Blu-ray + DVD

Blade Runner 2049 Blu-ray Review

Legacy

Reviewed by Michael Reuben, January 15, 2018

Rarely has a movie arrived in theaters with the peculiar mixture of anticipation and dread that awaited director Denis Villeneuve's sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner . Although many key members of the original creative team returned for Blade Runner 2049including screenwriter Hampton Fancher, visual futurist Syd Mead, original star Harrison Ford and Scott himself as executive producerthe degree of difficulty seemed impossibly high. Scott's film was a box office failure, but its influence has been incalculable, and its fan base has only grown larger and more fanatical over time, spurred just as much by the originality of Blade Runner's dystopian imagination as by the new versions that continued to appear over the next twenty-five years. Each of those versions, whether called "Workprint" or "Director's Cut", supposedly brought us closer to the original vision that Scott was forced to compromise due to financial constraints and a production beset by strife. Blade Runner has long been steeped in dual mythologies, one from its provocative content and another from its tortuous path to the screen. After many hurdles both legal and technical had been cleared, the version officially designated as "the Final Cut" finally appeared in 2007, but it didn't so much lay any controversies to rest as open a whole new chapter.How could any sequel hope to satisfy such a phenomenon's legions of devotees? How could any creative team not be crushed by the sheer magnitude of an attempt to build on a vision rivaling Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for its originality and its impact on virtually every futuristic vision that has followed? (Even Luc Besson's comically colorful The Fifth Element walks in Blade Runner's shadow, because Besson was deliberately trying to do the opposite of whatever Scott had done.) And how could the story be continued in a way that maintained the delicately poised ambiguities of Scott's narrative, with its cosmic reverberations and stubborn existential riddles? Blade Runner may have taken the form of a police procedural wrapped in an eye-poppingly art-designed future, but it was ultimately a sustained meditation on what it means to be human.That Villeneuve and his team succeeded as well as they did is almost as much of a miracle as Scott's achievement in the original film. It may be an unfortunate badge of their success that the initial box office for BR 2049 was widely considered disappointing, though nowhere near the fizzle endured by the original in 1982. Entertainment Weekly recently pronounced BR 2049 one of 2017's noteworthy failures, but I think such judgments are premature. The film is destined for a long afterlife, and while it cannot hope to attain the original's influencethat intensity of lightning doesn't strike twicethe sequel has now become an essential part of the Blade Runner lore. Its continuation of the original film's tragic tale and its relentless questioning of the nature of humanity arises so naturally and organically from Scott's work that the two films cannot be separated. If you love the first Blade Runner, you are destined to love BR 2049maybe not right away, but eventually.I saw BR 2049 on its opening weekend after carefully avoiding all advance publicity beyond the teaser trailer, and I was thrilled by the film's surprises, many of which have been engineered to play upon the expectations of those who know the original Blade Runner as intimately as BR 2049's creators obviously do. Since then, I have seen numerous reviews and discussions that reveal secrets of the sequel both big and small. I don't want to add to their number, because I assume that many purchasers of the Blu-ray and UHD will be first-time viewers. So let's stick to the bare essentials.BR 2049 is set thirty years after the elevator door slammed shut on Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and his replicant lover, Rachael (Sean Young), as they fled a dark and sodden Los Angeles just a few steps ahead of fellow cop Gaff (Edward James Olmos), who was supposed to complete the "retirement" (i.e., execution) of Rachael that Deckard refused to carry out. (Or maybe Gaff let them go; Scott's film leaves the question open.)Much has changed since then, and not for the better. Under the guidance of visionary industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who acquired the Tyrell Corp. after the death of its founder (and a few other unfortunate incidents), replicants have successfully been used to further the colonization of space. Indeed, much of the human race has relocated to the off-world colonies that were being so heavily promoted in the original film. Large portions of Blade Runner's crowded L.A. are now uninhabited. They're also dark, thanks to an EMP disaster known as "the Blackout" that, in 2022, wiped out much of the world's financial and other data.Replicant technology has progressed from the Nexus 6 stage of which Rachael was the most advanced to the current Nexus 8. Unlike their predecessors, Nexus 8's have a normal human life span, and the memory implants pioneered by the Tyrell Corporation have made them more easily controllable and thus more reliable. But soon enough, even supposedly reliable Nexus 8's begin thinking for themselves and revolting, which is why the authorities continue to need blade runners, officers specially qualified to hunt down and "retire" errant replicants, which was Deckard's job in the original film. BR 2049 centers on a blade runner who goes by the name of "K" (Ryan Gosling), and it's surely no coincidence that this was Franz Kafka's preferred designation for his protagonists trapped in bureaucratic nightmares. A lone and melancholy figure, K reports to a tough commander, Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), who views their work as a holy calling, an essential bulwark protecting humanity from its own creations. (After the events of the first film, you can see her point.)As BR 2049 opens, K has tracked a replicant named Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista) to a remote location where he is hiding in plain sight as a farmer raising the grubs that have become the planet's principal source of food. But the mission produces some unexpected evidence, sending K on a new investigation that will eventually lead him to Deckard, who is hiding in the remains of a former metropolis that was thought to have been rendered uninhabitable by radiation, possibly from the Blackout. K's latest investigation is one in which multiple parties take a keen interest. Chief among them is Niander Wallace, who believes that K has stumbled onto something that will propel Wallace Corp. to new heights of technological achievement. Wallace, who is blind, operates through a replicant assistant that he has ironically named Luv (Sylvia Hoeks). Luv may be as immaculately manicured and coiffed as Rachael in the first film, but she is just as dangerous as the replicant assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), memorably and bloodily retired by Deckard.K does not have a Rachael to fall in love with. Whatever heart he may have belongs to an A.I. known as Joi (Ana de Armas), who is like a holographic Alexa and such a common product that K sees her image wherever he goes. But Joi adapts to each owner so thoroughly that she and K have developed a love affair that could almost be described as passionate, except that you can see on K's face his lingering awareness that Joi is just a simulation. No matter how hard he may pretend otherwise, he can never forget that she's incapable of genuine love. (Or is she? The film's events certainly suggest otherwise.) Even their physical connection is a charade, achieved through the involvement of a self-described "real girl", a hooker named Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), who looks like the second coming of Darryl Hannah's Pris in the first film and who has her own agenda, like everyone else in BR 2049. Well, almost everyone else. K's investigation introduces him to Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a designer of memories for replicant implementation, who lives alone in a sealed environment required to protect her compromised immune system. Dr. Ana seems to care only for her work, which is her sole source of companionship, much like J.F. Sebastian's toys in the original film.At the core of BR 2049 lies an unexpected but entirely logical response to the demand made by Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty in the first film for "more life!" In his own twisted way, Niander Wallace is attempting to fulfill that request, though not by any means that would have satisfied Batty. Wallace's goal is not to prolong one replicant's life but to multiply their numbers, supplying the world with infinite legions of Battys (and Pris's and Zhoras and Luvs and Sapper Mortons), numbers so vast that they exceed the endless fields of human pods in The Matrix  except that these beings will be controlled by humans instead of machines: a small and select group of humans who can share Wallace's vision. The world that Wallace envisions is bleak but beautiful, like the vast cathedral-style spaces of his domain at Wallace Corp. Some lives, and many freedoms, may have to be sacrificed to attain this technological utopia under Wallace's (mostly) benevolent control. But such is the price of progress.