Blade Runner 2049

(Warning: contains spoilers about Blade Runner, and Blade Runner 2049)

Writing a film review is a strange and interesting process.  Some films lend themselves very easily to a review.  By the time I’ve travelled home from the cinema, the review is pretty much in my head, fully formed, just waiting to get written down.  I find this has been particularly true of bad films, where it’s like my brain needs the earliest opportunity to expel the poison from its system. 

I’ve previously likened films to food, where some are candyfloss – delicious, insubstantial and of no nutritional value whatsoever.  But still a good experience.  Others are steak – satisfying  and something to get your teeth properly into, though not necessarily something you want all of the time.  Blade Runner 2049 has been a properly meaty film.  It’s taken a while to write the review for a couple of reasons – 1. After steak you need a while to sit and digest.  2.  I’m still not entirely sure what I’ve seen.

Is this just what all film posters look like now?

Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner.  Set 30 years after the original, there has been some kind of blackout which has wiped the details of all replicants and their locations.  K (Ryan Gosling) is a Blade Runner - the never really explained term used to describe those who hunt down replicants and kill them.  He himself is a newer model replicant, but is tasked with finding older replicant models and “retiring” them.  He discovers the remains of a replicant.  Closer inspection suggests that this replicant was once pregnant – it was previously believed that replicants could not reproduce (as an ongoing argument about how they as “artificial humans” should be considered as less than “real humans”).  K is given the task of investigating, and destroying any evidence about the child (plus the actual child if necessary).  Mission ensues.
Written by Hampton Fancher (who co-wrote the screenplay of the original Blade Runner) and Michael Green (who is racking up an impressive list of sci-fi credits including American Gods, Logan, Alien: Covenant), and directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), the result is faithful to the noir, gloom, and neon artifice of the 1982 original, while also not alienating those who come to the sequel first.   

This film is fascinating, because it can be viewed and interpreted in a myriad of different ways.  There are compelling arguments to say that it’s a pro-feminist film, and equally compelling arguments to say that it’s very anti-feminist.  Discussions about what’s real and what’s artificial are rife.  Comments about who knows what, and when, and how.  Interpretations of what it is to be alive, and the permutations of what that means.  It is vast and intimate, unknowable and personal, specific and vague.  In the hours following my first viewing of the film, I was having very complicated discussions with friends about different interpretations of what we’d all seen, knowing that in 10 years time the same topic could come up, and I’d think 100 different things.  There is much to savour, and much to digest.

First of all, as previously mentioned, you don’t need to have a great understanding of the original to appreciate the sequel.  I saw this film with my husband, who has watched Blade Runner a great many times and insists on quoting bits of it, repeatedly, and out of context.  Conversely, I have seen it once, and rarely understand why he shouts “TOO BAD SHE WON’T LIVE” when I least expect it.  We both think Blade Runner 2049 is one of the best films of the year.  For those who have seen the original, the sequel is faithful to it but subverts it subtly and frequently throughout.  The origami unicorns are replaced by wooden horses.  The Voight-Kampff tests now actively discourage authentic human responses.

Secondly, for me the oddest subversion is that the things that had the most emotional resonance…weren’t real…   So, K has a girlfriend, Joi (Ana de Armas), who is an upgraded hologram who travels with him.  We see K upload her, and upgrade her.  We see her glitch, and get interrupted by other technology.  She is partially see-through, and frequently reminds K that she is not real.  But when her emitter is destroyed it is a character death, it is shocking, and it is the most upsetting moment of the film.  The relationship between K and Joi is real to them, and real to us.  But it’s also completely and utterly not real.

Deckard (Harrison Ford) comes face to face with Rachael (Sean Young), the replicant he fell in love with.  He is visibly moved to see her, more so because she’d died some years before.  He speaks of the romance of their first encounter – the film goes to great pains to point out that those memories aren’t real either.

Ana Stelline creates memories and dreams for people.  They are things of intricate joy and beauty, and they evoke profound emotional responses from all who see them.  They’re not real.

