning the DVD box, I’m not convinced that it’s the seamless masterpiece those ratings might suggest. In the LA of Blade Runner’s dystopian future, it’s a case of plus ça change.  Following an uprising by the Nexus replicants bio-engineered by the Tyrell corporation, culminating in an EMP attack resulting in the ‘Blackout’, replicant production was banned. Enter Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) whose visionary technology has restored food production and arguably saved the world, as well as continuing to advance off-world colonisation. Planet Earth, and particularly the L.A. of the film, is still an ecological disaster area. Wallace’s new generation of replicants are subservient slaves, constrained by protocols similar to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, but Tyrell-era Nexus replicants are still at large, hidden in plain sight due to the data-loss brought about by the Blackout. Ryan Gosling’s ‘K’, an obvious reference to Kafka’s troubled hero from The Trial (1925), is a replicant blade runner tasked with hunting down and ‘retiring’ his own kind.

During a confrontation with the replicant ex-soldier Sapper Morton (played by go-to heavy-with-a-heart Dave Bautista), at the latter’s protein farm, K is told he has ‘never seen a miracle’. K discovers a grave which is revealed to contain the skeleton of a female replicant who died giving birth by caesarean section.  To prevent exposure of the discovery that replicants can sexually reproduce, K’s superior officer Lieutenant Joshi (Wright) orders K to find and ‘retire’ the child.  At the Wallace corporation HQ, K is able to access pre-Blackout records belonging to the former Tyrell Corporation. His investigations reveal that the dead female’s remains are those of an advanced replicant named Rachael, who absconded with blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). However, Niander Wallace is also determined to find the child, in order to unlock the secret of replicant reproduction, and orders his replicant assistant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to track her down. 

Alongside the police procedural of Blade Runner 2049 we see something of K’s home life. K lives with Joi (Ana de Armas) a holographic female interactive A.I. who fulfils the role of wife and companion. In a frankly baffling scene, K gives her the gift of an emanator which expands her sensory range and allows her to move beyond the limits of K’s apartment. Although de Armas performs her role with commendable sincerity, the sheer silliness of the concept acted like a dead weight on the film for me, dragging it back like the anchor on Dick Dastardly’s Mean Machine. 

For the expanded edition of the late Brian Aldiss’ Supertoys Last All Summer Long (2001), the author revealed his parting-of-the-ways with film director Stanley Kubrick, over their different visions for a film of the original eponymous short story, which imagined a future where childless couples could ‘raise’ artificial surrogates. Aldiss claimed that Kubrick became obsessed with adapting the story as a re-telling of the tale of Pinocchio. K’s relationship with Joi brought this back to mind. Is Joi K’s Jiminy Cricket, or his Blue Fairy? The parallel is made even more striking when Lieutenant Joshi suggests that K might become ‘a real boy’. 

A further point of reference, this time to The Matrix trilogy, suggests itself when K starts to believe that he might be Rachael’s replicant child, a sort of messiah for replicants everywhere. This plot-line arises out of his implanted memories which tantalisingly summon up incidents from a ‘remembered’ childhood. As one assumes that replicants are brought into the world fully-formed as adults, like the Uruk-hai Orcs in Lord of the Rings, a fact confirmed by Wallace’s overseeing of a replicant ‘birth’ early in the picture, clearly K’s ‘memory’ of his childhood must be an implant, a situation he accepts. K then uncovers evidence that suggests his implanted memories might be genuine, something confirmed when he visits Dr Ana Stelline (Carla Juri) a memory designer, who works for Wallace from the confines of a sterile ‘bubble’ due to a deficient immune system. K’s belief is later unpicked when he encounters the replicant freedom movement, and it is revealed that all replicants believe themselves to be Rachael’s child. 

