Film review: ‘Blade Runner’

For the entirety of its running time, you watch “Blade Runner: 2049” feeling the unenviable position of director Denis Villaneuve, who is trying to follow 1982’s “Blade Runner,” one of the most influential films ever. Villaneuve (with lots of help from cinematographer Roger Deakins) offers an often-breathtaking homage to the original, if not a groundbreaking new work.

The atmosphere in Los Angeles in 2049 is even more dour than it was in the 2019 of the earlier film. Smog thick as pulverized bone hangs in the air between a sea of grey housing blocks slivered with neon signs from entrancing brands stuck in time - Coca-Cola, Pan Am, Atari.

Cutting through the fogged dystopia is LAPD officer K (Ryan Gosling), a young replicant who retires rogue older models with a large gun and deadpan expression. In the first sequence of the film, he is almost rakish in his military brush cut and fur-lined trench coat while terminating the replicant Sapper Morton (the neckless Dave Bautista). As Sapper dies, he teases K: “You’ve never seen a miracle.”

K makes his rote report to LAPD Lt. Joshi (a sharp Robin Wright) and returns to his cement block apartment. Even though he is frequently slurred as a “skinner,” by humans, K has refined tastes - he listens to Frank Sinatra, reads Vladimir Nabokov and has an almost real relationship with Joi (Ana de Armas) his holographic pleasure bot. One of the several heart-stopping moments in “2049” occurs when Joi slips on a qipao dress like those memorably worn by Maggie Cheung in “In the Mood for Love.”

A new replicant-tracking case leads K down among the ash heaps and millionaires to the amber-lit lair of glaucous-eyed mastermind Niander Wallace (Jared Leto, now flagrantly taking roles based on opportunities to don villainous costuming). He is pharaonic in his aspirations - “We should own the stars” - as well as in his pyramidal décor and thirst for slaves. He wants K to determine for him whether some replicants can get pregnant, thus creating a more inexpensive pipeline for labor.

While Niander is insane in a creepy way, his ironically-named enforcer Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) is mad as thunder, the kind of woman who receives a manicure of rainbow opalescence while overseeing a savage drone attack. She mistrusts K instantly, calling him a bad dog and stalking him for the duration of the plot.

K continues on his way and finally reaches a green space, though it’s inside the bubble of a “memory designer” named Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri). She has access to the sun and the trees and tells her visitor that not all replicant memories are constructed. Believing a recollection he has of a carved wooden horse might be the real thing, K presses eastward, back in time, from colorless Los Angeles to the mustard gas yellow of Las Vegas.

There K steps through the hulls of wrecked pleasure domes to get to the Vintage Casino. It’s a radioactive zone full of booby-trapped and malfunctioning entertainment systems that generate faulty holograms into the darkness - glitchy projections of Elvis, Marilyn and Frank. Found working his way through a couple decades worth of Johnnie Walker Black is, at long last, Deckard (Harrison Ford, wearing no clothes more technologically advanced than a T-shirt), possibly the key to the replicant progeny question.

In spite of Gosling and Ford’s commendable gravitas, overall “2049” shows a regrettable decline in cast diversity - Edward James Olmos is onscreen but a moment - and in the sense that we’re invited into a pidgin-speaking community of misfits in the first “Blade Runner.”

Even though Ford’s Deckard is right there, another question lingers. Where is Rachael, so wonderfully played by Sean Young in the ‘80s? Villaneuve tries to collect pieces of her uncanny beauty where he can - but many of the best things in cinema exist now only in your memories.