“A ravishing visual colossus, Blade Runner 2049 more than lives up to its predecessor’s legacy as a groundbreaking mixture of sound, images and mood,” begins Screen’s Tim Grierson. “This long-anticipated sequel’s screenplay sometimes struggles to keep pace, but director Denis Villeneuve has crafted an enrapturing sci-fi dystopia whose themes and emotions are so vividly realized cinematically that it hardly matters when the actual story isn’t quite as engaging. A superbly muted performance from Ryan Gosling grounds this solemn exploration of identity and what it means to be human.”
“Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic,” enthuses the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “This is the sequel to the 1982 sci-fi classic, directed by Ridley Scott and based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, starring Harrison Ford as a ‘blade runner,’ a futureworld cop whose job is to track down and kill disobedient almost-human androids known as replicants. The 2017 follow-up simply couldn’t be any more of a triumph: a stunning enlargement and improvement.”
“In a similar but distinct way to Ridley Scott’s masterful original, Blade Runner 2049 mulls one of the meatiest questions around,” writes the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, namely: “is surface all that there is, or do life’s currents run deeper than the things we can see, hear and touch? Denis Villeneuve’s film toys with both options, making neither a comfort—and in the process, maps out one of the most spectacular, provocative, profound and spiritually staggering blockbusters of our time.”
Variety’s Peter Debruge finds that, “in both tone and style, the new film owes more to slow-cinema maestro Andrei Tarkovsky than it does to Scott’s revolutionary cyberpunk sensibility. In fact, at two hours and forty-four minutes, Blade Runner 2049 clocks in at three minutes longer than the austere Russian auteur’s Stalker. But Villeneuve earns every second of that running time, delivering a visually breathtaking, long-fuse action movie whose unconventional thrills could be described as many things—from tantalizing to tedious—but never ‘artificially intelligent.’”
At ScreenCrush, Matt Singer suggests that it’s as if “someone dared director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins to make the most visually spectacular science-fiction film of the century—and then they actually did it. . . . Scott’s Blade Runner was a science-fiction film that looked like a detective story. . . . Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is much more of a detective story that looks like a science-fiction film.”
“Three decades have elapsed since the events of the first film,” explains Alonso Duralde at TheWrap. “The spate of replicant rebellions has led to the bankruptcy of the Tyrell Corporation. In the mid-2020s, a famine strikes, and Niander Wallace (Jared Leto, underplaying for once) becomes wealthy and powerful through his mastery of synthetic agriculture. He acquires what’s left of Tyrell and begins producing his own replicants, with shorter lifespans.” K (Gosling) “tracks down Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista) at one of Wallace’s farms” and “makes a potentially earth-shattering discovery that eventually sends him out in search of retired, and long-missing, blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford).” But Blade Runner 2049 “isn’t about what happens; it’s about what this terrifying and beautiful world . . . tells us about life and perception and reality.”
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“In a film that has already been studded with several bursts of sudden violence and rough action, Ford's arrival ups the ante, as the great action star, fully looking his age and perhaps more, really delivers here with a ragingly physical performance that bursts the film's exquisite languor,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy. “As a contrast to Gosling's deliberately deadened, emotionally zoned-out turn, Ford almost single-handedly amps up a film otherwise intentionally drained of character vitality.”
“Villeneuve directs every scene as if his entire filmography has built to this moment,” writes IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “While Prisoners showed his penchant for a morbid investigative thrillers, Sicario proved he could intensify a stern police drama with tense, dynamic set pieces. Even his smaller, stranger films contain the breadcrumbs that come to fruition here, from the peculiar identity crisis at the root of Enemy to the personal and historical details that comprise the investigation in Incendies. They’re all in Blade Runner 2049, which has a greater efficiency and confidence than any of his previous work.”
“Villeneuve further cements his name as one of the best and most striking filmmakers working today,” adds Rodrigo Perez at the Playlist.
At Vulture, David Edelstein finds that “it has nothing as striking as [Rutger] Hauer’s morbid majesty or the screaming-dervish demise of Daryl Hannah’s Pris. There’s nothing close to the shock of seeing Blade Runner’s Tokyo-influenced futuristic dystopia—a dismal mix of high-tech and corrosion—for the first time. I thought it was okay.”
“Deakins has shot what is one of the most beautiful movies ever made,” counters Mike Ryan at Uproxx. “And Hans Zimmer’s score just beats you into submission in a way I don’t now how to make sound positive.”
Jeremy Egner talks with Scott, Villeneuve, Ford, and Gosling for the New York Times, where Rachel Lee Harris interviews costume designer Renée April.
Michael Schulman’s conversation for Vanity Fair with Scott, Ford, and Fancher focuses on the long road to the realization of the original.
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