RogerBW's Blog

2017 SF, dir. Denis Villeneuve, Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford; IMDb / allmovie. Turns out slaves may think they're people.

This production felt to me like the collision of two ideas: a thoroughgoing remake of the original film, only with modern bankable actors, and a sequel to that film fed by thirty years of obsession over its tiniest details; but in the end it doesn't handle either terribly well.

On the one hand, we have not-Deckard ("K"), a blade runner whose job is to hunt down replicants who aren't causing any trouble. (But this time he is, explicitly, a replicant himself.) He finds out some things, and they lead to some more things, and he finds himself opposed to not-Tyrell.

On the other hand, we find out "what happened" to Deckard and Rachael. And it's grim and depressing and is obviously going to lead to a replicant revolution, but that's not interesting enough to get a film made about it.

Women? Women are hookers with hearts of gold, or slaves in cages, or sexless bosses, or murderbitches, or eye-candy. Woo, variation. Most of them are both passive and victims. Two of them are called "Joi" and "Luv".

I don't find Ryan Gosling particularly appealing, but he did a decent job as K, following a trail of clues while it becomes increasingly clear that someone from not-Tyrell is out to kill him. Then at about the two-thirds mark Harrison Ford comes in to take over (after doing a very clichéd Bad Dad, oh I had to abandon my kid and never be seen again, it was for their own safety), and K's story stops dead. (Sean Young was used as an acting coach for her body double; you couldn't have an (ick) old woman on the screen. She was 57 when this was being made. Ford was 74.)

You have two choices with the soundtrack for a sequel to a film with a distinctive and well-known soundtrack: do something original inspired by the first one, or rip off all the stings and add pastiche around them. That latter didn't work well in The Machine and it doesn't work here. (Nobody seems to have thought of asking Vangelis back, though he was still working at the time.)

We get not one but three separate scenes in which someone directs someone or something else to move a picture about, because we all remember the "enhance" scene from the original. But we don't get anyone in the role of a Roy Batty. Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) ends up trying to do that job (after a false start in which she's implied to be a candidate for K's Rachael), but while she's effective as a conscienceless killer, she doesn't have – none of the replicants does – any of the joy in life which characterised the replicants from the original.

And the "deep philosophy" is all basically from the remake strand of the plot, because we've seen it before. Are replicants people? Well yeah, obviously. They've just been badly indoctrinated to think they aren't. (And if you were growing them from scratch with the intent of making them disposable labour, why would you even include reproductive organs, with all the attendant complications?) Is Deckard a replicant? (Which I always thought was more interesting as a question than as an answer.) There are hints here, but carefully arranged to convey no actual information.

If you have an unsupervised orphanarium like the one we see, why do you need to make replicants for disposable labour at all? This is a crapsack world, just offer people a few bucks and they'll happily work at your dangerous jobs.

Trying to track down some unregistered children, K finds records of a boy and a girl with identical genetic codes. He doesn't, and the rest of the film doesn't, perceive anything even slightly odd about that.

K finally kills Luv. Not-Tyrell is meant to be a huge corporation; why don't they sent ten more after him? Why didn't they send ten to start with? Why did they fire missiles, possibly damaging the guy they wanted to capture, rather than just sending in 2,000 replicant ninjas [sic]?

Ach, I just couldn't come anywhere close to getting absorbed in this. There were too many big and small problems, and the film's more interested in posing questions than in working through any implications. Visually, yeah, visually it's pretty good, though Villeneuve's love of heavy colour grading is distracting as always.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.