The characters that we know most about and respond most to – K, Joi, Deckard, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) – are artificial.  The characters we believe to be “real humans”, such as Wallace (Jared Leto) are the ones who seem most inhuman.  That suggests that “humanity” can be artificially created, and I’m not sure I believe that, and yet…I find myself moved by a film, which in its very essence isn’t real.  WHAT DOES ANYTHING MEAN!?!

Thirdly, it would be remiss of me to ignore the feminism argument.  How does Blade Runner 2049 depict and treat women?  Good question.  The arguments that say it is anti-feminist are compelling – this is a film directed by a man, screenwritten by men, predominantly produced by men.  The female characters are mainly sex objects created for men and overtly so.  A woman is “born” and killed entirely because she’s not pregnant, and therefore worthless.  Joi is subject to the whims of K – she acts the way he wants her to act, dresses the way he wants her to dress.  He has bought her to be like that.  She has sex with him via another woman – Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), in a scene oddly reminiscent of Ghost – that woman is also bought and paid for.  There is a crumbling society where there is evidence of giant female sculptures, all naked, all fetishized, all submissive.  Replicants like Luv carry out the whims of people like Wallace because they literally cannot do anything else.  The film makes the point that Lt Joshi is also a sexual creature – propositioning K, and being turned down.  There is no suggestion that there is a male version of Joi for her.  So there’s a lot there that’s troubling.  However…

Blade Runner 2049 is a dystopian world, and it is evident that it is wrong and sick.  It is a place where no one is happy, content or satisfied.  It is not a world to aspire to.  Of the many people I know who have seen this film, not one is desperate to live there.  Therefore we can reason that, likewise, its treatment of women is not to be emulated.  If the argument is that the film is pro-men anti-women, who is the male character who is “winning”, and we should aspire to be?  Deckard – in seclusion, grieving, hunted?  K – who has no idea what’s real anymore, and his only raison d’ệtre is to kill his own kind?  Wallace – blind, deluded, isolated?  No thank you very much.

I don't really want to live here, thank you.

There are significantly more female characters than males.  Those female characters are notably more detailed, interesting and complex than the males.  Consider Mariette – on one hand, she is a prostitute who is paid to betray K.  She is also a significant figure in the resistance, not only betrays K but saves him, and is the only one not put off by his Blade Runner reputation. 

Consider Lt Joshi – she is a woman in a position of power, who isn’t afraid to ask for what she wants.  In a world which is male dominated, that really stands out.

The main argument for women as commodities for reproduction alone is voiced by Wallace, who is the villain of the film.  We aren’t supposed to agree with what he says.

Admittedly, a few small tweaks here and there would have improved some of the criticism.  It’s a very heteronormative film (although the dystopia argument could come into play here again, I suppose), and a few more women behind the camera wouldn’t go amiss.  There is an argument to say it’s anti-women, but there’s also one to say it’s anti-men. 

But that it manages to cram so much into 2 hours 44 minutes (admittedly long, but not bloated.  It’s a surprisingly lean film), while remaining faithful to the original, and introducing an old world to a new generation.  In a lot of ways, it’s nothing short of a miracle.

But then again,  

…you’ve never seen a miracle.     

Additional thoughts, questions, concerns:

1.  What was the point of Wallace and where did he go in the end?

2.  Who in the film is very definitely a human?

3.  If the film were to go on another 5 minutes, or 5 days, what would happen next?
 

Passengers

(Warning: contains spoilers for Passengers)

If this picture doesn't go here, the thumbnail for the link will be of T2 which would be very confusing.

I wish trailers could develop the art of showing less.  Over the past year (in particular, for some reason), I've seen a joke, an action sequence, a reveal that would have packed a huge punch if I had been watching it "fresh" for the first time, rather than for the 15th because of trailers.  Here are three examples off the top of my head:

1.  Doctor Strange
Chiwetel Ejiofor's character gives Benedict Cumberbatch's a piece of paper with an unfamiliar word on it. 
"Is this my mantra?" wonders Cumberbatch. 
"No," says Ejiofor "it's the Wifi password.  We're not barbarians."
Nice line the first time.  Diminishing returns.

2.  Trainspotting 2
Spud appears to fall off a high rise building in Edinburgh, before being caught by Renton just before he hits the ground.

What I assume to be a beautiful moment of tension, which I'm now anticipating.

