Jared Leto, Hollywood’s go-to guy for creepy, is perfect as Niander Wallace, founder of the replicant-manufacturing company that’s picked up where the last film’s Tyrell Corporation left off. It’s the kind of visual feast you’d expect from Villeneuve, whose “Arrival” was an alien-visitors masterpiece. In one of the few scenes I can mention - and certainly one of the best - the duo brawls in the dusty remains of a Las Vegas casino, throwing punches while a singing Elvis Presley hologram flickers on and off. Is Gosling appropriately soulful as the new hit man who’s increasingly uncomfortable with his job? Hell, yes. Is it satisfying to see the return of Ford as the hard-boiled Deckard? Absolutely. It faithfully upholds the architecture of Scott’s futuristic world but fails to conjure its wonderful strangeness: Recall Rutger Hauer’s replicant, Roy Batty, howling like a wolf as he chases Harrison Ford’s detective Rick Deckard, or the humble genetic designer (William Sanderson) who lives in an apartment full of misfit animatronic toys.Īnyhoo, there’s little else I can tell you about “Blade Runner 2049,” whose studio has, rather astoundingly, forbidden critics from revealing central details about main characters, anything about the plot and a couple of important cameos (although one has already been spoiled by a TV spot). Its central query - what does it mean to be human? - is hardly groundbreaking it’s been posed by countless artificial-intelligence films, many with more feeling. Like the 20-foot-tall ballerina holograms pirouetting through its decrepit Los Angeles streets, “Blade Runner 2049” is hauntingly beautiful, technologically stunning and low on substance. But seeing as it’s mostly about Ryan Gosling’s Officer K, a “blade runner” tasked with executing older-model replicants, pondering his own existence, I think I’d be wrong. I’d like to think this follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade Runner,” whose rainy noir aesthetic informed just about every sci-fi flick that came afterward, is a cautionary tale about a society that views women as disposable and/or as outright slaves. The shrieking, stomach-shredding death of Daryl Hannah’s “standard pleasure model” bot, Pris, runs a close second. All, it must be said, with artful cinematic relish.ĭirector Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”) is entirely faithful to the original, in which one of the most gorgeous and terrible scenes is of a stripper replicant (the film’s term for humanoid robots) cut down in a hail of bullets as she crashes dramatically through multiple plate-glass windows. If you have two X chromosomes, or know and like someone who does, “Blade Runner 2049” may not be the movie for you.įemale characters get the short end of the stick in this long-awaited dystopian sequel they are drowned, knifed in the stomach, shot point-blank in the head and, in one instance, simply winked out of existence with the stomp of a boot.
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