So we know I think this is a film that shouldn’t have been made. But within that there is much in the themes, the tone, the cinematography, in many of the performances, to love.
But there’s an awful lot that’s a frustrating mess, as well.
The plot is not good. It’s paint-by-numbers, derivative, it barely rises above the cliches of the genre. And its engine is so often powered by plot necessity, by cool ideas, by moments, than by character. The characters end up doing implausible things because the plot dictates, rather than the plot being dictated by an exploration of character.
Look at the scene right after Ryan Gosling’s Officer K has discovered, so he believes, that he’s the chosen one, the child born of a replicant, that he is truly alive, and thus has, as he says, “a soul”. The next scene is him returning home - where his holographic girlfriend, Joi, has ordered him a prostitute who she will lay her visual presence on top of so it will feel to K like he’s having sex with Joi, not the sex worker. What the hell is this scene doing here? It doesn’t fit tonally, at all - it’s a heated moment of event and consequence, when we should be given stillness and space to process, along with K, the revelation about his apparent newfound existence, and the ramifications that that will entail.
But the scene is needed from a plotting point of view, so that the sex worker can plant a bug in K’s jacket, so she can follow him later - and maybe because it’s a scene that someone somewhere thought was cool, like a discarded Black Mirror concept - and so there it sits. It tanks the pacing - it’s like a musical composition that right after all the themes mingle and rise and crash, that instead of cutting to silence and then building up slowly, it comes straight in with something unrelated. It utterly ruins the rhythm, the flow - and ultimately the emotional heart of the piece.
This is a film of events - this happens and then this happens, and then that leads to this - rather than of emotions. Apart from the excellent beginning and end it never really rests within its scenes, never sits in them and lets them breathe, lets them develop organically, lugubriously - it’s a film that doesn’t give you space to exist within its world.
It’s too busy trying to tell a story, and it’s a prosaic, pedestrian story at that. There are sins of convenience and coincidence everywhere, subplots that go nowhere, uninteresting side characters, an antagonist in industrialist Niander Wallace who, for all the shots of him submersed in shadow, declaiming biblical-sounding lines (like him from the first film, innit!), is just another dull bad guy, ever monologuing, with ill-defined motivations (he wants the secret of the replicant baby so he can produce replicants faster than he can assemble them, because his slave-labour workforce has taken him to nine worlds, but “a child can count to nine on its fingers” … and so… I guess that is not enough?).
I mean, it all just about works. The film holds itself together. But there’s this feeling of the scriptwriters assembling a wobbling tower, with elements only existing in order to hold up something above, whole floors that are required to be there by the overall structure, but that serve no purpose by themselves. It feels mechanical, something assembled, rather than something grown. The first film, of course, also had moments like this - but it was so clear that the plot was only the bones upon which to hang the meat of the work, the art of it, that it barely mattered. Yes, the plot shunted itself forward with Deckard doing some “zoom and enhance” on a photograph he stumbled across, or finding a barcode on an artificial snake scale that could only come from one location - but when that was just an excuse for some moody noirish staring out of windows as elegiac blues played, who gave a shit?
And then we have Deckard.
Deckard is Blade Runner 2049’s elephant in the crumbling neon cityscape. Someone decided Deckard, the protagonist of the first film, was going to return. Harrison “Pay Me Enough” Ford signed on, and the filmmakers became lumped with an utterly iconic character to whom they were never going to do justice - because how could you? - who wasn’t going to be the protagonist in this film (Harrison “Act for a Buck” Ford only wanted a new loft extension, he wasn’t committing to more than a few scenes), but nevertheless was by his very existence going to pull the emotional weight of the film towards himself when he turned up. Deckard has the gravitational pull of a planet, as does Ford, and it’s hard to know what to do with a story in which all does not revolve around them. As with Star Wars VII, the scriptwriters come up with a workaround, and it suffices, but it’s intrinsically flawed.
There he is, old Deckard, stepping from the shadows, blaster raised (like in the first film, natch), saying things the filmmakers hope are iconic, but which are not iconic. And there’s Ford playing him, making his face do a bit of acting, deploying his expert’s chops, while back behind the eyes there he’s dreaming about that new conservatory he’ll be using the paycheck to build for himself.
And he puts that special-edition futuristic bottle of Johnny Walker - available for sale to coincide with the film’s release - down on the counter with a twist, so the label faces outwards towards us, and sucks that corporate cock, and takes his whore-money all the way to the bank. That damn talented, couldn’t-give-a-shit shill!
I don’t blame him at all. But it’d be a better film without him.
That’s a fine plot point, a good idea, but you can’t get past the fact that the film also gets to shoot the actress singularly with the male gaze, showing her in cute outfits, wearing dresses with no bra in the rain, staring up at K, and by extension us, with fluttering orgasmic eyes, perfect and deferential - at one point slinking naked on all fours, cat-like, porn-like, projected as an advert a hundred feet tall across the rooftops. Yes, this scene is mocking K for his foolishness at believing Joi belonged only to him - showing that she will put out for whoever pays for her package - but this is not exactly female empowerment. Her existence is nothing beyond satisfying him, the revelation being that she in fact satisfies anyone - and for K this is a cold and lonely discovery, but for Joi… well, who cares? She’s not important.
The film takes power from K, but still gives the audience their male power fantasy - and neatly has its cake and eats it too.
There are other moments that leave a sour taste. The salacious stuff with the sex worker, a screenwriter’s wet dream, adding no real meaning to the narrative. The extreme violence perpetrated on the female replicant by Wallace in his introductory scene, traumatic, repugnant, upsetting - and unearned, I think, by the film. It’s shorthand to show how dastardly the villain is, but it’s like it’s deployed in this throwaway manner, shocking as an image but never explored, its consequences unfelt, unburdening itself of responsibility when the responsibility was there.
So that’s all I got tonight. I’m running on fumes now, I don’t think much of this makes any sense, but it’s all good. Got my thoughts down, had fun, found more in the film than I would have done without writing.
Blade Runner, as the Director’s Cut, was a weird and unfathomable poetic dreamworld, sensuous and elegant and esoteric - and Blade Runner 2049 has filmmaking motivations similar to that in some ways, but it is also much more a piece of entertainment, a product, with elements that run counter to the purity of the artistic vision. I wish there was more time spent hanging out with K, exploring how it feels to be a replicant who retires other replicants - getting lost in the mists of this world, going on a journey with the characters, rather than seeing what happens to them. But still, in the face of everything egregious the film could have been, had every right to be, it ends up often affecting, powerful, playing on some of the magic of the original, some from the source novel, and just a little that is all its own.
