Wednesday 11 October 2017

Blade Runner 2049

WARNING: Around the halfway mark of this review, I compare Blade Runner 2049 to James Cameron's Avatar. Favourably, no less. You have been warned.

Immersion is something many filmmakers aim for when creating a movie, irrespective of budget or genre. To be sat with a captive audience in front of a huge screen is to be transported to where a filmmaker (director, writer, production designer) wants to take you - be that somewhere fantastical (let's say, Star Wars) or wholly real (anything from the Dogme 95 movement). David Lynch plunges his audiences headfirst into twisted Hollywood nightmares; Peter Jackson - for better or worse - boldly attempted to put the viewer literally inside the frame with his 48fps versions of the Hobbit trilogy.

Ridley Scott - having proved he could make a hit with Alien in 1979 - turned to author Philip K. Dick for his stab at the immersion game, turning a polluted and overcrowded Los Angeles circa 2019 into a world that is fizzing with tactile energy; a world that transports you somewhere you never really knew you wanted to go until you got there. That world formed part of Blade Runner, a critical and commercial flop on its initial release in 1982, though it inspired a cult following and has since become a high watermark by which other big, daring sci-fi thinkpieces are judged (along with Kubrick's 2001).

It's far from an action film; the glacial pace and questionable morals of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a bounty hunter brought out of retirement to track down and kill a handful of replicants (synthetic humans) make it easy to see why it didn't exactly set the box office on fire. But while time was never on the side of the Nexus 6 replicants with their four-year lifespan, it was on the side of Blade Runner itself.

Having undergone two directorial revisions - with Scott's 2007 'Final Cut' his preferred version, omitting a studio-requested voiceover and cleaning up certain optical effects - it's a film that when viewed today looks like it could have been made yesterday. It has held up in a way few genre pieces do, a combination of prescient production design (gleaned from the sketches of visual futurist Syd Mead) and a lack of obvious fashion or cultural touchstones from any particular decade.

Whether you like the original Blade Runner or not (it has a cold air of detachment about it - arguably by design, but not to everyone's taste as Gareth Dimelow argues over at Sabotage Times), you cannot suggest it aims for nothing less than total immersion. It envelops the viewer in a thick smog of meticulous imagery - one could quite easily argue it's a triumph of style over content, but boy, what style.

You'd think Denis Villeneuve - director of Blade Runner 2049 - would have balked at the idea of making a sequel to a film so revered by its loyal fans. What he has come up with however, alongside screenwriters Hampton Fancher (scribe of the original 1982 film) and Michael Green, is nothing short of miraculous.

Let's be clear: this may not be a film for everyone. I disliked the original for years, arguing much like Gareth that it's a monumental achievement in totemic boredom (I have long since decided it's actually ace, though far from an easy film to love). But for a big, mega-budget studio film such as 2049 to have gotten made the way Villeneuve has made it; it is borderline astounding.

It flies in the face of what much of mainstream cinema has in many ways become - a limited-attention span marketing gimmick, designed to get people to part way with their hard-earned in order to invest in multiple-film franchises (yes, I'm back on that old horse again) that do nothing other than mildly entertain. I'm not entirely dismissing those films - well, at least not all of them - but they offer little in the way of genuine nourishment to chew on and ponder. You don't come out of Spider-Man: Homecoming thinking "gee-whizz, that film really had something profound to say about X, Y and Z - I'll be up all night thinking about it!" - it's undoubtedly a great piece of entertainment, but ultimately, disposable.

Blade Runner 2049 eschews the aforementioned filmic rulebook everyone seems to be playing by these days, making a sequel to a 35-year old film that feels just as timeless as the original. It retains the glacial pace and moral ambiguities, but adds something new to the table: an emotional core, something arguably lacking from Scott's film. It's by no means short, clocking in fifteen minutes shy of three hours, but if you have the patience you will be handsomely rewarded with a piece of cinematic art that ticks so many boxes it's a veritable embarrassment of riches for all concerned.

While there's ambiguity abound regarding Deckard's true identity in Blade Runner, there's none regarding Ryan Gosling's Agent K (no relation to Tommy Lee Jones), a replicant Blade Runner working for the LAPD, hunting down illegal older models in order to 'retire' them. Having taken care of a replicant farmer who teases him with the line "you've never seen a miracle" prior to his death, K discovers a box of bones buried underneath a long-dead tree on the land he was tending. Turns out the bones are those of another replicant who died almost thirty years ago, and who seemingly had a child. With the very notion of a replicant pregnancy impossible to believe - not to mention the undesirable headlines it would generate - K is ordered to find the now-adult child and retire it.

Now the plot basics could very well be deemed perfunctory - you could set them in any time within any genre and spin a similar yarn. But Villeneuve raises the stakes by creating a world that made me recall the punters who went back to see James Cameron's Avatar multiple times.

Far from Cameron's finest hour, but a box office smash nonetheless - a chunk of that generated from repeat ticket sales to people wanting to return to the world he had created: to be back in the lush, verdant jungles of Pandora; to be flying on the backs of direhorses and mountain banshees (I admit I had to google those); to feel part of a film that ticked the immersion box gratuitously. I never quite understood it at the time. Watching Blade Runner 2049, I know how they felt. It's a world I want to go back to ASAP.

My colleague Ally Davies said she's "never seen anyone make grey rain look so stunning and poetic". When you first see K making his way through the L.A. cityscape, a solitary flying car in a bewildering metropolis that dwarfs the original's opening scenes by comparison, you'll know why (you can make out the former Tyrell Corporation HQ through the polluted haze, a once-towering steel pyramid now shrunken in the shadow of the Wallace Corp which has assumed control of it's replicant-manufacturing empire).

