Archived Review: Blade Runner 2049
If you have ever left a movie theatre and contemplated whether to describe or perhaps deem that experience 'a masterpiece', ask yourself this: What do you see when you look at people and your surroundings, are your views changed, does the world feel different?. If it does, and it makes you over-joyous, then you have probably just watched Blade Runner 2049.
Denis Villeneuve is a human enigma to me because he has never made something that is, in some way, 'not that interesting of a movie'. Granted, I've yet to see some of his other works, but judging this next to Enemy, Sicario and Arrival... it's tremendously difficult to distinguish them in terms of quality. Kind of like picking a favourite child. And, yet again, in Blade Runner 2049, he reconfirms his position of improvement in this industry, as the best Director working today (and for the foreseeable future).
What I felt lacked in the original Blade Runner is sleekly introduced into this overdue sequel with honour and the care of a Museum Curator. When Harrison Ford described this as "A cathedral of a movie" after his first watch, he wasn't lying, but that was a severe understatement. This is the (finished) Sagrada Família of a movie. A pale, baked, rain splashed world of radioactive consumption illustrated with Roger Deakins staggering composition of the frame. I can sense your ears have perked, Academy, let's just hope you actually have the gusto to go in for the kill. Because there's a sinking gut feeling I have when I think of the Oscars and Science Fiction, and I seriously don't want that, more than ever in this case.
Talking plotwise in too much detail would be like rolling up this film into a paper ball and chucking it into an incinerator for those yet to see it, so I'm going to try my best to not talk anything deep. I will only say this, the personal story I felt with Deckard in Blade Runner is something I couldn't quite grasp, but I did understand Ridley Scott's intentions eventually. K, is a character I see so integrated with the story, technology, themes of life, death and family, that the nearly 3 hour run time is absolutely justified, this is someone fleshed out and purposeful to the maximum, he is as useful as he is tragic.
Verdict: The brilliance of modern Science Fiction is that we are aesthetically going into the past whilst looking at the bleak, dark end of humanity directly in its cold blue eyes. Blade Runner 2049 chillingly, but also elegantly, reminds us of the soul that our species used to be before our inevitable crumble into the 'god-complex void', in graphic, mind-blowing vigour
Blog image credit: Warner Bros.
