Ryan Gosling,left,and Harrison Ford in<i>Blade Runner 2049</i>.

Ryan Gosling,left,and Harrison Ford inBlade Runner 2049.

Villeneuve and his writers (including Hampton Fancher,who worked on the originalBlade Runner script) share this willingness to take artifice for granted. In one sense,this makes Blade Runner 2049 less of an exercise in nostalgia than Scott's film,which harked back to the 1940s in style – Deckard dressed and behaved like an archetypal private eye – while asking if true feeling might be found even in the midst of falsity and corruption.

Today,cinema has moved on:the drama here isn't about the search for authenticity,but about the relationship between different types of images. Ford as the aged Deckard is the film's most vivid presence and there's paradoxical energy in his weariness,which now seems bone deep. His impact is inseparable from his status as an iconic reminder of cinema's past.

Meanwhile,the video billboards from 2019 LA have evolved into full-fledged holograms,some gigantic,others not unlike K's computer-generated girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas),whose affection he's willing to accept at face value. Joi's phantom allure is central to the most memorable scene,which recaptures some of the bizarre eroticism of Scott's film while borrowing from Spike Jonze's Her,a sunnier vision of technology triumphant.

One reason Blade Runner has worn so well is that Scott and his collaborators created a future you could dream yourself into,a city assembled from disparate parts – from low-rent noodle shops to buildings styled like ancient temples. Villeneuve does not try to replicate this achievement:Blade Runner 2049 is visually and geographically more fragmented,moving between the dark,rainy city and the barren areas beyond the sprawl.

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Ryan Gosling in<i>Blade Runner 2049</i>.

Ryan Gosling inBlade Runner 2049.

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Even within the city,the crowds have thinned:Villeneuve can mimic Scott's congested textures when he chooses,but instinctively prefers a starker look,using shallow focus to isolate the actors in blurry space. Hints of what lies beyond are conveyed by the soundtrack,often far more atonal and forbidding than the electronic score by Vangelis which was draped over the 1982Blade Runner like a blanket.

That Villeneuve takes nearly three hours to tell a relatively simple story is one sign of his daring. Like its predecessor,thisBlade Runner is a genuine science-fiction art movie,driven by mood and ideas rather than plot. Perhaps it's a symptom of Hollywood's decay that a film about the future should be so wrapped up in the past. In his complex negotiations with a model that remains out of reach,Villeneuve comes closer than Scott ever did to imagining a post-human world.

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