Blade Runner 2049
A sequel that had no right to work, and works by refusing to hurry.
Reviewed
Blade Runner 2049
Mark
The rare sequel that earns its length by using it for something.
The thing that makes Blade Runner 2049 work is that it is confident enough to be slow. Not slow as an affectation, but slow because the questions it is asking do not resolve at speed and it declines to pretend otherwise.
What it gets right
The original film’s central trick was to make you unsure whether the question “is he a replicant” mattered. This one goes further and makes the answer actively beside the point. K spends the film assembling an identity out of evidence, and the film’s cruelty is not in taking the evidence away. It is in showing that the identity was real regardless.
Visually it is doing something few expensive films attempt: using scale to make you feel small rather than impressed. The Las Vegas sequence in particular is enormous and completely empty, and the emptiness is the point.
Where it falls short
The Wallace material is the weakest strand. Jared Leto is given a philosophy rather than a character, and every scene he is in stops the film to explain itself. Cut those scenes and you lose some thematic scaffolding and gain fifteen minutes of a better film.
Joi is a harder case. The relationship is the emotional core, and the film is genuinely ambivalent about whether it is real. But the ambivalence is doing a lot of work to cover an idea it never quite commits to.
The verdict
Not perfect, and better for it. A sequel that respects the original enough to disagree with it.