The Box Office:
Blade Runner 2049, distributed in North America by Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. and overseas by Sony, arrives in theaters worldwide on the week of Oct. 6, 2017. If the $185 million budget figure is correct (it’s produced by Alcon Entertainment and Columbia among others), that’ll make it the biggest-budgeted R-rated movie ever, besting the $170m figure for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines way back in 2003. So, yeah, this one is going to need more than nostalgia in its corner. The good news is that early critical buzz (I’m writing this before I see the movie) is strong, and there is a decent chance that the Ryan Gosling/Harrison Ford movie may become the buzzy babysitter-friendly movie of the season.
There is usually room for one or two big October sensations, big-scale films with exorbitant budgets that play to adults which dominate the water-cooler and justify hiring a sitter for a movie night. In 2013, it was Gravity. In 2014, it was Gone Girl. In 2015, it was The Martian. The good news is that two of those films earned well over $600 million worldwide. The bad news is that the R-rated one earned “just” $166m domestic and $369m worldwide. But since the David Fincher/Gillian Flynn potboiler cost only $60m, it was a huge hit for Fox. But for Blade Runner 2049, $369m worldwide won’t be enough.
There is very little precedent for a movie like Blade Runner 2049, a 2.75-hour, R-rated sequel to a very old cult movie and box office flop starring a long-ago box office draw and an inconsistent younger movie star, earning as much as this one needs to in order to be profitable. Yes, Tron: Legacy made $400 million worldwide in 2010, but that was a PG-rated, Walt Disney sci-fi actioner opening right before Christmas and thus designated as the year-end event movie. Denis Villeneuve’s sequel, produced by Ridley Scott and co-starring original lead Harrison Ford, is a grim, very long and occasionally violent R-rated sci-fi drama. Yes, it will probably win Roger Deakins an Oscar for Best Cinematography, but I am very curious as to how it performs at the global box office.
The Review:
Blade Runner 2049 takes forever to go nowhere special. The picture, filled with intriguing sights, low-key performances and a few interesting ideas, is drawn out to the point of self-parody. Like the first Blade Runner, it masks a thin story and little in the way of momentum with towering visuals and self-seriousness. But the filmmaking world has changed in 35 years, and the mere ability to put incredible sights and sounds onscreen is no longer in itself a pass for deficiencies elsewhere. It is a true sequel to Blade Runner, warts and all. While it doesn’t require a firm knowledge of the original, I’m glad I watched it again (in “The Final Cut” form) 24 hours before seeing this one.
If you thought Ridley Scott’s original was a genre masterpiece, you’ll find much to appreciate here. But if you’re like me (and Roger Ebert, for what it’s worth) and think the first film offers a barebones story and paper-thin characters, you’ll be disappointed that the extra money and extra running time merely means a more drawn-out mystery with little urgency or momentum. The picture, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Denis Villeneuve, doesn’t so much expand the world as merely tell a story that happens to take place 30 years later. The screenplay, courtesy of Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, sets up some intriguing ideas about memory that get overpowered by some admittedly jaw-dropping production design and cinematography.
Things get off to a promising start, with Ryan Gosling’s Blade Runner discovering a dark secret that could theoretically start a war. As his boss (Robin Wright) correctly notes, such a reveal would change the very nature of how the artificial lifeforms (“Replicants”) are perceived at-large, so Gosling’s “K” is tasked with finding and eliminating all traces of said secret. And, that’s it. There are a few minor plot turns and the path does eventually lead to Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) while offering some unneeded answers to what transpired between the two installments. But the investigation moves at a snail’s pace, and quite frankly almost all the interesting reveals are dispersed in the first 80 minutes of the picture.
While Blade Runner 2049 is technically a hard-boiled detective picture, there are few interesting characters to be met and interrogated along the way, and too many scenes of our hero silently taking in his surroundings. One thing that made the first Blade Runner stand out was that, like Star Wars, the film didn’t obsess on its art direction and neither did its lived-in cast. For Deckard and Rachel, it was Tuesday. There is far more visual emphasis on the visuals this time out until we realize that this is a 90-minute detective story stretched out to 155 minutes (plus credits). For much of the movie, the only entertainment comes from Robin Wright and Sylvia Hoeks’ all too brief screen time.
What we do get in terms of story are some interesting details about what happened to the Replicant program after Blade Runner, as well as hints at some rather striking world events (like a blackout that wiped out all records and data up to that point in time). It does straddle the line between telling a self-contained story and setting up a theoretical long-form narrative, but it still feels like a prequel to a new franchise. While Harrison Ford doesn’t have a ton of screen time, he gives another soulful performance. He is seemingly willing to spend his remaining years revisiting his cinematic icons in mourning for the future they didn’t get.
The film tonally resembles the recent Ghost in the Shell redo, which at least was under two hours and offered a few notable action beats amid it’s “What makes a human? Can a machine have a soul?” pontificating. Blade Runner 2049 least has the courage of its convictions, as it’s R-rated without wallowing in gore and nudity. They could have easily gotten a PG-13 for this one, and it’s to all parties’ credit that they didn’t. I did like the textual examination of the value of implanted memories, as well as the real-world value of inherently artificial relationships like the one Gosling has with Ana de Armas.
I also appreciated the genuine sense of vertigo during the airborne sequences (I imagine this wo look glorious in IMAX), and (no spoilers) how the film answered at least one major question right away. For better or worse, this sequel to a 35-year old cult item is essentially for the fans. It tells a thin story in the most obtuse way possible, complete with occasional exposition dumps to make sure that audiences got the visual clues. It desperately needs more screen time for its supporting characters, as it’s at its best when Gosling has someone to talk to. Its best scene is a conversation between two (female) supporting characters, as it’s the only one where both participants aren’t mostly in the dark about the various goings-on.
The original Blade Runner had pioneering visuals, strong performances and superb special effects to compensate (or justify) thin characters and a thinner story. But the films that followed in its wake surpassed it. This faithful to a fault sequel can’t compete with the visual and narrative imagination of something like Dark City or Ex Machina. Blade Runner showed us things we wouldn’t believe, which in 1982 was enough to make it a must-see movie. But 35-years later, showing us the incredible is par for the course, meaning that even a visual delight must justify itself in terms of story and character. By following in the footsteps of its predecessor, Blade Runner 2049 is more machine than man.
