‘Blade Runner 2049’ reinvents the future

It might take a minute or two, watching Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049, to get over the nagging notion that, any moment, he may burst into a little softshoe number, or crack wise. Though there’s a trace of a smirk somewhere behind that impassive face, playing LAPD Officer K, he’s not allowed much of a sense of humor or irony. He’s all business, assigned to hunt down remaining, rebellious Model 8 replicants in the near future.

Set 30 years after Ridley Scott’s dazzling sci-fi vision, Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t waste any time in setting up a near-future where, after a replicant rebellion leads to a nasty global blackout and environmental collapse, the world order is preserved — precariously — by a new successor to Dr. Eldon Tyrell, original creator of state-of-the-art replicants. He is Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), a literally sightless visionary who has helped feed Earth’s population through synthetic farming — though the workers on such farms, naturally, are synthetic themselves.

Officer K takes us into the downtown sleaze of future LA — after dealing with a secretive farmer played by Dave Bautista — and we learn that things have changed a little since 1982/2019, when the original Blade Runner came out/was set. There are skyscraper-sized holograms parading around, and K has a very valued virtual partner named Joi (Ana de Armas) whom he summons with a remote control, ready to serve him cocktails or slow-dance after a hard day blade running. We get just a taste of how the future might look a bit like now, with some tweaks — during one embrace with Joi, he’s interrupted by an incoming phone message, so she’s just frozen there, mid-pucker.

Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has an eye for indelible images — think of the floating ships in Arrival or the plastic-wrapped, walled-up corpses in Sicario — so he’s a good choice for taking Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner a step forward. Also onboard is original Blade Runner scripter Hampton Fancher, so we feel the story is at least in the hands of someone deeply committed to its nuances.

And this is good, because one thing people tend to forget about the original Blade Runner is that it was sloggy in parts, caught up in its own gloomy, neo-noir look and feel. Watching and rewatching it dozens of times, we forget that it was critically panned upon release, perhaps because of a yawn-inducing voiceover from Harrison Ford, but also because of a trudging pace, enlivened by intermittent bursts of replicant violence.

Blade Runner 2049 clocks in at an even longer 163 minutes, but one feels there is a solid enough payoff in sticking around. For once, this is a very worthy sequel to an original, even if it took 35 years to get here. Echoing some of the same visual cues — the golden-shimmery Tyrell-type digs of Niander Wallace, the echoey concrete tenement halls bisected by sweeping spotlights, the weird neon-noir LA streets, now beset by snowflakes as well as hookers with clear plastic umbrellas — it also manages to raise some of the same existential questions, even deepen them.

Those questions, present first in Philip K. Dick’s source novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), dwell on what makes us human, and whether memories are reliable, not to mention the morality of AI and its likely use as slave labor. These topics are more timely than ever, with Silicon Valley moguls like Elon Musk warning that artificial intelligence is, in fact, a self-made trap set to destroy and replace us, in that order.

Also onboard is Harrison Ford returning as Rick Deckard, last seen speeding out of LA and the blade runner game with replicant partner Rachel (Sean Young) by his side. As always, it’s refreshing to see Ford resurrecting an iconic character, one that’s imbedded in our memories, falsely or not. He and Gosling raise the game here, especially in their scenes together (particularly one set in a future radioactive Las Vegas that’s gauzed in golden dust, which can’t help reminding us of a recent mass shooting there). Young, too, turns up in one of those is-it-CGI-or-Memorex? moments that’s become more and more a part of today’s movie-going experience. (It also fits in well with Blade Runner’s retro-future-nostalgia feel.)

There are remarkable images, such as the “birth” of a new replicant in Wallace’s headquarters, slipping out of a plastic bag onto the floor with a wet glop. Another great scene picking up on a theme from the original takes place in the lab of Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), who’s largely responsible for designing the implanted “memories” of new replicants. Watching her construct a virtual children’s birthday cake blowout with a strange, camera-like device holds some of the same edge-technology wonder we felt watching Deckard tell a computer to “enhance” a photograph back in 1982. There are scenes of bald children replicants destined to a factory existence, slaving over electronic parts; elsewhere, massive nude female sculptures emphasize the daunting, eerie scale of a future laid waste. If nothing else, it must have been a kick to design the look of Blade Runner 2049.

Look for Sylvia Hoeks as a lethal Wallace employee, and Robin Wright as Officer K’s hard-drinking, old-school LAPD boss. Small character roles — like Barkhad Abdi (Captain Philips) as a sly trader of info — bring this canvas to believable life.

The new Blade Runner offers a few sly twists, too, that play around with our memories of the original. But it’s on the human level — or not-always-human level — that Villenueve’s vision works best: the confrontations between beings now running along an edge of technology overlooking a new horizon. “Replicants are like any other machine,” Deckard once said. “They’re either a benefit or a hazard.” Blade Runner 2049 suggests that such black and white distinctions will no longer suffice.