Review: Blade Runner 2049 is not even an average film

Roger Deakins’ cinematography, the subtle and effective use of CGI, and the magnificent exteriors (as seen in numerous trailers), the author of the excellent Sicario Denis Villeneuve as director, all based on the visual postulates that Ridley Scott so impressively established thirty-five years ago, promised at least a solid genre achievement.

Yet Blade Runner 2049 is not even an average film. The reasons for this can be found in Villeneuve’s insistence that the characters’ emotions, along with the mediocre ideas of screenwriters Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, always take center stage.

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Villeneuve has proven himself to be an excellent director of action scenes, skilled in building atmosphere and a master of sound. As a narrator, the Canadian has always been banal, and here we are forced to watch his manifesto of the simplest philosophical answers and tedious affirmations of paternal love for almost three hours. And there was so much potential.

The world is ruled by a man who, thanks to his own technology, has saved humanity and is the master of life and death. Instead of creators playing with parallels to characters and ambitions like Elon Musk and similar figures, Jared Leto embodies him like a villain from early James Bond installments. The dialogues seem to have been written by aspiring high school philosophers on not particularly stimulating narcotics.

There is no need to discuss the family pathos so as not to reveal too much of the plot to the viewer. It is enough to mention the conversation between Deckard (Harrison Ford) and the previously mentioned world ruler Wallace in Jared Leto’s pathetic reinterpretation. In response to Deckard’s remark that Wallace cannot understand his emotional aspirations because he has no children, he (thinking of the replicants he created) triumphantly responds like a second-rate version of some Marvel superhero that he has millions of them.

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Aside from a very well-directed scene of the search for the replicant at the very beginning of the film, the atmosphere of dystopian Los Angeles and Las Vegas is quite benign and sterile. The marathon duration, emotional dullness of the work, and unexciting characters have nullified all production virtues. The most interesting character in the entire universe is a dark-skinned merchant who appears for less than 50 seconds and is completely irrelevant to the film.

American and British mainstream critics are thrilled with Blade Runner 2049, but that is usually the case when a blockbuster appears in cinemas that shows even a hint of pretension to be profound.