3.  Passengers
Jennifer Lawrence tells Michael Sheen that she and Chris Pratt are on a date.  The camera pans down to show that he is an android, human from the waist up, metal from the waist down.

I mention this, because Sheen's entrance in the film is a surprise and confusion.  Pratt's character, Jim, wakes up on the Avalon, a spaceship on a 120-year mission to reach Homestead II where the 5000 passengers and 247 crew will set up their new home.  A computer glitch leads to Jim's hibernation pod awakening him.  He realises he is 30 years into the journey, no one else is awake, and he has no way of going back to sleep.  In his befuddled state he wanders round this state of the art deck seeing no one until he catches sight of Arthur (Sheen), bartending to nobody.  Conversation ensues, and Arthur doesn't give any clues that the situation is anything less than normal.  Until he goes to pour Jim a drink, and we (and Jim) realise that Arthur is not human.  That would have been a great reveal, had the trailers not told me.
"Just don't watch trailers, then" is the obvious solution.  The problem is that trailers are everywhere.  I saw the trailer for this film, for example, during advert breaks on television, before YouTube videos downloaded, at the cinema waiting for other films to start, on giant screens in the middle of city centres.  It was a trailer that was impossible for me to miss.  Conversely, it also made the film intriguing enough that I wanted to watch it.  No win situation.
The flip of this is that I saw the trailer for La La Land repeatedly since August.  I knew it excited me, I knew wanted to see it, I hadn't a clue what it was about. 
Conclusions:
1.  It is possible to give a spoiler free gist of a film to whet the appetite.
2.  For some reason, the majority of film companies don't like this approach.

Back to Passengers.  I'll be honest, I liked this film a lot more than I was expecting to.  The main criticism I had heard about it was it's ethical dilemma, and I was unsure what to make of it myself.  Jim, after a year by himself, happens upon the hibernation pod of Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence).  He likes the look of her, reads her files and profiles, and then spends a considerable amount of time wrestling with the decision of whether to wake her too and condemn her to the same lonely death as him.  It's not a decision taken lightly, the tipping point coming when Jim finds himself considering suicide.  It is not good for man to be alone.  He wakes her.  I understand that there's been some criticism of this decision.  There are arguments that it's a "bit stalkery" at best, or another example of a man exerting his authority over a passive woman.  I don't think it's an issue because I think the film resolves it. 

Aurora and Jim have a really good time together, until she discovers what he has done and goes berserk.  She challenges what he has done, physically attacks him, and refuses to engage with him further, thus condemning him back to his lonely life.  And for Jim's part?  He agrees with her.  He accepts her response.  He doesn't even try to explain what he's done.  He knows it was - for want of a better phrase - an assault, and not her choice.  He knows he was wrong.  Horrible circumstances led him to make a horrible choice, which has horrible consequences for her - but I think this film and these characters come to resolution about this, which does not excuse his actions.

Yeah, the reason is that you woke her up.
Idiot.

Overall, it's an interesting film and not (in my opinion) deserving of the criticism it got.  It poses a number of interesting questions and ideas - what would you do in similar circumstances, how AI is almost human (but not quite), can anything actually replace human interaction?  Worth seeing, and (as with most space films) worth seeing on a big screen.


Additional thoughts, comments and questions.
1.  The division in passenger types is an interesting gimmick.  Jim is a discounted passenger who can have basic amenities because he has paid for a lower ticket.  Even in his year by himself, he cannot access any of the higher class passenger amenities.

2.  The spaceship malfunctions and tried to kill them.  This seems to happen a lot with spaceships in films.  Maybe we stay on Earth, people.

3.  How well would any of us do if left without company for a year.  Not very well, according to this study:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts

Arrival

(Warning: contains spoilers for Arrival.  And The Sixth Sense)

Every so often, a film/book/television programme/advert is released and, coincidentally, its themes and messages chime with whatever is going on in the world.  John Lewis, in an attempt to make a nice advert about some trampolining animals, accidentally created a message analogous to the Trump/Clinton presidential campaign.  Sometimes film makers (or people creating their own different kinds of art) are a little more prescient and what they portray comes to pass in some way (example: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/23/back-to-the-future-writer-bad-guy-biff-was-based-on-donald-trump).

