Blade Runner 2049 (Dir Denis Villeneuve, 2h 43m)

How does one go about continuing a film that to many has a legendary, if not quasi-iconographic status among and impact upon science-fiction films? Over the last 31 years, the shadow of Ridley Scott's 1986 adaption of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner, has not only influenced everything from anime and manga to videogames, fashion and even fellow novellists, and Scott's cybernetic fingerprints can be seen in everything from William Gibson's Neuromancer to Square's equally iconic JRPG, Final Fantasy VII. More than three decades, on, however, Denis Villeneuve, director of the equally intelligent and thought provoking Arrival, has done the seemingly impossible. He's made a film that not only acts as a perfect continuation of Deckard's story but reassesses, re-frames and reinterprets many of the original's questions and concepts with three decades of hindsight, technological and indeed human development.

Nowhere is this more perfectly seen than in K, a replicant Blade Runner, (Ryan Gosling), tasked with retiring older model-on one job, retiring the rogue Sapper, who has retired to a simple farming life in a barren landscape. The introduction, once again text on black instantly subverts what we have expected from the Blade Runner world-outside the city. Indeed, 2049 openly steps outside the boundaries of the Los Angeles of 2049, showing the effects of the ecosystem collapse only hinted at by the opening text-if the original film was a critique, at least in part of the white flight to the suburbs, of overpopulation, then 2049 instantly critiques man's impact upon the earth. From here, the noirish tone once again returns, with a terse exchange giving way to violence, and Sapper's dispatch.
And here the mystery begins, with a body buried in the ground with a secret threatening to turn the shaky peace between humans and replicants slowly but surely questioning their servitude to chaos and revolt.

K is clearly a very different form of protagonist, especially when compared to Deckard-where the latter is a 21st Century repeat of the weather beaten gumshoe (and when Ford makes his triumphant return, he still feels like a man against the system he finds himself caught in, despite his self-imposed exile), K is, in all senses of the word, a good cop-clearly diligent, good at his job, and a hard worker-we see him undergo a Voight-Kampff early on. Yet, as the conspiracy surrounding the hidden body grows, he finds himself questioning his identity-Villeneuve's stroke of genius is to, in a word, reverse the key question at the centre of the original Blade Runner. Certainly, K is far more human, far more grounded than the dangerous if intelligent Roy Batty and his group of the original, and these are seen in his often touching scenes with Joi, his AI assistant and friend, with whom he clearly shares a strong bond.

As with the original film, Villeneuve asks a probing question-what does it mean to be human, even when you yourself are not a naturally born human? Can one truly love when one does not possess a soul? Moreover, Joi is an extension of concepts seen elsewhere in cinema and speculative fiction-it's easy to compare their relationship to that of Twombly and Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her, taken to the nth degree-Joi seeks to be human, to be able to touch and kiss and hold K, but it's also striking just how close AIs like Joi truly are to existing-as many have said before, the world of Blade Runner has come closer in many ways (flying cars aside), than Scott could ever have imagined. Yet, Villeneuve does not merely ape Scott, retreading with better visuals, crisper, more aggressive soundtrack, and an update in technology.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Jared Leto's chilling Niader Wallace-if Tyrell was an unfortunate Frankenstein, misjudging his creation then Wallace is something altogether Luciferian, like a cold and extremely calculating Steve Jobs, disturbing and clinical, comforting a newly born replicant before clinically dispatching her in a horrifying manner-obsessed with his product, and with the growth of humanity into the stars. Yet, there is also something else, more troublingly familiar in Wallace's approach, his belief that the evolution and continuing growth of humanity is dependent upon a subjugated workforce-there's echoes of white supremacists, something that Scott's original film hinted at in its imagery, frightening at the time, of an Asian-dominated USA-but Leto's character plays heavy upon the modern resurgence of that movement.

Villeneuve goes further than this, however-not only is the concept of being human explored through the character of K, in a way that Scott's work only hints at-after all, is an artificial human not a human, albeit without growth or memory, or is it a creature of an entirely different nature? Do replicants indeed deserve the rights of a normal human-indeed, their independence movement, something the film only briefly touches upon, seems to echo various movements of human suffrage-are the replicants, as the Tyrell motto goes, becoming more human than human? What, after all, in a 2017 increasingly reliant upon technology, where AIs are becoming increasingly common, and mechanisation may well threaten even highly skilled jobs in the next decade where, after this film, the viewer may go home to talk to Siri or Cortana or Alexa, does it mean to be human, or an AI or a clone or a post-human in 2017, or indeed 2049? 

Yet, at the heart of the film, with 31 years of visual effects, Villeneuve does one more thing previously thought impossible-he rivals Scott for visual spectacle-an entire desert city full of strange, Ozymandial naked statues, an even more visually stunning Los Angeles, almost overwhelming to the eye, and of course Joi, whose glitching appearance, including scenes where she morphs through K and "syncs" with another woman, is, in a word, jaw dropping, pushing visual effects to the edge as the original did in the 1980s. Villeneuve adds his own new iconography-falling snow, the desert, grey and decaying farmland, a woman foetal but fully grown, blinking into the world. This is the world of Blade Runner, 30 years on-more advanced, more beautiful, more frightening. Yet, as the original resembles, with a few notable exceptions, the world of today, so 2049 feels like a tantalising-and viable-glimpse of 32 years into our own future.

We've seen things that the 1980s couldn't believe. A sequel that answers questions and poses its own. I saw a film that lives up to the Blade Runner name and adds new visual splendour and arresting new ideas. All those moments will be rewatched, time and time again, building up in the popular imagination, like snow on snow. A legend...continued

Rating: Must See