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Lessons from watching Blade Runner 2049 today

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Sonal Sher
Sonal SherOct 09, 2017 | 12:38

Lessons from watching Blade Runner 2049 today

Science fiction in film attracts even the unlikeliest of people to cinema. I assume it is the mystery and excitement of glimpsing into the future, much like looking into a Magic-8 ball or talking to an astrologer. The business of future, after all, has always intrigued human beings. I am no different, except I like my predictions on a 35mm screen with a heavy dose of background music. Maybe the footpath astrologers with their pet parrots should take note.

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We are a generation of fantasy. The idea of future is slowly becoming a dreadful reality and it has been easier for us to move to a parallel dimension where heroes and superpowers hold our attention. Yet, some ideas are such that it is hard to leave them behind, especially for a profit seeking movie studio. And so I found myself watching Blade Runner 2049, a film that the millennials would uphold with ferocity and the Generation X would accept with quiet reservations.

The film goes three decades further in the universe created by the author Philip K Dick, for we are already in 2017 and his dystopian world was based in 2019. With a new corporation at hand, Wallace, and a new series of obeying replicants, it is set clearly in the steps of its predecessor. As the new replicants thrive, the older rouge models are hunted and retired for they no longer fit into the idea of civil life that has been imagined by big money.

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Blade Runner 2049

The motivations are clear, the characters quietly awe-inducing, the visuals breathtaking and the background score painfully surreal. And yet, Blade Runner 2049 has the faint smell of being a metaphor for films themselves. A well behaved new age replicant from a big corporation for the viewers of our times.

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We get the delicately macho Ryan Gosling to play out this idea. He may not have the frustrated swashbuckling magnetism of Harrison Ford, but Gosling provides us with something better. The cool and sometimes unnerving humanity makes a relationship with an operating system look believable.

It is not a coincidence that he plays K, a bio-engineered human in the film. He had once done his turn in the romantic comedy Lars and the real girl, playing a socially awkward man in love with a blow-up doll. Here, his partner is the enchanting Ana de Armas who plays Joi, a commercially-produced artificial intelligence application. To a generation of Siri users who are soon going to be flushed with a range of pleasure dolls, Gosling's K provides a sense of morality with his searching eyes on the lookout for something real.

He may not have the clarity of Deckard's "I know what is real", but he has the confused dignity that is equally endearing.

Blade Runner 2049 has everything that one goes to the theatres for, a problem that films did not have to face earlier. The screen is drenched with images that rouse a sense of pathos and fear. The smoky sky, the denatured Los Angeles landscape and the desperately frantic neighbourhoods full of seductive holograms and vivid vending machines. Director Denis Villeneuve along with the cinematographer Roger A Deakins, the production designer and the special effects team have managed to create afresh the spectacle of the original on a far larger scale.

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This combined with the haunting score lends to this film the deathly noir feel that is hard to shake off. It's an art that is often forgotten in films with inflated budgets.

And yet, just as in the film everyone is looking for something more, here too I was left wanting. The carefully constructed maze for an audience, a majority of whom may have never seen the original, is all too suffocating at times. An element of modern cinema that makes me uncomfortable: spoilers. No one could have spoiled Blade Runner even if they had tried. Or 2001: A space Odyssey or Metropolitan. It did not matter if I knew the end of Alien or The Matrix.

Spoilers did not exist in the vocabulary of a film goer unless we were watching a mystery whodunit like Psycho or The Sixth Sense. But now we must speak with caution for we are in the future. This complication that has evolved into a way of life for the audience begs me to question that isn't a film highly simplistic if it can be blown apart from a revelation.

Do we watch films as a magic show or an art? Blade Runner was a film about a detective out to hunt a replicant gone rogue while developing romantic attachments with another replicant. There wasn't any secret plot points and Easter eggs to be cracked. And, yet, this very simple story went on to become a cult classic. Because simple words, when used well, hold within themselves the most complicated notions.

Unfortunately, today we prefer the unnecessary complications of simplistic films.

Despite my reservations, I cannot sweep this film aside. The idea and the final execution will hover over your mind like the three-wheeled spinners raging through a clouded sky.

At a time when mankind is at the brink of catastrophic change, the return of this franchise goes on to make a statement about the audience.

They might not have been prepared for it in 1982 but today they will welcome it with open arms.

Last updated: October 10, 2017 | 12:07
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