BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017)

Blade Runner 2049 Poster — Images: Warner Bros. Pictures

“I had your job once – I was good at it.”

Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi
2h 44minR$

I didn’t think this would ever happen, and it may never happen again. A sequel to Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner—written, shot, cut, and projected onto actual movie theater screens. The movie I’ve seen more times than any other finally has a bigger world and a new story to explore and obsessively dissect. Want more neon-drenched Los Angeles? Want more dangerous Replicants? Want to be even more confused by the nature of reality and what it means to be alive? Now you can have it all.

After a short thirty-five years of patient waiting, Blade Runner 2049 is here.

In the original future-noir film, Harrison Ford played detective Rick Deckard, a gun-for-hire tasked with identifying and permanently retiring a group of Replicants—artificial humans manufactured by the Nexus Corporation—who had the nerve to ask their creator some uncomfortable questions. Set thirty years after the original, Blade Runner 2049 introduces a new rogue Replicant hunter, known simply as K. He’s on a mission to discover a lost history of the Replicants and their unexpected evolution. The dangerous truths he discovers could incite a civil war between the “real” humans and the Replicants that live and work beside them.

This all plays out in a beautifully devastated world where Atari is still a huge company, manufactured humans have VR girlfriends, and nobody can be sure if their pet dog is real.

Denis Villeneuve lands the job directing the sequel to the 1982 sci-fi masterpiece, and if you’ve seen Villeneuve’s previous film, Arrival, then you’ll know exactly why he was chosen. His grasp of the fantastical and ability to shoot a visually spectacular future suits the world of Blade Runner perfectly.

Blade Runner 2049 was a gift to be thankful for in 2017. With it’s mellow pace and looooong running time, Blade Runner 2049 isn’t everyone’s cup of tea—as evidenced by the disappointing box office numbers—but it’s my cup, no question. Between 1982 and October of last year, the closest thing we had to a second Blade Runner story was a point-and-click PC game. Seeing this unlikely sequel become a reality is kind of amazing.

I plan to spend a lot of time in the new radioactive Hades landscape of Blade Runner 2049.