The Los Angeles of Blade Runner 2049 is a more dismal place than the 2019 Los Angeles of the original film. And the problems aren’t confined to one decaying city. In the 30 preceding years, the “Black Out” took down the worldwide web (Lesson: Don’t go paperless!). After the global ecosystem collapsed in the 2020s, the Wallace Corporation kept the Earth fed through synthetic farming. Wallace also bought the patents for those synthetic people called replicants and “upgraded” the design. The newer models ostensibly lack the spark of free will that caused so much trouble 30 years before.
Enter K (Ryan Gosling), one of those obedient new replicants. He works as a “blade runner,” a LAPD cop tasked with hunting down and killing dangerous old model replicants. While on mission he uncovers forensic evidence leading to a startling conclusion: decades earlier a replicant gave birth to a child, something they were not designed to do. Seeking to “maintain the wall” between humans and replicants, the LAPD wants to close the case. But for the Wallace Corporation, headed by a mogul-guru who presents like a sinister Steve Jobs on weird drugs, the child is part of a bid for cosmic dominion.
Let’s just say that Blade Runner 2019 gets off to a good start and collapses somewhere near the two-hour mark. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve did wonderful work on his modestly financed science fiction film Arrival (2016). Here, he was handed a big budget and, unfortunately, he chose to spend it all on a sketchy screenplay whose dramatic arc falters as the movie loses rhythm and drags on—and on.
Villeneuve masterfully transposes the retro-future vision of Blade Runner’s original director Ridley Scott to a time 30 years on. The countryside is gray and dead as chalk; the sky is a smudge; the rain over LA is unceasing; the city is a crowded concrete slum where giant holograms beckon with sexualized advertising. K “lives” with an artificial intelligence app called Joi (Ana di Armas), a girlfriend who assumes various forms according to his momentary desires.
The screenplay does acknowledge the concerns of Philip K. Dick, the author whose work originally inspired Blade Runner. Many scenes wonder about what is real and what is illusion; the definition of human and non-human; the fallibility of memory; free will and predestination; and the grim fact that—one way or another—civilizations are usually powered by the energy of slaves.
By visuals alone, Blade Runner 2019 catches the apocalyptic anxiety of our moment as the world seems to implode under unending disaster. Right: close to the two-hour mark, Harrison Ford, star of the original Blade Runner, emerges from the shadows with an ornery look in his eyes.
