Butler's Cinema Scene

Ana de Armas, Ryan Gosling

“BLADE RUNNER 2049”  My rating: B 

163 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Making a sequel that will satisfy three generations of “Blade Runner”-obsessed geeks isn’t easy.

What’s surprising is how close director Denis Villeneuve and his screenwriters (Hampton Fancher, Michael Green) have come to pulling it off.

Of course this pronouncement is coming from a guy who admired the original 1982 “Blade Runner” (great film technology and a brilliant evocation of a dystopian future) but didn’t actually like it (one of Harrison Ford’s clumsiest performances…plus the movie should have been about Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty, a vastly more interesting character).

“Blade Runner 2049” finds me reversing my original evaluation — I like it but don’t exactly admire it.

Explaining one’s reactions to this eye-popping, ear-shredding futurist epic (the running time is nearly three hours) is made considerably more difficult by Villeneuve’s request  — read to critics at advance screenings — that we not discuss the new film’s plot in our reviews.

Well, that’s kind of limiting.

But here goes.

Once again we have a film about the conflict between replicants — artificially engineered humanoid slaves who are born as adults with phony memories of childhood — and their human creators.

The film centers on “K” (it refers to the first letters of his serial number), a replicant played by Ryan Gosling. K, like Ford’s Deckard in the first film, is a blade runner who hunts down renegade replicants. (The character’s name may also refer to Josef K., the existentially-challenged hero of Kafka’s The Trial. Allegorical names are big here; the principal female characters are called Joi and Luv.)

In the  years since the events of the original film there have been major societal upheavals:  A “great blackout” that destroyed most digital records; the bankruptcy of the Tyrell Corporation which invented replicants; and the rise of mad scientist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto, as irritatingly weird as ever), who has perfected technology to ensure that his new generation of replicants obey their human masters.

But there are still some aging Tyrell-era replicants hiding out in Earth’s less-hospitable neighborhoods, and it is K’s job to track them down and eliminate them.

In his off hours the silently suffering K takes much abuse from his human neighbors, who contemptuously refer to him as a “skin job.”  At least he has a wife at home…well, sort of.  What he is has is Joi (Ana de Armas), a computer-generated hologram who can change her clothing and hair instantaneously to match K’s mood.  She loves him; sexual congress,  though, seems beyond her technology.

No wonder K seems so sad.

Running throughout Fancher and Green’s screenplay are hints that man’s inventions — holograms, replicants — are at least as “human” as their creators, struggling against their programming to express emotional needs and intellectual curiosity.

The plot centers on K’s assignment to find and destroy a newly discovered threat to mankind’s very existence.

“This breaks the world,” warns his LAPD boss (Robin Wright).

But K isn’t the only one on the case. Leto’s nutjob industrialist dispatches his replicant Girl Friday, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), on the same search with orders to preserve this phenomenon for his own questionable purposes.

So basically you’ve got the loner K competing with Luv’s ruthless team to complete his assignment. As a result of this conflict we get a big action scene about every 15 minutes.

In between we watch K collect clues, many of which trigger his own implanted memories. Moreover, our man is having moral qualms. He frets about killing a human who, unlike replicants, may have a soul.

“You’ve been getting along fine without one,” assures Wright’s cynical boss lady.

Except, of course, the film quietly argues that these artificial beings have as much soul as the rest of us.

All of this sleuthing and slugging is a buildup to the film’s third act introduction of Harrison Ford’s Deckard, now a grizzled recluse hiding out in the radiation-ravaged ruins of Las Vegas.  (Not giving away anything here…Ford is on the movie poster.).

(By the way, the long-festering question that has lingered for 30-plus years since the original “Blade Runner” — you know, the question that has launched a million blogs? — isn’t answered here.  The screenwriters are toying with us. Clever bastards.)

Harrison Ford

There is much to enjoy, not the least an overwhelming sensory experience.

The Los Angeles of 2049 remains rain-soaked (though on some days it snows), and most of the buildings still meld high-tech with dirty grunginess.  At night the place is almost dark except for a few streetlights and neon ads (in the post-blackout era electrical power seems to be rationed) — it looks kind of like a Soviet burg during the Stalin era.

Once outside the city K encounters barren landscapes with barely a hint of vegetation or animal life.

All this is beautifully (if that’s the right word) captured by Roger Deakins’ atmospheric cinematography.

The soundtrack is impressive, too, with Benjamin Walifisch and Hans Zimmer’s score toying with Vangelis-inspired electronic droning, jarring roars like revving NASCAR engines, and something that sounds like gigantic steel plates clanging in a massive mausoleum.

Villeneuve, who’s been on an incredible run in recent years (“Incendies,” “Sicario,” “Arrival”) delivers several tour de force visual passages, including the the most mind-blowing sex scene ever to appear in mainstream cinema and the most creative use ever of old Elvis performance footage. (Even in 2049 he’s still the King.)

Acting? Well, it’s all solid but rarely showy.  Gosling plays it low keyed, in keeping with his character’s replicant imperatives, but he’s expressive enough to suggest the conflicts and disappointments that are eating away at K.  Face it, no young American actor is better at revealing beneath-the-surface action.

De Armas and Hoeks’ synthetic females are more up front with their emotions, leading us to wonder if their passion is real or just programming.

Still, “Blade Runner 2019” is not really an emotional experience.  It’s an intellectually complex jigsaw puzzle unapologetically aimed at hard-core fans of the original production. And for all of its eye and ear candy, you’ve got to wonder if it will make sense to anyone not already intimately familiar with Ridley Scott’s original.

So it’s not perfect.  But it’s quite a ride.

| Robert W. Butler