Blade Runner 2049 (MA). Director: Denis Villeneuve. Starring: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, Jared Leto, Ana de Armas. 163 minutes
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), about a veteran cop in 2019 LA tasked with hunting and executing rogue androids known as replicants, is legitimately hailed as a masterpiece. A visionary tour de force, it delivered high-concept science fiction with the tone and structure of a hardboiled noir detective story. It also tackled, with piquant Judeo-Christian religious overtones, such heady philosophical themes as what it means to be human and the nature of memory, skewering humankind's perception of itself as the pinnacle of sentient existence.
Viewed with a critical rather than merely adulatory eye however, the film has its problems. And I'm not referring only about its at-times muddled story, which was muddled further by Scott's penchant for periodically meddling with it (there have been no fewer than five official cuts of the film from 1982 to 2007). Blade Runner's sidelining of the experiences of women and non-white characters, in favour of the experiences of white men, has been widely noted — including, recently and pithily, by feminist pop culture commentator Anita Sarkeesian.
Sarkeesian noted in particular the forceful manner in which the film's replicant-hunting hero Deckard (Ford) 'seduces' Rachael (Sean Young), herself an evolved model of replicant. The moment undermines what commentary the film otherwise makes on the place of women in this dystopian patriarchal society, notably through the characters Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), both replicants who have been put to the service of male sexuality, with whom we are asked to sympathise and who die agonisingly at Deckard's hand.
Fast-forward to 2017 and the latter-day sequel, Blade Runner 2049, replicates many of the achievements of its predecessor, but also its problems. Original screenwriter Hampton Francher returns, with directing duties filled by Quebecois filmmaker Villeneuve, whose 2016 film Arrival evidenced a nous for thoughtful science fiction. Here he brings to bear his skills at balancing detailed characterisation, heady ideas and compelling story with stunning visuals to create a rare sequel that expands upon the original in every conceivable way.
That includes the running time, which outdoes the original by some 45 minutes. But 2049 puts every one of those minutes to use, opening up new corners of this dilapidated and overcrowded Los Angeles in physical, technological and sociological terms. Visually it's as visionary today as Blade Runner was in 1982, not