“I hope you don’t mind me taking a liberty” are the first words spoken in Blade Runner 2049, an unlikely sequel to the oft-revised Ridley Scott sci-fi sleeper that has confounded and divided normals — and been an object of adoration for nerds — for 35 years.
I certainly don’t mind. This inspired, expansive follow-up, for which Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher returned, though Scott handed the directorial reins to Sicario and Arrival‘s Denis Villeneuve, is less a generational iteration from its precursor than an evolutionary leap. It chews on the many existential questions introduced in Blade Runner — if our machines can think and feel, are they still machines? How do we know our memories can be trusted? Do androids dream of electric sheep, or unicorns or whatever? — more fully and more satisfyingly than Blade Runner did. Yes, even The Final Cut, which came out some 25 years after the original.
The past few years have spoiled us with good and even great sequels to beloved hits from the late ’70s/early ’80s — Mad Max: Fury Road, Creed, Star Wars: The Force Awakens — but 2049 is the cream of the genetically engineered crop. It doesn’t just remind you of what you loved about Scott’s weird but unshakable hybrid of film noir and cyberpunk-before-it-had-a-name, or even require you to have seen it, necessarily. It takes the grubby, thoughtful world-building and hyperkinetic imagery of the 1982 landmark and gives it, at long last, a story to match.
2049 runs 45 minutes longer than its precursor, but feels shorter. It’s the best philosophical gumshoe movie since Memento and the best dystopian future flick since Children of Men. It’s an astonishing achievement. And like Dunkirk, it’s worth the tariff you’ll pay to experience it on the largest, sharpest screen you can find.Part of its impact, of course, is that Blade Runner‘s, ugh, brand hasn’t been diluted in the intervening decades by other deflating sequels, even though its influence has been everywhere. For a generation or so, there was little presumptive demand for a follow-up to the 27th-highest-grossing film from the year when E.T., Tootsie and An Officer and a Gentleman ruled the box office. Ironically, the movie about a gang of desperate “replicants” — superstrong, self-aware bioengineered humans built as slave labor for the hazardous “off-world colonies” — who trespass on Earth hoping to have their built-in four-year life spans extended, was the ultimate grower. Planned Obsolescence would’ve made worlds more sense as a title than Blade Runner did.
The new movie does not explain the origin of that sexy-sounding idiom, nor does it dispel any of the glorious mysteries in the margins of the old one, like what a “kick-murder squad” is (one could hazard a guess) or what C-Beams or the Tannháuser…
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