Review: Blade Runner 2049

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Visually gorgeous and concerned with matters typically more pressing than your average science fiction picture, Denis Villeneuve's "Blade Runner 2049" is a good sequel to a great movie. Much will be said about Roger Deakins' cinematography and it will all be warranted. The film is, no hyperbole here, pretty incredible from a visual standpoint.

From vast desert vistas to a hellish fight amid a sinking ship and cities lit up with large virtual characters making their way through the swarms of humans, Villeneuve's sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 classic film features some breathtaking camerawork and visual effects. Its story is also pretty engaging - and leaves viewers with much to ponder on what it means to be human or, perhaps, having a state of consciousness - if not quite groundbreaking, considering that it covers much of the same ground of the original "Blade Runner."

As the film opens, Ryan Gosling's K is one of the titular figures, a cop whose job it is to track down replicants who have lived past their planned expiration date and are making lives for themselves outside of their original intention - and kill them. The film opens with such a scene, during which K finds a clue regarding a child who, it appears, was born from a replicant and may have something to do with Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford).

K works for Robin Wright's Lieutenant Joshi, who appreciates his work and obviously cares about him, but the only other "person" with whom he makes actual contact is a hologram of a woman. Other characters central to the picture include Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the blind villain who is responsible for creating - and destroying, rather cruelly - the replicants, and his vicious henchwoman Luv (Sylvia Hoeks).

My favorite scenes in the picture involve K's mission to track down Deckard, who lives in an abandoned Las Vegas, where hologram images of Elvis Presley flicker on and off in a deserted theater and large statues looking like something out of ancient Egypt mark the entryway to the city. The scenes between Gosling and Ford - both of whom are very good here - give the film, which is often purposefully emotionally distant, its heart and soul.

I don't think "Blade Runner 2049" is on the same level as the original. As I'd mentioned before, it doesn't really cover much ground that hasn't already been well-trodden, but instead it provides a worthy coda to its story. It also, perhaps, hints of more "Blade Runner" films to come. Regardless, Villeneuve has proven again that he is a filmmaker who can take on big budget genre concepts and draw strong performances and thematic relevance from them. This is a rare example of a sequel that is warranted and expands upon its original story, rather than merely milking more money out of a concept.