Blade Runner 2049 - 2017

Here we go.

Who knows how this film will age with me, but I wasn't a big fan when I saw it earlier in the month. I felt a bit insulted and exploited honestly.

I'm not going to talk about the massive fanboy hype or push to give the DP an Oscar nod before the premiere. I'm going to try and avoid the fact that its a copy structurally, thematically and technically of the 1982 classic. Fuck that. Thats the problem.

The first film has to be covered briefly. Here is a landmark achievement in screen storytelling that went against the Lucas/Spielberg grain (love those guys btw) to present a cold, existential, cynical picture of our future post-corporate apocalypse and technical enslavement. Or is it technical apocalypse and corporate enslavement? Anyway, underneath its bleak noir deconstructionism was a radical existential question about "what is a soul?" Are souls only human? Can a machine have one? Where's the spirituality in a world where man is a machine and machine is a man?

It answers this (at least in Ridley Scott's original cut) with the theory that souls are attained/created by anyone who earns one. There are men without and machines/animals/objects with. In Blade Runner, Deckard finds out that he is a replicant, not "a real boy" in Pinocchio fashion. His entire life has been a lie orchestrated by his creators to hide the fact he isn't real. But he accepts it; that his dreams are pre-programmed and that his free will is an illusion. His guardian angel sets him free and assures him that he has attained his eternal reward. This deterministic view upsets people. "Don't tell us humans are the same as robots!" It upset Warner Bros execs and Harrison Ford, so they re-edited the film so Deckard is not an unconscious machine but a really boring, flat human with no spiritual journey... who just falls in love with a machine woman by random whim. They essentially eliminated the poetry, tragedy and transcendent spiritual victory in a metaphor about enlightenment. It was reduced to a "future cop vs cyborg" movie. Yawn!

Flash forward to the Reboot Era. "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a super success and 80s nostalgia is inescapable. So good ol' WB dusts off Blade Runner and create a franchise from this 80s commercial failure/critical touchstone. But Ridley Scott is only brought back as "executive producer", which means a humored consultant used for marketing. The directing job goes to Denis Villeneuve, director of many world cinema-influenced Hollywood thrillers and darling of new film criticism. I think they brought back one of the original screenwriters too. But this is the same WB that mangled Suicide Squad and ripped the nuts off Batman V Superman.

Watching BR2049 I couldn't resist the very spacious, digitally colored and expensively art-directed cinematography. The film is top notch eye candy. I have to say it fails to live up to the original Blade Runner in its lighting techniques, but almost no one would notice or care so I'll drop the point because visuals are not paramount to this film's impression on me.

Whereas Scott's film was so radically different from its class, Villeneuve's film is so radically the same: the same as the first Blade Runner and the same as every new "prestige" attempt at blockbuster cinema. Besides the effectively moody lighting, the sleek production design and frankly expected & redundant moments of replicants philosophizing "how human am I?", this is like Logan, Kong Island, Leatherface and the other 2017 genre films that are mimicking 70s/80s tropes and aesthetics. Sadly, none bring the originality, experimentation or storytelling craftsmanship of their influences.

We are in this moment where style equals substance to the wannabe cinephile because A. thats the easiest thing to identify about great older films on Criterion, and B. Bret Easton Ellis has incorrectly defined Hitchcock's theory of "Pure Cinema" to a generation of internet critics. What Hitchcock meant was film built around montage: the combination of shots to create a non-visual idea. Somehow Ellis has repeatedly defined Pure Cinema as the "visual over everything" and "aesthetics divorced from ideology". I understand how he could make this mistake. Hitchcock was more interested in visual narrative than audio or text. But he never meant visual storytelling as a singular expression. Thats just an easy cop-out calling card to identify Hitchcock. Hitch himself was sorry that he was known purely for his aesthetics by early critics. And to divorce aesthetics from ideology is to analyze half of the artwork & be a shallow critic. The aesthetics serve ideology. Cinema is intrinsically ideological, which is why its been used for propaganda since the beginning. This is why Bret hasn't become a success in filmmaking and his opinions on film are not taken too seriously. But he has a legion of fans, many pretentious, many alt-right, many ignorant on cinema. I think a lot of these people showed up to see 2049.

Now if we go by Ellis' standards, Blade Runner 2049 is a near-masterpiece. Lingering "dead time" shots of gorgeous but hollow visuals, creepily pampered actor faces in technicolor lights, every movement measured for a maximum textual impact. Its one of the widest visual palettes I've ever seen on a big screen. But there's nothing else under the hood. Its like a very gorgeous date who has nothing original to say but he/she took a philosophy class once. The original '82 masterpiece is like a date with a heroin chic model fluent in 12 languages who wants to argue about Foucault. Basically its a comparison between Sean Young and the 12-year-old-looking-20something who plays the hologram girlfriend. Style is nothing without substance.

2049 is a beginner's course on Blade Runner. It tries to boil down, paint by numbers & commercialize the original and like a pop star's mp3 cover of a David Bowie anthem on vinyl... it loses a lot in translation. It tries so hard to be taken seriously. It wants you to feel so much apathy, disillusion & wanderlust. "Damn, its hard being a Millennial!!!" But it doesn't illustrate any of this well. Essentially we should relate to this story as a sequel because there's another generation who gets it. Thats all. Just like Disney's Star Wars, the respect for the original text somehow grants a reward- except, nah. 2049 doesn't re-interpet the original worth a damn. It doesn't return to Philip K Dick's original novel for anything. Its a cash grab looking for hipster cool points only. And this is most of Ryan Gosling and Denis Villeneuve's history.

Best & worst of all, it retroactively canonizes Warner's shit version of the story where Deckard is just a man. Or does it? Deckard is neither, so 2049 is trying to be a sequel to both films, which is a cool touch, but also the only logical choice for a sequel to a film with 3 official versions. But either way you look at it, Deckard's return is very flat and wasted. The decades long ambiguity of whether Deckard is or isn't a replicant is expanded to... "is he the father of the first half-replicant or first full replicant child?" Neither is that interesting.

The only way you can arrive at 2049 surpassing Blade Runner is if you are talking about the awful Theatrical Version. This is the most pretentious, boring, frustrating action film I've ever seen. And thats not a knock. I love Godard, "The Brown Bunny" and the lesser films of Bergman, Kubrick & Tarkovsky. But 2049 is still a crappy story underneath. No amount of shoegazing actors or post-ironic sexism will change that. And its sad because Blade Runner avoided all of that. It was a genuinely spiritual, psychological, romantic, feminist, speculative and socially relevant work of commercial art. This is just a lifeless replicant that needs to be retired.

*Always wanted to write a cheesy critic closing line like that :)