All sequels should be so good. Director Denis Villeneuve, DP Roger Deakins, and screenwriter Hampton Fancher all bring their A-game to this immersively spectacular riff on Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi classic. Set 20 years into the future Scott et al imagined so vividly, BR49 also feels very 2024 in its preoccupations with artificial intelligence and authenticity, the unearthly delights of virtual escapism, and a ruthlessly policed divide between the privileged elite and the rest. What price reality in a techno world where Fake rules?
Ryan Gosling is K, a blade runner whose job is to track down and terminate rogue fellow replicants. His latest quarry leads to unexpected revelations: the teasing possibility of a new form, half man, half machine. The implications are frightening, but also revolutionary…
This is also a meta-textual film about the cinema. After all, what are movies but false memories implanted into our minds? “See Everything You Want to See… Hear Everything You Want to Hear,” promises the slogan for Joi (virtual sex partners), and this studio blockbuster does its best to deliver everything a Blade Runner fan could possibly want. It’s a gloomy noir romance, the ultimate Origin story, even a subversive Resistance fantasy, and at the same time it’s none of the above, a hollow-gram manufactured to take you out of your own skin for two and a half hours.
Blade Runner 2049 is the thinking person’s sci-fi event of the year.
Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
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