Blade runner 2049 movie12/24/2022 ![]() Yet, against my better judgement, I have to say that an environmentally devastated world is one that can still look good. Blade Runner 2049 depicts a world that is meant to be only 32 years away and things are not going well: the earth’s eco system has collapsed. How can such devastation possibly be this gripping?Īnd devastating it is. We are now in the epoch of the Anthropocene, a time defined by our rampant destruction of planet Earth. In other words, humans are everywhere and in everything. And, dreadfully distinct /Īgainst the dark, a tall white fountain played.īut, as is apt for the riddle within an enigma that is Blade Runner 2049, Pale Fire isn’t just the title of a novel it’s also the title of Nabokov’s fictional protagonist’s poem, which in turn is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens: ‘The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.’ So: if I understand correctly, it’s not just replicants who behave like humans: nature can steal, too. But the writers of the film, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, go a step further: K’s sanity – or at least his ability to function as a robot killer – is tested by his being able to echo and quote Nabokov’s puzzling lines:Ĭells interlinked within cells interlinked / Within one stem. Like Blade Runner 2049, it, too, is about a man who has lost a daughter. Throughout the film we hear snatches of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (1936), which begs the question: who is the wolf here? Who is the boy? Who is impersonating whom? Signification swirls through these radioactive streets like a cyclone.Īnother reference: Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 poem-within-a-novel Pale Fire. ![]() But the use of music is, perhaps surprisingly, playful, too. ![]() From Elvis Presley and Sinatra to Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s lush soundtrack, a great song is solace in a world gone wrong, but orchestral strings can intimate doom like nothing else. To answer the last question: it does, actually, a lot. ![]() Questions hover as persistently as wasps at a picnic: who owns the past? What can we do to avert the apocalypse? Why are we killing the environment? How does gender define us? Can music help? Ridley Scott’s first, great Blade Runner (1982) also makes constant, sly appearances, from origami to generic Asian food stalls and the sharp tailoring of a replicant’s dress. But a dizzying range of sonic and visual references drift in and out of its gorgeous surfaces: it made me think of the artist John Martin’s 19th century apocalyptic landscapes and Matthew Barney’s wild human contortions, Andrei Tarkovsky’s heartbroken dystopias and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), when François Truffaut, playing a scientist, examines brand new, 40-year-old aeroplanes in a dust storm in the desert and realizes that time is not everything it’s cracked up to be. And it doesn’t fail.ĭenis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049, 2017, film stillīlade Runner 2049 recalls the grandeur of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and, in many ways, it shares its concerns: the plight of workers, love, and what it means to be human (hint: it’s not all about biology). We don’t know what, precisely, he’s getting at, but the sentence hovers like a promise of what we’re about to see. In the opening scene, a burly, bespectacled replicant snarls just before being ‘retired’ (and I don’t mean moving to Florida) that his murderer – the new blade runner ‘K’ played by Ryan Gosling – has ‘never seen a miracle’. Speaking of which, Frank Sinatra returns from the dead, singing ‘One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)’ to a replicant fixing himself a drink, waited on by a shape-shifting hologram with a penchant for Nabokov. To describe Blade Runner 2049 as ‘atmospheric’ is like saying Beethoven was good at tunes. The most beautiful snow you’ve ever seen drifts from a tortured sky cityscapes draped in a mordant fog are softly penetrated by flying cars that glisten like pearls and then morph into vultures. From close-ups of a tattooed eyeball, to an assassin’s hand covered in bees to vistas so vast that human vision isn’t enough, cinematographer Roger Deakins creates astonishing images. Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is nearly three hours long and only has two jokes, but somehow, you don’t mind. Never mind what it means (or, at least, worry about it later).
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