There’s a great scene in Blade Runner 2049 — Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic — in which our protagonist, frowny-faced bio-human killer Ryan Gosling, goes to where the memories are made. To that point, we’ve followed Gosling through various future-dystopia hellscapes: rural landscapes the colour of smoke and ash, neon-splattered cityscapes teeming with lowlifes and vice, dark interiors swallowed up in shadow and grime. It’s always raining, if not snowing; and whatever the precipitation, the weather’s toxic. Gosling’s only respite comes at home, inside a blank, rat-trap apartment high in a vertical slum, where he loses himself in the pleasing fantasy-fulfilment of his AI companion, a hot-babe hologram who can be all things to all men; but who feels, to Gosling, as real as anything else.
When this hologram, Ana de Armas, asks aloud “who makes the memories?”, Villeneuve executes a memorable smash-cut, the shadowy cyber-noir cutting to a lurid, verdant green seen nowhere else in the film’s colour palette. It’s there, in a digital approximation of a forest, that we find Carla Juri (the girl from Wetlands!) at work. Hanging around her neck is a piece of technology that looks like a series of connected camera lenses, which she fingers like a virtuoso at work. With every twist of the dial, she creates a new element to a new scene: adjusting, say, the expressions on faces of girls around a birthday cake. She’s authoring memories to be implanted in the minds of this dystopia’s ‘replicants’, the bio-engineered people designed, as the original flick’s eerie corporate motto goes, to be more human than human.
It’s a neat analogy for the makers of 21st century blockbusters. For, as visionary as Villeneuve may be — his CV, from August 32 On Earth through Maelström, Incendies, Sicario, and Arrival, is bulletproof — the real hero, or villain, of any big-budget epic are the computer technicians, the people tasked with bringing dreamt images to big-screen life. When digital effects are on song, it’s the stuff of glorious, thrilling feverdream. When they’re not, you’re stuck with shit like the clown from It. And, when Juri gives Gosling the secret to making memories, she delivers what seems like sage advice to anyone attempting to summon cinematic magic via the dark arts of CGI: it’s not about the details, it’s about the emotion.
Cinema, itself, is in the business of making memories, and tapping into those of viewers. When we watch films, we’re reminded of incidents from our own life; and, then, years later, recall those films as memories, too. In the pantheon of memorable, memory-making films, the original Blade Runner has long been a treasured cinematic property; untouched, for the past four decades, by sequel or reboot. Even the 2007, 25-year anniversary ‘Final Cut’ took the original and vastly improved it: removing the expository voice-overs and straining-for-something-approximating-happy ending; delivering something purer, more immersive.
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Picking up a beloved property years later rarely goes well; as Scott, currently in the midst of making a string of awful Alien movies, can attest. But Blade Runner 2049 is about as good as a sequel — a legacyquel — can get. It’s full of visual and narrative references to the original, but isn’t a work of homage. Its visions of a grim dystopia pick up on the original’s neo-noir nightmares; and the 30-year-on story picks up and presses on, in a way that deepens the themes. The beloved stars of the original — Harrison Ford, sure, but also Sean Young and Edward James Olmos — return, but there’s never the sense of pandering fan-service at play.
Blade Runner 2049 is a big, bold, bruising work; full of foreboding and doom, driven forward by an overdriven, signal-frying, speaker-rattling score from Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch. It’s a grim vision of a post-ecological-collapse future: witchetty grubs are the prized protein crop, your standard dinner is rehydrated goop onto which a holo-projection is needed to stomach the contents, and yet, somehow, Coca-Cola still has a bountiful marketing budget.
Gosling pilots his car through a host of environs rendering the All-American landscape as horrifying as the nation’s current political state: Los Angeles an endless favela spilling out, as if in deference or worship, around towering corporate ziggurats; San Diego a giant tip, amidst whose mountains of trash forlorn figures horde scrap and fight for survival; Las Vegas the most toxic place in the world. It’s in Vegas that Gosling finds Ford, eventually; a reveal spoiler’d long ago by trailer, and looming forever, here, as eventual fated meeting.
The narrative puts this generation’s ‘blade runner’ on the case of the last. Gosling, a replicant built for killing, a man for whom nothing is really real, is obsessed with the intersections of the engineered and the actualised, his love for a hologram and emotional response to implanted memories symbolising a yearning to be, like Pinnochio (or Hayley Joel Osment in A.I.) before him, a real boy. He’s set on this path when a routine mission to ‘retire’ an older-model skin-job leads him to dispatching Dave Bautista, finding a buried bag o’ bones, and a whole host of buried secrets.
As Gosling plays the neo-noir gumshoe, on the case of the replicants who could reproduce, he’s surrounded by a take-no-shit boss at the LAPD (Robin Wright, in gelled-back Pat Riley hair and constant sense of cruel bemusement), a panto-villainous playing-God figure (Jared Leto, in milky blind-man contacts, every line reading an act of fussy verbal filigree), an unstoppable-killing-machine corporate-hitman (Sylvia Hoeks, whose programmed blank expression manages to be played for charm, menace, satire, irony, and horror), and what almost, but not quite, becomes another femme fatale figure (Mackenzie Davis, pink of hair and wry of smile).
The cast is great, and deep (Barkhad Abdi and Hiam Abbass both show up, pleasingly). Gosling feels effectively stuck playing a post-apocalyptic Driver, but there’s layers and meta-layers to the work of both Ford, whose get-off-my-lawn grumpy-old-man shtick is both in character and of his character, and de Armas, who takes a role where she’s to play male fantasy-fulfilment for this film’s own male fantasy-fulfilment, and wrinkles the effect with real ache, angst, edges.
But all these humans — or approximations thereof — are tiny figures amidst the grand landscapes, the wild concepts, the 163-minute/$185mil valentine to one of the greatest visions of imagined future from cinema’s past. Every time a hover-car pulls into the air and wheels between skyscrapers dancing with neon corporate totems, and the sound design (by Theo Green) and score swamp the viewer in an overwhelming thrum, Blade Runner 2049 truly takes flight, winging its way into scenes of glorious imagination and audience satisfaction.
Gosling’s pursuit-of-truth is, really, the pursuit of memories: this engineered entity wondering how his were implanted; or, if, perhaps, they’re somehow real. They lead him to Ford, a recluse still holding tight to the memories of the last film; memories which are, in turn, to be questioned. And, so, Blade Runner 2049 comes for the memories of those generations for whom Blade Runner was, has been, or will be a formative text. As far as exploring the currency of memory whilst making new ones, it may not measure up to Villeneuve’s last film, Arrival, but all that matters is that it measures up to the original, lives up to the expectations of all who loved it. And that it does. And how.
