Blade Runner 2049: Review and Scenic Analysis
Preface and Some Notes
This post will be the first in what hopefully becomes a series of (weekly?) movie discussions reviewing my favorite films.
I will do my best to pick films which, while perhaps critically acclaimed, are not absolutely universally regarded as must-watch; despite this vague evaluation, I will argue exactly why I believe them to be exceptional works of art. This is to say, I will try to avoid picking films like The Godfather, but still might end up reviewing a film like Arrival. Blade Runner 2049 is a perfect example of my target film: a movie generally well-regarded by critics but controversial enough to make my opinion worthwhile.
I plan to structure these blog posts with a short (?) spoiler-free review of the movie. Then, I will add a link to a specific, likely spoiler-filled scene, and provide an in-depth scenic analysis connected to the broader themes of the film. Because I have the chance to provide spoilers in this section, I assume I will end up writing at significant length. I will clearly demarcate the beginning of the spoiler-filled section, so please do not read past the spoiler marking if you have not seen the film yet. (I will know.)
The Movie Review
Blade Runner 2049 is an exceptional achievement in modern filmmaking, a movie whose gorgeous cinematography is exceeded in quality only by its ingenious writing. From its creative continuity and narrative style to its exquisitely beautiful message, this film’s script is nearly flawless. While the plot can be labyrinthian, a highly attentive viewer will notice complex and breathtaking artistic and moral value in each twist and turn of both the camera and the story; this is a film that rewards repeat viewing like few others.
If you notice my descriptive word choice tends towards the more extreme, it is because Blade Runner 2049 is a visual and auditory feast despite its poignantly bleak atmosphere. Director Denis Villeneuve is the type of filmmaker who knows how to draw tremendous emotional value from stylistic minimalism. The set design and shot choices develop their emotional power not through the shocking differences between the world in 2049 and our own, but through the disturbing similarities. The film begins with a nearly black-and-white birds-eye view of California in 2049, a perspective of farmland vaguely reminiscent of the one we all know from our own experiences peeking through small plane windows, but a monumental, soulless quality inherently corrupts the provided image. The gradual decay of progress is one of the many themes explored by the film, and because of its portrayal of frequented environments, whether they be planes, cars, offices, cityscapes, or even downtown Las Vegas, the reminder of our own relationship with such spaces allows the differences to alienate us even further. It becomes difficult to pinpoint the exact source of our discomfort with the world Villeneuve has crafted; to borrow from American literary critic Gary Saul Morson’s analysis of an entirely different work, “form[s] faithfully but inappropriately fulfilled call attention to their own artifice”. Even in main character K’s enactment of the classic “honey I’m home” after a brutal arrest-gone-wrong, the moment of absolutely relaxed homecoming is subverted due a clever twist as to the nature of K’s partner. Everything here seems like something we know, but nothing here is as it seems.
K’s partner, Joi, is a holographic artificial intelligence who in many ways serves as the linchpin for the film’s ideology. Her projected translucence allows Villeneuve and Deakins to demonstrate their mastery of the camera, and in shot after shot, their ability to shift light and color around and through her figure not only recalls the emptiness of the world which both characters inhabit but also enables the creation of unprecedentedly stunning scenes. Joi’s antagonistic counterpart, the terrifying, murderous Love, serves as a powerful foil. Despite their names (which I have had much trouble analyzing - time for a rewatch?), the two hold opposite positions in this world, with Joi relegated to an ethereal, holographic, powerless form and Love almost defined by her brutal, active solidity.
The film follows K, a futuristic police officer or “blade runner” whose job is to hunt down rogue replicants (highly realistic humanoid robots powered by advanced artificial intelligence). As a replicant himself, he is tasked with tracking down and “retiring” older models, who are deemed too dangerous and unpredictable to be left alive when compared with the apparently docile nature of the newer line. K leads us through the vast spaces of farmland outside of Los Angeles, through the gloomy and alienated interior of the city, through homes and apartments, through casinos, through brothels, through orphanages. He discovers a secret with far-reaching implications for the relationship between replicants and humans, and in an ingenious twist of plot, the secret begins to point at himself.
Through his depiction of K’s struggle with his own narrative situation, Villeneuve is able to expertly explore themes of love, loneliness, and identity in a postmodern world. Los Angeles is strewn with giant, Japanese signs (interestingly, often katakana, the Japanese alphabet for foreign loanwords). There is foreignness in foreignness in this movie, alienation within alienation. His primary connection is with Joi, but in a cruel twist of fate we see copies of Joi strewn around the city. Here, the heartbreakingly empathetic character of Joi is transformed into a figure cheaply and easily replicated. Sentience is created almost thoughtlessly in this world of easily manufactured artificial intelligence. In one especially breathtaking scene, K converses with a gigantic holographic advertisement version of Joi, a subtle reminder of the horror with which technology allows the slavery and caging of intelligence.
The acting in Blade Runner 2049 is impeccable. Ryan Gosling’s iconic, restrained sadness is the perfect fit for the replicant blade runner K, and Ana de Armas embodies the very empathy which is inevitably missing in our discussions of artificial intelligence.
