Official trailer
Blade Runner 2049 is visually gorgeous and narratively inert. Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins built some of the most stunning images in recent science fiction cinema, the orange desolation of post-collapse Las Vegas, the gray protein farms extending to the horizon, the neon rain of Los Angeles. As a series of photographs it would be a masterpiece. As a film it asks for patience that the story doesn’t earn.
The 5 is an honest accounting of the gap between the visual achievement and the narrative achievement, and the frustration of watching extraordinary craft in service of a story that doesn’t match it. I wanted to love this film, and for long stretches I sat admiring it without feeling much of anything. Every frame could hang on a wall. The story underneath those frames moves like it’s afraid of arriving anywhere, and by the end my patience had run out even though my eyes were still having a wonderful time.
What Deakins Did
Roger Deakins won his first Academy Award for this film after having been nominated thirteen times previously, and the recognition was correct. The cinematography of 2049 works at a level that transcends craft into something closer to visual philosophy. Each environment has its own color palette that communicates character, the warm amber of Sapper’s protein farm, the cold blue-white of the LAPD headquarters, the orange hell of Las Vegas, the gray-green of the offshore platform.
That Oscar was long overdue, and I’d give the Las Vegas sequences a 10 on their own. If the whole film had the pull of those orange ruins, we’d be talking about a very different rating.
These are information. You know something about each location’s relationship to the film’s themes from its visual tone before a character speaks. The film’s production design is doing the script’s job, communicating what each place means instead of just what it looks like. That the cinematography is so good is both the film’s greatest achievement and part of its structural problem: beautiful images can take a slow narrative further than a slow narrative deserves to travel.
The Central Problem
The mystery at the film’s center, whether K is a special replicant, whether his implanted memory is real, is drawn out beyond its structural weight. By the time the answer arrives, the film has withheld it for so long that the revelation lands with less force than it should. The pacing is Villeneuve in his most self-indulgent tone: deliberate to the point where deliberateness becomes its own subject.
The original Blade Runner justified its slow pace through two things: the relentless visual density of Scott’s world building, which made each slow passage feel populated with meaning, and Roy Batty’s arc. That gave the film a second protagonist whose urgency supplemented Deckard’s cynicism. 2049 has the visual density. It lacks the second urgent thread. K’s story is meditative by design. That means the pacing has nothing to push against.
Ryan Gosling is a skilled actor giving a performance designed to communicate almost nothing for most of the film. That’s right for a character whose interiority is in question and taxing for the audience watching him. The performance is correct, and I respect it, but two and a half hours of correct blankness wore me down, and the film lost me.
What Works
The Joi relationship is the film’s most interesting element and its most underexplored one.
An AI playing at being human falling in love with a replicant playing at being human, two constructed consciousnesses performing authenticity for each other, has more philosophical weight than most of what the plot provides. Ana de Armas gives Joi a quality of presence that makes the relationship believable against all structural odds. When she’s killed, the loss lands, and it’s the one moment in the film that got to me.
Jared Leto’s Niander Wallace is the film’s most significant casting problem. He’s playing the visionary-creator-as-god figure the film needs as a real threat and an interesting idea. What he delivers is an affected performance that advertises its own artfulness and tells me nothing about the character. Every scene with him slows the film further, and I’d have trimmed half of them without losing a thing.
Is Blade Runner 2049 worth watching?
Blade Runner 2049 gets a 5 as a film of dazzling visual achievement and insufficient narrative discipline. The cinematography deserves every award it received, and the Joi relationship is the most honest thing in it. The pacing asks for patience it hasn’t justified, and Leto drags down every scene he’s in. I rate the original a 7 and I’d much sooner rewatch it, because it gave me a story to go with the pictures.