Arrival is a film I saw less than a week after the unfolding horror of Donald Trump becoming President-Elect of the United States.  And although its themes and messages are entirely coincidental, they resonate particularly because of global events.

Basic plot:  Spaceships appear over 12 cities across the world.  They just hang there.  But once every 18 hours, a small hatch opens and access is granted to whatever is inside.  Amy Adams (through means that are more plausible in the film) is an expert linguist and is recruited by the military to come and help them make sense of what’s going on.  They recruit Jeremy Renner too, for good measure, because he’s a theoretical physicist.  The film becomes an interesting debate on how we communicate in the absence of a common language.   

It takes a long time for Amy Adams to work out that this is the sign for "dancer".

Secondarily, it is important to remember that there are 12 of these spaceships.  One in North Korea, one in China, one in England (in Devon, for some reason) etc.  Everyone dealing with this unfolding situation in very different ways.  What do we do?  Try to talk to whoever’s in the spaceship?  Blow the spaceship up?  Try to blow everyone else’s spaceships up?   So there’s also interesting (and timely) discussions about the importance of continuing to talk to the people facing the same situation as us and not just reacting to whatever we initially see and think.  Fear makes us irrational, panicky and reactive.  Amy Adams, at one point, translates the word "weapon".  Panic instantly ensues, despite her protestations that they could mean "tool", or the word could be a question.  Stay calm, everyone.  We fear change.  We fear the unknown.  We fear new things.  Should we?  Or should we wait until there's something to actually panic about?

Yeah, fair enough.  Panic...

The third (and no less significant) theme is that of language.  The film argues that the language we use shapes our thinking.  China (I think) try to communicate with their spaceship in terms of Mah-jong – their language is subsequently about winning and losing, victory and defeat.  A variation of Maslow’s Law of the Instrument is noted – “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.  What is our current language saying about us?  What does your vocabulary say about you?

So, lots of things to think about.

This is a film that has stayed with me, and I find myself pondering it and it's ramifications.  Here are some other thoughts:

1.  Brains are amazing.  Obviously.  The first time I watched The Sixth Sense, I did not get "The Twist".  Despite all the clues being there that Bruce Willis's character was dead.  Deceased.  Pining for the fjords.  The first time I realised this was during the scene where his wife (Olivia Williams) is asleep in front of their wedding video, and she turns over, and Bruce's wedding ring drops off the sofa and rolls towards him and he realises he's not wearing a wedding ring.  At that point, my brain instantly pieced together all the bits of information and the thought "HE'S A GHOST" popped, unbidden, into my head.  "Where did that thought come from?" wondered a different part of my head.  (Which in itself is strange - how can the brain trick itself?  That's bizarre!).  Somewhere in the empty cavern of my mind, little cogs had been whirring away, trying to make sense of what I was looking at.  And gave me the logical conclusion before I had consciously processed it.  Of course I know that the brain in constantly doing that, but it was one of the very few times I was very aware of it.  That I wasn't in control of some of my thinking.  And that's odd.

This in itself shouldn't mean that much.  And yet...

I mention this, because there's a similar experience in this film.  Where what you're looking at suddenly resolves itself and you realise that you're looking at something else, like a kind of brain optical illusion.  This is not quite the film you think it is.

2.  Thank goodness for the mind meld.  Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner were making great progress with the aliens, trying to understand the strange inky blotches they created and communicate in response.  But you wouldn't need to be conveying anything of great urgency:

Aliens: THERE'S A MASSIVE ASTEROID HURTLING TOWARDS EARTH AND YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE

Amy Adams:  Hold on, this will take a week to translate...

Aliens:  ARGH!  Come here and let me mind meld your face...it'll be easier.  Screw this "learning other languages" malarkey...

There's a lot to think about in this film, and it's worth seeing and worth paying attention to.  It draws on Interstellar, but takes half the time and is twice as interesting.  There's hints of Aliens, Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and surprisingly, Up.  It's an interesting foray into sci-fi for director Denis Villeneuve, whose next project is the new Blade Runner sequel.  I hope that by the time it comes out, we have not watched attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  Or anywhere else for that matter.