Blade Runner 2049

Before our screening of Blade Runner 2049 started, a request from director Denis Villeneuve was read out asking reviewers to not reveal any major plot spoilers so as to preserve the experience for cinemagoers. It was a laudable request, albeit a slightly surprising one given that the plot of Blade Runner 2049 is probably its least important aspect.

That’s not a criticism. In fact, in many ways, it’s high praise. After all, what’s the story of the original Blade Runner but about a cop tracking down androids on the run? And yet, it’s about so much more. It’s about immersing you in a dystopian, Hopper-esque, chiaroscuro world of eternal night and neon light, an urban and ethical maze that consumes Harrison Ford’s Deckard. He’s a Blade Runner running into the dark, catching only the briefest glimpses of the light at the end. It’s a film full of soul-touching experiences that never lose their power, so much so that you don't ever follow the plot of Blade Runner, you’ll simply feel it.

Villeneuve takes great care to create a similar sensory experience in the sequel. If Deckard chased the light through the dark, then 2049’s Blade Runner K (Ryan Gosling) moves slowly through a fog, always seeing the light but never knowing where it’s coming from. Roger Deakins' sfumato cinematography covers the sequel in a haze and Villeneuve makes sure it seeps into its every pore, clouding everything – structures, people, concepts and beliefs.

Buildings can be seen but not enough to specifically identify; K follows leads right in front of him that have consequences he cannot possibly foresee; concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, human and replicant, all sway hand-in-hand in the smoke until you can’t tell them apart. All the while sonorous music pulsates, vibrating, distorting everything even more.

It’s a stunning, overwhelming experience, flooding your senses in ways that few films ever could. In the hands of a lesser director, a Blade Runner sequel would have easily been overwhelmed itself, even suffocated by the original’s epic mythology and style. But Villeneuve succeeds in making 2049 feel distinct from Ridley Scott’s film without sacrificing aspects that made the original so powerful.

Well, almost.

Deep, deep down there is a feeling that there is something missing from the soul of 2049. Something that would only be flagged up after at least 100 questions on the Voight-Kampff test: that for all its visual and aural magnificence, it’s no... well, Blade Runner. At a certain point the fog we’ve been enveloped in lifts, just enough for K to fill in the puzzles of a plot the film never really wanted to emphasise. In a stark contrast to the original, not only are we given actual answers, they’re answers to questions no one felt the need to ask in the first place.

Such preoccupations prevent the film from reaching the heights of Blade Runner. There’s no true Rachael-esque character to shake K to his core. There’s no time for a Roy Batty figure – an Adam railing at his Frankenstein, a Christ dying for humanity’s sins – to imbue the film with raw emotion, to deliver that real moment of “tears in rain” transcendence.

Blade Runner 2049 is an undeniably stunning experience and a worthy sequel in so many ways. Ultimately though, it just doesn’t overwhelm your heart in the way that made the original so powerful.