A lot of the movies released in the late 1970s and early ’80s have spawned franchises, merchandising empires and what we are now invited to call “cinematic universes.” “Blade Runner,” Ridley Scott’s initially underrated 1982 adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick, accomplished something more unusual. It sent tendrils of influence — pictorial, conceptual and spiritual — into every corner of the culture and inspired a mystery cult.
Like other sacred texts, the film invites doctrinal arguments and esoteric inquiries. One of my fondest memories as a father and a film critic is of an impromptu post-screening seminar with two 11-year-olds about occult meanings and hidden clues in the director’s cut. How do we know (if indeed we do know) that Harrison Ford is a replicant? What is the significance of the origami horse? Are Sean Young’s shoulder pads for real?
Alongside these basic interpretive questions, an academic subfield has blossomed, isolating “Blade Runner” as one of the original symptoms of postmodernism, a terminal and interminable disease of the mind. The film’s blend of curatorial nostalgia and dystopian prophecy captured a mood of self-conscious melancholy in its moment and set a tone of melancholy self-consciousness that has endured ever since. Maybe the real world never quite achieved the smoky neon-noir glow of Mr. Scott’s Los Angeles, but the map of our collective dream world was permanently redrawn.
The precise future “Blade Runner” projected is now less than two years away, and the next chapter, once something to be dreaded, seems, if anything, overdue. “Blade Runner 2049,” directed by Denis Villeneuve from a script by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, tries both to honor the original and to slip free of its considerable shadow. That’s no easy feat, and it’s worth noting right away that, in narrow movie terms, Mr. Villeneuve, who also directed “Arrival,” mostly succeeds. From the opening aerial shots of a thoroughly denatured agricultural landscape and the lethal confrontation that follows, we know we are in the presence of a masterly visual tactician and a shrewd storyteller.
We are also in territory that is both familiar and disorienting. A brief note explains what has and hasn’t changed in the 30 years since the events in the first “Blade Runner.” Three-wheeled spinners still zoom through the California skies, and the building-size video advertisements have evolved into seductive, R-rated holograms. The titular profession — hunting down and “retiring” renegade members of the almost-human, genetically engineered android species known as replicants — is practiced with the same brutal doggedness as in the old days.
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A new, more obedient type of replicant has been developed by a corporation led by a tech visionary played by Jared Leto. (His lieutenant Luv is played by Sylvia Hoeks, a far more vivid and persuasively terrifying presence than the mannered Mr. Leto.) One of these models is our hero, an L.A.P.D. employee known as K. (It’s an abbreviation of his serial number and also, maybe, an allusion to Franz Kafka’s avatar of modern alienation. That poor fellow’s full name was Josef K; when this K acquires a human pseudonym, it’s Joe.)
Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Blade Runner 2049’
Denis Villeneuve narrates a sequence from his film featuring Ryan Gosling.
By MEKADO MURPHY on October 2, 2017. Photo by Stephen Vaughan/Alcon Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures. Watch in Times Video »
Speaking of avatars of alienation, K moves through his days with the unhurried shuffle and downcast baby blues of Ryan Gosling. This is impeccable casting. Mr. Gosling’s ability to elicit sympathy while seeming too distracted to want it — his knack for making boredom look like passion and vice versa — makes him a perfect warm-blooded robot for our time. He is also, in 2017, something close to what Harrison Ford was 35 years ago: the contemporary embodiment of Hollywood’s venerable ideal of masculine cool, a guy whose toughness will turn out to be the protective shell encasing a tender soul.
At first, of course, we must take that sensitivity on faith. K does his grim job thoroughly and without complaint, showing the weary, cynical patience of an old-time shamus. His commander (Robin Wright) is a human who believes that everything depends on policing the border between her kind and K’s. The whole point of “Blade Runner,” though, is that such boundaries are always blurred and porous. K comes home each night from work to the company of Joi (Ana de Armas), his devoted girlfriend, who happens to be a commercially produced artificial intelligence application.
We are prepared to acknowledge the pathos and the paradox of her condition, which is a version of K’s own. The idea that synthetic humans harbor feelings, desires and dreams — that they are mirrors of us, that we are replicas of them — has long been a staple of speculative cinema. “Blade Runner 2049” does not wander as deep into this ontological thicket as, say, Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” or Spike Jonze’s “Her,” but like those movies it uses the conceit of the suffering cyborg as ethical and emotional ballast, a spur to the audience’s curiosity as well as our compassion. A political theme also asserts itself: These replicants are an enslaved labor force; their exploitation is the fuel on which this civilization runs.
There is a something to think about here, a fair amount to feel and even more to see. Mr. Villeneuve has conspired with the cinematographer, Roger A. Deakins; the production designer, Dennis Gassner; and the special effects team to create zones of strangeness that occasionally rise to the level of sublimity. The movies Mr. Villeneuve has directed — his recent English-language features include “Sicario,” “Prisoners” and “Arrival” — are full of violence and psychological intensity, but what distinguishes them from other high-end genre spectacles is an unnerving calm, as if he were exploring and trying to synthesize the human and mechanical sides of his own sensibility.
Movies are by their nature hybrids of technology and sentiment, machines for the delivery of human emotion. The first “Blade Runner” approached this as a philosophical problem and an artistic challenge. Mr. Scott used imagery borrowed from old Hollywood, German Expressionism and the nascent art of music video to create a dazzlingly artificial environment where authenticity was out of the question. Except, of course, that it wasthe question: How do we know what is real, ourselves included?
“I know what’s real,” says the hero of that movie when — at long last! — he shows up in this one. K finds Deckard, the original Blade Runner (Mr. Ford, as if I needed to tell you), in an abandoned Las Vegas casino, surrounded by shimmering bottles of whiskey and primitive 3-D projections of Elvis and Frank Sinatra. Mr. Gosling, suddenly overmatched in the masculine cool department, acquits himself well enough, and Mr. Ford does exactly what you expect him to do.
Which is not something I’m going to explain, at least as far as it relates to the story. The studio has been unusually insistent in its pleas to critics not to reveal plot points. That’s fair enough, but it’s also evidence of how imaginatively impoverished big-budget movies have become. Like any great movie, Mr. Scott’s “Blade Runner” cannot be spoiled. It repays repeated viewing because its mysteries are too deep to be solved and don’t depend on the sequence of events. Mr. Villeneuve’s film, by contrast, is a carefully engineered narrative puzzle, and its power dissipates as the pieces snap into place. As sumptuous and surprising as it is from one scene to the next, it lacks the creative excess, the intriguing opacity and the haunting residue of its predecessor.
As such, “Blade Runner 2049” stands in relation to “Blade Runner” almost exactly as K stands in relation to Deckard before the two meet: as a more docile, less rebellious “improvement,” tweaked and retrofitted to meet consumer demand. And the customers are likely to be satisfied. But now and then — when K and Deckard are knocking around the old gambling palace; when K visits an enigmatic mind-technician played by Carla Juri — you get an inkling that something else might have been possible. Something freer, more romantic, more heroic, less determined by the corporate program.
Then again: Who knows at this point if that sense of loss, of lost possibility, is even real? It might be nothing more than an artificially implanted memory.
Correction: October 5, 2017
An earlier version of this review misidentified the actress who plays Dr. Ana Stelline, the mind-technician. She is Carla Juri, not Mackenzie Davis (who plays Mariette).
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