You look lonely

Water Stone and Sound

I'll admit that, although I did get "The Final Cut" edition of the original Blade Runner, I didn't watch it. I've been too busy with (yet another) playthrough of the fantastic Dark Souls 3, and I thought of the idea of devoting time to the remaster of the 1982 film as something of a chore.

Don't get me wrong, I think I'll be making time for it soon, but in some sense watching Blade Runner is akin to hard work. It demands attention. You can't watch it while browsing twitter or whatever on your phone. The movie rewards you for soaking in the atmosphere, and constantly considering the the motives of the characters. If the even have motives give the artificial nature of the replicants. This is, of course, the fundamental question at the heart of the film, and why it has developed a cult following over the years.

Now, the original Blade Runner didn't see much success at it's opening. It took years, and a grassroots kind of groundswell that prompted the various re-releases. It appears that the new movie set in the universe is going to follow the same trend - at least that's how I feel about it. 2049 didn't do too well in the box office, but I have the feeling it will be just as cherished as it's predecessor as the years go on.

It's the atmosphere man

Solar Power yaaaaas

What will make 2049 worth repeat viewing is the incredible world the events take place in. The world, and the presentation of it. Everything is wet, or it's incredibly dry. There is no middle ground here, no verdant forests (except for in one case where such a forest exists as an augmented reality projection). The only life is of the artificial kind. It's a world where humanity reigns supreme, and it's very dark. The climate is destroyed. Child slave labor is used to salvage components from old an discarded circuit boards. Replicants themselves are (apparently) docile slaves, with Ryan Gosling's "K" a replicant Blade Runner purposed to hunt down older and fugitive models.

Light and shadow is used in the classical Noir style much like the original film, but the sound is what really drew me in. This amazing synth track accompanied most of the film. This deep and thrumming thing that grabs you. I absolutely loved it. It gave a grave sensibility to about everything going on in the film, and is perhaps the primary thing that has stuck in my mind now a week later after seeing the film.

Everything is brown. Or grey. Bright colors come from the corporation supporting advertisements that exist on a truly monstrous scale. As with the headlining image here, the residents of 2049's L.A. are utterly dominated by these corporations, who seem to own anything of vibrancy or color in the world. This is not a city with very many happy people. I don't get the sense that many of the residents make excursions to the countryside, which seems to be even more dreadful than the city. You are likely to get shot down by scavengers, murdered from scrap metal made of your futuristic flying car.

The Beauty of Retro-Futuristic Tech

Stark, and beautiful

One of the great things about the new movie is the way that the old tech is carried on with. Much fanfare has been made of the existence of Atari and Pan-air in this new film - as if the world of the 1980s just carried on with incremental improvements in the tech of the world to get to the state portrayed in 2049.

For my part, I thought that it was well done. The great "black out" of around 2020 helped to diminish the incredulity here. The world had something of an apocalypse where most or all of the computer memory was destroyed, and only some data stored in a spherical crystal state was preserved. The scenes in which these crystal memories were tapped reached back to the original movie. The main character uses a microfilm reader to rapidly compare DNA sets. Nothing in the film seemed absurdly "furturistic," everything seemed to be realistic, and have a realistic cost. You get flying cars, sure, but also massive wastelands, and damage to the climate.

There is augmented reality virtual girlfriends - this is actually a key part of the film, and one of the main characters, but in no way is it an utopia. The world is getting by, but just getting by. The frustration put forth by Leto's character helps to make this point made more concretely.

The Blind Architect - Here be some spoilers

I can only build so many

I gotta admit, I sympathize with the drive of Leto's character here. Yeah, colonizing the solar system if fine and all, but we should have a great reach over the stars. To this end, Wallace wishes to grant self-replication to the replicants, i.e. being able to be made pregnant and produce children.

Obviously this would make them effectively human, or at least eliminate any difference between them and humanity, but this doesn't seem to phase Wallace. He comments that civilization was iteratively built by one slave race or another, and so this is the extent of the esteem he grants towards replicants. This is made clear when he murders a new-born female replicant when it becomes clear that she isn't able to bear children. He pays no mind to this other than to bemoan his frustration at uncovering this mystery which becomes the primary mover in the plot.

Wallace, and his female replicant enforcer are quite effective as primary antagonist. They are almost emotionless in their pursuits. This seems to line up quite well with the overall feeling of the movie. Emotions, feelings, and the soul are muted. The essence of consciousness is denied within the replicants, and likewise this is the same with the human participates. One wonders how much "man" actually exists within Wallace. It appears that he gave up his natural site for an augmented version that allowed for great perception. These tradeoffs aren't always apparent in their initial configuration, so one must wonder how this has effected his perception of humanity, and consciousness and the soul. All of his sight is filtered trough the myriad viewpoint of hovering drones. This is something beyond the ken of any other human, and certainly would have a transformative effect.

Misc thoughts past that

I've seen shit man

• The "action" scenes are infrequent throughout the film, but his helps to punctuate them, and on the balance I feel they are much preferred to your generic Michael Bay affair
• Harrison Ford was fine. I mean, I think he did a good job, and was well integrated in the plot. The scene with him and "Rachael" was probably one of the most moving moments in theater this year. His performance had some gas to it, and was nothing like what we've seen with other instances lately, Ender's Game for instance. Ford did not phone this in by any stretch.
• That pseudo-threesome between K, the replicate prostitute, and K's virtual girlfriend was incredibly innovative, and technically well done, and VERY hot. It's interesting to think that none of the participants were "real" by some of the more chauvinist attitudes at play in this society. The deep kiss where the Augmented Reality girlfriend Joi went in eyes closed, while the replicant prostitute Mariette had eyes-wide-open was particularly memorable.
• Given the wet cityscape of L.A., and the ruined outskirts of the city, it was refreshing to see the abandoned casinos of Las Vegas. The semi-malfunctioning holographic Elvis Presley performance had a very interesting mechanical function, as well as thematic function in K and Deckard's first encounter. The silent gaps between pops of music really highlighted the action.
• The bald albino archivist was hilarious. This movie doesn't have a whole lot of humor to it, so it was nice to have some banter there when K was doing some initial investigation into the exhumed replicant Rachael.
• A lot of people might find this movie to be too slow. They miss the point, the pace is the experience, the atmosphere is where you find the richness.

What does this mean for the furture of the series (if there is one).

So, Wallace is foiled from have an specimen to experiment on, and the replicate subsurface army are free to continue to organize and grow. This seems like a fine setup for a followup movie, but ultimately this comes down to the corporate overlords to decide on how this followup is formed.

In one sense, they could just wait a decade or two, and reboot it all together. It's my opinion that every, sacred or not, will be remade and made again as time goes one. Sure, we can come up with novel ideas as a society, but it's so much easier to just respin and recreate ideas already rooted in the culture.

I think that this film was well done, and hope that it proves out over the next couple years.

With that being said, thanks for reading this review, and please let me know what you think in the comments below :D