Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

directed by Denis Villeneuve
USA
163 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I held off on writing a review for this until I had my thoughts together because it deserves more than just the initial hype I felt after I had left the theater. It is absolutely worthy of that hype, but it's also worthy of more than the one-dimensional praise I would have written had I written this review straight away.

I'm not an expert on this storyline- I've never seen the original, and I've only read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? once. But 2049 makes the series immediately accessible to anyone who happens upon it whether they have intimate knowledge of the context or not, and if I know anything about the internet and elitist film fans, that's not going to go over well; people will claim the film is pandering and making itself too easy. But after the title card lays everything out in simple terms, the next 162 minutes speak for themselves: this isn't an "easy" film, but it doesn't rely on holding things just out of reach of the viewer to be a work of art like so many other art-house pictures do.

The more I watch movies where society crumbles and nature retakes human-made structures, the more I realize that that is an ideal apocalypse, not necessarily the most likely one. There's a shot in Blade Runner 2049 of the landscape of "new" Los Angeles from above that shows endless blocks of grimy concrete structures with a handful of thin veins of neon light running between them, and it's far from the film's most devastating picture of post-civilization Earth, but I think it sums up humanity's place on a mostly destroyed Earth: clinging to those neon veins, but ultimately slowly joining the blackened apartment blocks and mounds of trash.

The imagery used in Blade Runner 2049 is incomparable. The lengths it goes to show us a planet wrecked by the decadence of a very small number of its inhabitants and the flimsy lives lead by the last people who now have to live in a polluted, inhospitable world are staggering. The scenes in the wreck of Las Vegas, those surreal, hundred-foot-tall sculptures of naked women, silent and open, a picture of desirable youth and health that now serves to titillate no one but colonies of bees, are singularly some of the best images I've seen in film this decade.

Personally I was floored by the depiction of apocalypse-in-progress, but there is also a very strong undercurrent running through this film that asks us what personhood is and how an artificially-engineered being might view itself in a world still relatively unused to the idea of its having any kind of independence at all. The debate about whether or not robots can have feelings and deserve rights is almost secondary, and now instead we turn to questioning which robots deserve rights, which ones we will accept responsibility for creating and which ones we have to convince ourselves are insensate and deserve a life of slavery. The viewer also has to contend with the prospect of not just robot life but holographic life- something that's not really been explored yet, to my knowledge.

See this. See it if you don't know anything about Blade Runner. See it if you hate science fiction. See it if you think you might fall asleep during a movie that's over two and a half hours long (a valid point, but it feels closer to 90 minutes in actuality). See it now, because while I advocate that viewing a film on an iPad screen doesn't change its inherent value, the experience of sitting back in a plush seat while this movie's irradiated neon haze and physically oppressive bass score washes over you is something you only get once.