Blade Runner 2049 Words Ilona Gaynor
The much-anticipated Blade Runner sequel offers a return to the richly layered and visually dense world of the original, but does the dystopianism of its universe move beyond that of our own? shifting dynamic between a “centred sense of subjectivity, and an autonomous one”, as argued by the cultural theorist Scott Bukatman. As an audience, we are in a constant state of disorientation, and the legitimacy of the images, objects, places and people we are presented with must be subjected to scrutiny. Not only is this required by the theme of the film – to distinguish what is real from what is artificial – but it also aligns with the characters’ motivations to determine the reality of their world. Eyes are central: in part because they are the metaphorical “window to the soul”, but also because in an artificially soulless world they are an externally manufactured, commodified object used to identify replicants. They are objects that are given (designed), as if by a deity, by Dr Eldon Tyrell, the head of the corporation responsible for the manufacture and sale of replicants. Eyes are also taken away through brute force by the very replicants Tyrell creates, as in the scene in which Batty cups Tyrell’s head in his hands, plunging his thumbs deep into his eye sockets and crushing his skull. The film’s recently released sequel, Blade Runner 2049, however, fails to move quite so fluidly between what is seen and what is not. Instead, it presents a more self-referential silhouette of Scott’s original vision – a world so densely cultivated and imaginatively fertile that it will be forever redrawn and reheard, like images permanently burnt onto the retina. Directed by Denis Villeneuve of Sicario and Arrival fame, Blade Runner 2049 launches us back into the murky elevations of Los Angeles 30 years after the events of the previous film. The plot
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centres around K (Ryan Gosling), a Blade Runner replicant tasked with “retiring” the Tyrell Corporation’s vestigial android models. These androids still exist after a worldwide “data blackout” that led to the firm’s bankruptcy and subsequent buyout by the Wallace Corporation. Along the way, K learns that a baby was born from a relationship between Deckard and Rachael, a discovery that forces K to question his perception of reality as he receives orders to search, investigate and destroy any evidence of the child’s existence before Wallace (Jared Leto) can exploit it. Science-fiction has always been predicated upon the idea that a world’s narrative will alter over time. Its films provide a reactive visual correspondence to profound shifts in actual political, philosophical and technological change, grounded in what Fredric Jameson, in his book Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, termed the “estrangement and renewal of our own reading of the present”. But unlike most contemporary examples of the genre, the original Blade Runner was a film that refused to explain itself – the viewer was forced to make constant inferences in order to understand its detailed world. Its brilliance, like that of Alien before it, lay in its dense visual layering – a symptom of postmodernism relayed through an inexhaustible and complex accumulation of surfaces and textures, and a spatial treatment that was both shocking and vast enough to be explored across repeated viewings. The tour de force of Blade Runner 2049, like that of Scott’s 1982 film, is its howling cityscape. It’s a cacophony of nostalgia and dystopian prophecy that
Joi, played by Ana de Armas, operates and should be read as an object throughout Blade Runner 2049. A holographic AI, she exists to satisfy the needs of others, serving as the symnbolic promise and failure of technology.
All photographs courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Despite its legacy in shaping the photographic and material literacy of the sci-fi world-building genre, Ridley Scott’s epic Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s android-hunting novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) required seven cuts over the course of 10 years before it was accepted as a masterpiece. Upon its original release in 1982, the film was critically dismissed as an exercise in meditating upon vast emptiness: a series of gazing images, layered under rationalising voiceovers delivered by the film’s protagonist Deckard (Harrison Ford). It was not until 1992, after Scott gave his approval, that a director’s cut was released in theatres. The final film print was stripped of both Deckard’s narrative descriptors and its happy ending, an absurd scene in which Deckard and the replicant Rachael (Sean Young) drive into the sunset. When interviewed about the director’s cut, Ford stated that “they haven’t put anything in, so it’s still an exercise in design”. Nevertheless, it was this reduction and conclusive reframing that launched Blade Runner to a level of critical acclaim that allowed it to sit comfortably alongside Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as an exemplary historical work in Hollywood’s extensive sci-fi repertoire. “If you could only see what I’ve seen through your eyes,” says the replicant Roy Batty in the original Blade Runner, speaking to an engineer at Eye Works, a genetic engineering lab. Blade Runner was as much about the areas that occupy our vision as it was about the inferred spaces out of sight. This has always been apparent in the film’s
captures a mood of melancholy which is to be endured and perhaps even enjoyed. Scott and Villeneuve may have conjured a vision of hell, but it would be one hell of a place to visit. Although K and Deckard are the chief protagonists of the films, the city itself is the more prominent figure, reducing the two Blade Runners to neon-silhouetted tour guides.
Blade Runner 2049 opens with a tracking shot that tails K’s self-flying car, moving unimpeded over the landscape. We see dead, chalky Los Angeles: now an earthly corpse whose land can only cultivate worms. These worms are the world’s protein source and the visual contrast at work is presumably meant as commentary
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on the film’s thematic emphasis on biological reproduction. At first, the terrain appears unusually flat – not unlike images from Soylent Green (1973) or Logan’s Run (1976). Then a slight camera shift reveals another dimension that offers possible clarity: the city still exists, but is buried below the crusted surface and compacted