If I have one critique of Blade Runner 2049, it is that the complexity of the narrative almost ensures its unwatchability. I remember watching the film in theaters for the first time when I was fourteen and leaving confused, thinking vaguely, “that seemed cool”. Understanding the plot on the first watch is a laudable achievement, which means even approaching a full comprehension of the film’s many messages requires at least one rewatch, or a guide through the film with whom to talk as you are watching. This critique is praise as well, however. The movie is an intricate web of overlapping themes and messages, and the clever ways in which it sets up and pays off its most meaningful ideas makes it an absolute joy to behold.
Scenic Analysis: Spoilers Beyond!
Please watch the scene: https://youtu.be/VuV2c-6js8w
Before I get to the analysis, can we just appreciate what an unprecedentedly creative and beautiful scene that is? From all layers- the acting (notice how subtly Gosling plays his performance, leaving nearly the entire scene to de Armas’s eyes) to the restrained dialogue, to, of course, the gorgeous blending of the two figures. Rather than featuring an exploitative, disturbing excess, like many futuristic sex scenes, the scene is as understated as it is thematically significant. What a joy to behold. It makes me wish I could rewatch this film in the giant Googleplex movie theater where I first experienced it.
Throughout Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve emphasizes the ephemerality of Joi simply to distract you from how uncontainably alive she is. In a previous scene, he pauses her during an intimate moment in the rain with K, and he later shows her rapidly switching outfits to whatever K’s preference is at the dinner table. While an attentive viewer’s first assumption when watching these scenes will be to mull over K’s depressing loneliness, that very loneliness is predicated upon Joi’s status as something other. In this way Villeneuve automatically constructs our viewpoint coming into this scene of Joi as something less than real. Even when Joi expresses her love to K earlier in the film, he reacts with confusion and rejection, telling her that she does not have to pretend. In his mind, he essentially wonders, “why does this thing I bought think I want it to pretend to be human?” instead of “why is something this alive and this capable of emotion inside of something I bought?”. As the viewer, we trust K’s viewpoint on the world he introduces to us, further shaping our perspective on the legitimacy of Joi’s sentience.
The creation of this understanding of Joi as somehow “fake” is what makes the scene we are analyzing so emotionally impactful. The prostitute hired by Joi recognizes how truly unique her decision to find K a physical form for intimacy is. Because of this moment of profound and harrowing self-sacrifice for the man she loves, the indisputability of Joi’s humanity suddenly confronts the viewer. Through this recognition of Joi’s humanity, we are forced to come to terms with our own assumptions about the value of artificially intelligent life while simultaneously retrospectively re-evaluating the other scenes containing Joi’s character which we may have previously dismissed. As Joi stands before the camera, naked in an ultimate statement of her own personhood, we are suddenly shown an advertisement for Joi, first in Japanese, then English: “Joi is anything you want her to be. Joi goes anywhere you want her to go.”
The horror of the crime being perpetrated by this society becomes immediately clear. How could a soul this compassionate, this beautiful, and this profoundly palpable be bought, sold, and used like any other commodity? And even more impactful than this realization is a consideration of Joy’s status as physically unrealized. If artificial intelligence is developed, its form will not be only the anthropomorphic corporeality of K. Instead, it will take place in layers further and further away from physical reality, more and more trapped from a world which it is unable to interact with or fully experience. This tortured existence would make lovemaking, suicide, warmth, pain, and even the feel of rain on a person’s skin merely a hint and a dream. This is the kind of existence we risk creating when we pursue artificial intelligence.
Joi’s character is also a perfect meditation on what it means to be human. As an intelligence who is even further removed from our reality, our conception (and subsequent realization) of her soul occurs in a parallel manner to that of K. Throughout the film, we are told by K that he is the replicant who is born, that it is his memories which are real, his life which is special. The absurdly natural feeling of his generated memories makes this idea believable, and his status as our protagonist extends this to a near certainty. When he realizes that he in reality was not born, and that he was not special, he begins to believe that his life does not have value. This perhaps is the fundamental misconception of both K and the viewer which is created by the very nature of the mystery posed by the movie. By delineating between replicants who are born and replicants who are manufactured, Villeneuve implicitly develops the belief in the viewer (which K clearly holds) that to be born somehow imparts some special value to our existence. As we watch K discover his own soul, both the viewer and K begin to believe in the value of his life, predicated on his special status as the first replicant to be born. Then, when Villeneuve ingeniously reveals to us that K was not born, we are suddenly forced to come to terms with the fact that being born was never what provided K his soul. It has been proven to us, just as it was proven to K, that simply by living his life as if he were human, his inner humanity became revealed. As the movie fades out, playing Hans Zimmer’s take on Vangelis’s gorgeous composition Tears in Rain, the absurd beauty of snowflakes falling on our dying protagonist remind us of the actual value of our life: not the arbitrary distinction between being born and being manufactured, but the rare and inconceivable joy afforded to us by the impossible opportunity of our own existence; the sparkling delights, the agonizing pains, and the moments of silent, irreplaceable understanding which accompany the human soul.