The film suffers somewhat by the weight of history behind it.  While it will be perfectly possible for a newcomer to the world of Blade Runner 2049 to enjoy the film without ever seeing its influential precursor, familiarity with the earlier film obviously allows for the minimum of exposition, its themes already apparent to that audience. The great drawback of this is that long-term fans of the ‘franchise’ are impatiently waiting for the introduction of Deckard. The fact that Gosling perambulates through the action like a morose cocktail-sausage only emphasises Ford’s portrayal of Deckard’s vulnerable damaged humanity.  But that was intentional, right? Ford and original director Ridley Scott famously disagreed over whether Deckard was a replicant, Ford saying no, his director saying yes. A ridiculous question, and one suggesting that Scott misunderstood his own material, Deckard clearly has to be human. It would be nice to think that Denis Villeneuve has deliberately directed Gosling as replicant K to downplay any hints of human empathy, in the way that Kubrick presented the people of the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as practically de-humanised automatons, however I’m not convinced this is the case. 

In this the bi-centenary of the first publication of the three-volume edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), it seems appropriate to consider source material and themes. In his history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree (1973), Aldiss not only declares Frankenstein to be ‘the first real novel of science fiction’ but saw in it ‘the seeds of all later diseased creation myths’. If James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is famously a novel no one has read, Frankenstein, like its post-Gothic counterpart Dracula (1897), is a novel people haven’t read but think they know. Familiar through its creative afterlives, Frankenstein, is much more than the ‘diseased creation myth’ Aldiss acknowledges, but is ‘accompanied by a psychological depth’. After Frankenstein’s creature is rejected by his creator, and realising that his appearance militates against his acceptance by humanity, he acquires language and culture but finds himself still facing rejection. He urges his creator to make him a mate, but Frankenstein, wary that a pair of creatures will engender a race of monsters, aborts his female creation. 

Having already murdered Frankenstein’s younger brother, the creature then goes on to murder his friend Clerval and his fiancée Elizabeth. The creature as the instrument of monstrous acts is the character that has survived through the original novel’s creative afterlives, but Shelley was careful to show that it was the human Frankenstein who lacked the very qualities of emotional attachment that his creature was desperate to find fulfilled. In Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968), another novel that people have probably never read but might think they know, Phillip K. Dick mixed cultural and economic satire, with his trademark philosophical musings. The androids of Dick’s novel are concerned not only with their own survival but in exposing the religious cult of Mercerism as a sham. Mercerism is based on the ability of humans to share empathy, the thing that sets them apart from the androids, if the androids can debunk the humans’ belief system, the distinction between human and machine-human becomes blurred. 

In Blade Runner, Deckard and Rachael’s love affair, and the replicants’ emotional attachment to each other, acknowledged a post-human evolution.  Roy Batty’s emotional monologue at the end of the picture, ruined for me by a lady’s stifled snort of derision behind me in the cinema (actually I thought the doves were pretty corny too), confirmed the replicants’ very human aspirations.  Does Blade Runner 2049 move the story on by having a replicant as the central character, displaying the same 21st century angst as the humans around him, seeking to assuage his loneliness with ever-more advanced technological companions and casual sex? It’s a bleak portrait if one looks beyond the shoot ‘em up police story. Personally, I’d have preferred a tighter and considerably shorter story, Blade Runner got its themes over in less time, and I don’t believe the intervening 35 years has made for any more depth or sophistication in the argument. The new film does look fantastic, and credit must go to Roger Deakins’ superb cinematography. 

An interesting set of extras with a rather repetitive set of links. There are three filmed prologues filling in the intervening years between the original Blade Runner and the new film. 2022: Blackout is an anime by Shinichirō Watanabe depicting the triggering of the EMP device by Nexus replicants. 2036: Nexus Dawn by Luke Scott shows Wallace attempting to get the authorities to lift the ban on replicant production, and 2048: Nowhere to Run, also by Scott, shows Morton’s flight from L.A., and the tip-off that leads to K tracking him down. A mixture of talking-heads and footage, Blade Runner 101: Replicant Evolution, Blade Runners, The Rise Of Wallace Corp, Welcome To 2049, Jois, Within The Skies: Spinners, Pilotfish, & Barracudas, introduces some of the background, and technology, in the film.