There's a brightly-lit aesthetic to many scenes that is the complete antithesis of the first film (K's apartment is practically floodlit compared to Deckard's Egyptian-themed whiskey den), yet it feels entirely appropriate and seamless - as if the film was always there, waiting to be made, and this is how it was always going to look no matter what.

It's hard to sound anything less than gushing but it's testament to everyone involved that a film with such anticipation surrounding it gets so much right. I fear if Scott would have directed it, it would have been a completely different beast altogether (just watch Prometheus to see how a wrecking ball can be taken to a beloved universe he himself helped to create). Villeneuve is a self-confessed uber-fan of the original, but has made something that doesn't in any way feel fanboy-ish.

It has similar beats and cues in the same way The Force Awakens and Jurassic World took a known template and reworked it to suit a new audience (Carla Juri's Dr. Ana Stelline, a memory designer with a defective immune system, feels like a direct descendant of William Sanderson's J.F. Sebastian), however it's not at all as slavish or simplistic as either of them. 2049 delves into entirely new territory, laying the groundwork for a final shot that nearly brought me to tears. If the first film asks what it means to be human, 2049 asks what it means to be a replicant; it's a film about memory, how our memories shape and define us, and how we might feel if we were pushed to question all what we know to be real.

But this is by the by. Just what will a so-called regular punter make of this slow-paced, introspective arty sci-fi bullshit when they've been weaned on insta-gratification cinema that wastes no time in getting to where it's going, for fear that everyone's attention will be lost if there's not an explosion of some sort every five minutes? Having not stood outside a multiplex with a clipboard and pen I've no actual idea, but Simon Bland's latest Culture Dump blog post delves into a worrying trend that ties in with what I'm getting at - the noisy cinemagoer.

Mark Kermode has been banging on about this for years, but yet again he's not a normal member of the public - he's a film nerd, a movie geek, someone who wouldn't be seen dead at the concession stand when everyone else is stocking up on popcorn and chip'n'dips (whatever happened to them, eh? I used to serve them at UCI Trafford Centre, back in sepia-hued 1999... halcyon days). When a proportion of the general public are unable to sit in a cinema they've paid money to be at without talking or dicking about on their phone - and this is during mainstream releases, mind - how are they supposed to sit through and enjoy a three-hour art film that's being sold as an action-packed thrill ride they dare not miss?

Seeing as this review is cribbing views and opinions aplenty, let's go back to Gareth Dimelow who brought up on Twitter the fact that 2049's box office returns haven't been great in the US so far (the UK looks to be bucking that trend), along with the distasteful notion being bandied about that audiences aren't intelligent enough to know a good thing when they see it. It's a knee-jerk elitist reaction when supposed 'good' cinema is avoided or unappreciated by a wider audience. He's right that we (as fans of the first film) should be lucky it got made at all - a sequel to a commercial failure that gained appreciation slowly over 30-odd years. It's far from the speed at which endless Marvel films are churned out.

But is it what a wider audience actually wants? You could argue the sheer volume of generic action pictures that use the same template have lowered the bar for what audiences are prepared to sit through. Sony (the film's distributor) would have you believe it's one type of film with their trailers, god forbid it breaks the mould and is actually a bit more nuanced than your usual multiplex fare. Some viewers may feel they've been misled. But others may feel they've been taken on a journey they never expected, and come away wishing more films would aim for more than the cut-and-paste thrills they're becoming numb to.

As for the lack of plot/narrative/emotional hook that is often levied at the first film, 2049 delivers these on a glistening neon-trimmed platter. It takes its time with the characters inhabiting its world, allowing you to genuinely feel the conflict at the heart of K as he approaches the film's climax, meeting Deckard (a stunningly grizzled Ford, eating up the screen in a way he hasn't done since his Indiana Jones days) which sets up an electrifying showdown with the God-like Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) and his latest replicant creation.

Christopher Nolan has arguably laid the groundwork for this type of bold studio ambition to flourish when it comes to costly tentpole releases, but it's up to audiences to keep the momentum going. Sadly, box office takings remain king - films can live or die by the amount of bums on seats it brings in for the studio that's taken a chance on something different.

If no-one took any risks, you'd never get La La Land ("What's that kid, a musical you say? How much?! Get outta town!"). You'd never get Arrival (Villeneuve's previous effort, arguably an even better genre piece than 2049 but I don't want to go down any more rabbit holes here). Hell, you wouldn't even get Baby Driver. But those films made money. 2049 needs to show it can do well and hold the attention of the most distracted cinemagoer if Hollywood are to continue to invest in such passion projects; in 2049's case, something most of us never thought we'd see.

So yeah, I liked it. I liked it a lot. I'd go so far as to say it surpasses the first one (heresy they'll cry, but balls to them). The cast are excellent. The script is superb. The visuals are like nothing you've ever seen before. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch's score is literally out of this world (you'll know what I mean if you go see it - it's not 'music', it's something else that truly defies description).

If you didn't like the first one, give 2049 a chance. It's got a beating heart and soul that the 1982 film is curiously devoid of, no matter how much meaningful poetry Rutger Hauer might spout on that rain-soaked rooftop. Yes it's long. Yes it's a slow-burner. But it's one of the most mind-blowingly beautiful films you will ever see in a cinema, period. It should resonate with anyone who's lost a loved one, made a life-changing decision for the benefit of someone else, or found a box of 30-year old synthetic human bones under a dead tree on a protein farm in California, circa 2049.

Come on. We've all been there.