Blade Runner 2049: A Review

For the life of me, I still can't understand why they made a sequel to Blade Runner. If there was ever a classic movie that didn't need a sequel, that would be it because making a sequel could only ruin the allure and mystique of the original. Blade Runner is an outright classic that raises a lot of interesting questions about the nature of life and humanity that left the audience to figure out the answers themselves. What could really be gained from a sequel? What would it even be about? Well, the team behind Blade Runner 2049 seem to have taken the path of not really making a sequel at all, but more of an original story that happens to take place in the same universe as the first movie with a few tangential connections. That was probably the right move from a narrative standpoint, but it also plays into what I feel is the film's greatest weakness. Which is that it never really justifies its own existence.


We'll get to that but here's the basic setup for the plot. It's thirty or so years after the original Blade Runner and Ryan Gosling is K, a replicant and blade runner aware of his own artificial nature. While on a routine assignment retiring another rogue replicant, K uncovers evidence that sometime in the past a replicant woman was able to conceive a child and bring it to term, something that should be impossible for the artificial lifeforms. The only clue K has to the child's whereabouts is a loose connection to Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), protagonist of the first film who disappeared after the events portrayed there and unseen since. K is assigned to find Deckard and the replicant child and eliminate both, but meanwhile Jared Leto as the head of the replicant-making company is having K followed so that he can find the child first and reverse engineer breeding into all the replicants from it.

A giant hologram propositions K (Ryan Gosling).

The plot in and of itself is pretty engaging, and director Denis Villeneuve has made enough twisty thrillers to keep the audience on their toes. But my problem with it its that it feels like the opposite of what the original Blade Runner did. Many people forget but the original had a very simple plot, it's really just a sci-fi fugitive story, but with deep, well-rounded characters and many interesting ideas raised that the audience had time to chew on while taking in the gorgeous production design and soundtrack by Vangelis. In contrast, 2049 plays out much more like a conventional noir mystery drama, with subplots and red herrings. The story has taken precedence over the ideas. That's not a bad thing and the story itself is well-told, it just feels strange in comparison to the original and lacks that film's moral ambiguity. Also, much like a noir mystery, the plot itself doesn't make complete sense when the whole thing is over.

That choice of narrative structure also shortchanges a lot of the very good actors in the cast. Most of them give good enough performances but never really evolve beyond their specific functions in the story either, like Robin Wright as K's superior at the police station. This is standard for this kind of detective story where it's the detective themselves who gets the most focus and character development over the course of the story. Which follows through here as Gosling gives a good subdued performance as K, portraying his tension at accepting his replicant nature and wishing he could be something more. His subplot with Ana de Armas as K's holographic girlfriend is one of the film's better subplots, even if it has no actual bearing on the plot, and the two actors have excellent chemistry. Harrison Ford doesn't quite feel like the same Deckard from the original but puts in a good turn all the same, totally different from the older Han Solo we saw in The Force Awakens. On the opposite side, Jared Leto stands out like a sore thumb. His corporate overlord with a god complex couldn't be more cliche and uninspired if he tried and his rote mad scientist routine feels out of place with the rest of the movie. Between this and Suicide Squad, why did we think this guy was a good actor?

Deckard (Harrison Ford) confronts an intruder.

While 2049 can't match the original in character or intellectual depth, it does match it in production design. Which is fitting since it seems like every sci-fi movie since 1982 has been ripping off Blade Runner's look. This film doesn't copy the original so much as take it to the next logical step, building off what we saw in Ridley Scott's classic to see how that world might have progressed. The giant holograms in particular feel like an eerie prediction of something we might see in a couple of years. The soundtrack is a mixed bag. It's a Hans Zimmer score so it has a few too many of his Inception "BWAMS!", but when it's aping the Vangelis score of the original it matches the film's tone perfectly.

I'm still not sure why this movie exists. It's actually very good in many respects but it never really gives me a reason it needed to be made. The film doesn't add anything to the original Blade Runner, it doesn't delve very deeply into its own ideas, and it doesn't answer any of the lingering questions. Ultimately, I think it's a film worth seeing at least once. It's a well-made cyberpunk story if nothing else and maybe you'll find more in it than I did. But as an equal to its predecessor? Not even close.

Final Score: 4/5

And thank god they didn't give us an answer to whether Deckard was a replicant or not!