(Catch my other Blade Runner essays here: Set Design and 2022)

This past Thursday, I was lucky enough to hear about the one day Blade Runner double feature run nationwide. The original Blade Runner is my favorite film of all time and I think of the final cut version as perfect as a film can be. So getting the chance to see this cut of the film in theaters was a no-brainer, the 5 1/2 hour run time of the double feature and $25 ticket price notwithstanding. After work, I made the trip up to Charlotte, North Carolina and killed some time mulling around a Barnes and Noble near the theatre, picked up a few Bukowski books, and the new Deadpool Munchkin expansion cards before sojourning on to the Regal Cinema.

The original Blade Runner is now considered to be more than a cult film, or a great innovative sci-fi, or a film who’s style set a tone for similar cerebral films for 35 years. It is a cinema classic widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and regularly makes AFI top 100 lists. Its cinematography was a heavy expressionistic jazz-beat-noir assemblage of blues and blacks and greys and greens, of high contrasts, of dread and angst and paranoia and all the adjectives usually applied to the imagined mise-en-scene of a Kafka or Dostoevsky. Jordan Cronenweth, its cinematographer, shot no other film with this level of virtuosity and rightly received BAFTA nods and his own artistic immortality. So how does Roger Deakin’s work on Blade Runner 2049 hold up in comparison?

Surprisingly well.

Since the events of 2019 in the original Blade Runner film, environmental catastrophes have led to intense climactic conditions and food shortages on Earth. The smog-ridden skys and acid-rain downpours of 2019 are part and parcel of different time, and as such, much of the mise-en-scene that dictated the darkness and moodiness of the first film’s cinematography has become old hat. In 2049, we find LAs streets less rainy, but just as dark and oppressive. We find the police headquarters and the abode of the replicant’s memory-maker more like a modern, very bright THX-1138 than Bryant’s smoke-filled, intensely blue noir pad. We are introduced to many new vistas unseen in the original Blade Runner universe. The films’ coda, which introduces Ryan Gosling’s character, and the film’s main protagonist, K (a name unmistakable as a nod toward the alienated, isolated and confused characters in Kafka’s oeuvre) is extremely white and grey, akin to the desolation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath dust-bowl America: a wasteland. We are introduced a Frisco-turned junk heap shot in a relatively conventional Hollywood style. But we can forgive Deakins and Villeneuve this relatively uninspired sequence once we reach the empty, dust-laden orange (post-nuclear?) Las Vegas that is deeply unsettling in a manner akin to when Charlton Heston first spies the Statue of Liberty destroyed on a beach in Planet of the Apes.

There are night scenes with the same intense blues and blacks we all love from the original film and scenes of snowfall that reach poetic heights rarely attempted in cinema (last I recall was Inarritu’s Biutiful). The business mogul and visionary Wallace who has replaced Tyrell’s company with his own has a den of evil inspired heavily by the art-deco sets of Tyrell’s former building and Deakins shoots cascading green light with all the same magnificence as Cronenweth in these scenes.

Blade Runner 2049 is a flawed film in some ways, as was the original Blade Runner (pre-Final Cut). However, its cinematography and mise-en-scene are not flawed. Deakins work is both a pastiche of the original film and an ingenious and graphically potent way to move the film into new territory and respond to its needs both artistically and thematically in a manner few other modern Cinematographers seem to be able to grasp or replicate.

But who am I? Just some blogger online telling you why the film’s visual style is so great. Go see it for yourself and then tell me I’m wrong.

Cody