While many aging actors struggle to land the starring roles of their youth and are instead relegated to small cameos or ridiculous B-movie sequels, one actor who has had seemingly little trouble in this area is Harrison Ford. Not only has Ford managed to land new roles in films such as 42 and Ender’s Game, but he has also reprised his most famous roles some thirty to forty years after the initial films’ release dates, with his outing as Indiana Jones in 2008 followed by his return as Han Solo in 2015. It only seems fitting then that Ford should revisit yet another of his iconic roles: that of Rick Deckard, revived for 2017’s Blade Runner 2049. While the original 1982 Blade Runner was a critical failure, subsequent revisions helped it to develop into the landmark film we know it to be today. Being as it took twenty-five years for the original film to reach director Ridley Scott’s final cut in 2007, it seems remarkable and much overdue to have a sequel released on the film’s thirty-fifth-year anniversary. Just as the original effectively combines the two genres of science fiction and film noir into an entirely unique hybrid—securing its legacy as a neo-noir—director Denis Villeneuve’s 2049 takes care to revisit the world of the original rather than reboot it, all the while revising it for the next generation of film-goers.
Part of the original allure of Blade Runner was the intricately designed cinematography, much of which drew heavily from classic noir. 2049 places the same emphasis in its scenes, albeit in more subtle ways with plenty of nods towards the original. This becomes immediately apparent in the scene from the beginning of the film where Ryan Gosling’s Officer K confronts Dave Bautista’s Sapper Morton.
The wall-busting action is clearly a nod towards the original film’s fight between Deckard and the replicant, Roy Batty, as played by Rutger Hauer, who smashes his head through a wall. This 2049 scene also nods toward the fan theory that Deckard was not a human, but a replicant, with the reveal that the new blade runner, Officer K, is, in fact, the latter.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins makes several interesting stylistic choices within this scene. Sapper’s house is very darkly lit with bright diegetic light from the window, creating a chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of the classic noir technique. Small, diegetic splashes of color, like the warmly lit hallway in the background and the brief flashes of K’s Voight-Kampff machine, occur in this scene and will continue as cinematographic motifs throughout the film. These splashes of color offset the picture’s bleaker tones and seem to be Deakins’ way of creating a new style of chiaroscuro that uses color instead of light.
Another interesting inclusion is the steam rising from a kettle in the background. Classic noir often included smoke and other air-obscuring components like fog as a cinematic staple, which added to the mystery and murkiness surrounding the characters and story. The original Blade Runner fully embraced this style, and 2049 doggedly continues the motif, even down to such small details as steam rising from a kettle.
One of the main sources of the smoke motif in both films is the exhaust from the spinner vehicles, which is present in the scrapyard crash scene featuring K and Ana de Armas’ holographic character, Joi.
The color splashes motif also reappears in this clip with the brightly colored glow of the monitors within the vehicle as well as Joi’s yellow jacket. The bright, digital colors stand out cleanly in contrast to the otherwise dirty, monotone scene that matches the gray of the smoke from the exhaust and the missile explosions.
The entity behind the missiles—the deadly replicant, Luv, the femme fatale of the film, as played by Sylvia Hoeks—makes her appearance on the scene in a clever cinematic way. The smoke from the missiles’ explosions reflects in Luv’s glasses, bringing to mind scenes from classic noir such as Mike Hammer’s glance in a mirror behind him towards his follower from Kiss Me Deadly, where mirrors frame and highlight the important information in the scene. 2049 gives this a technological update, however, with the information not being a reflection that Luv is directly seeing but instead one she is remotely viewing and controlling. These new technological glasses also nod at the original Blade Runner’s ESPER machine that Deckard uses to investigate a photograph with the same verbal commands that Luv speaks: “Closer, stop.”
Another noteworthy noir trope appears in this scene: the presence of water. Droplets appear on the windows of the spinner distorting the image and manipulating the lighting within the vehicle. The watery theme also occurs in the reflections on the walls within Luv’s room, although where the reflections are coming from is unclear, adding to the sense of artificialness in this dystopian future. It is also reminiscent of the classic venetian blinds and other distorted lighting effects.
While water frequently appears in film noirs, bringing to mind scenes from films such as Sunset Boulevard and Touch of Evil, rain holds a special place in the Blade Runner canon with the famous “Tears in Rain” scene at the end of the original film. This scene is alluded to within 2049 when the hologram, Joi, steps outside to feel rain for the first time.
This scene on the urban rooftop at night is an especially effective case for how 2049 revisits the original world while updating it for the current times. Stylistically, it stays true to the original, featuring murky, foggy air lit up by passing searchlights and giant billboards of sensual women. The setting is again Chinatown, just as it was in the original—perhaps an allusion to the neo-noir film—but with these elements also comes the color splashes motif, notably framing Joi and K with the green light from the door and the blue from the billboard. While the characters’ silhouettes are barely discernable from the dark background, the framing draws the viewers’ attention to the relationship between the two characters—the heart of the scene.
Just as the love story between Deckard and Rachael explores the authenticity of an organic being caring for a synthetic one, the love story between K and Joi takes it one step further and features a physical being loving a holographic one. Viewers are likely very familiar with the media’s saturation of emotive robot stories already but featuring a character who is digital and has no physical form restores the sense of the uncanny that the original Blade Runner possessed, and this time it’s for 21st century viewers living in a world of computers and personal-assistants.
While it appears that the world will not have synthetic beings walking the Earth by November, 2019 as the original Blade Runner predicted, it is fascinating to see how timely many of the film’s ideas remain. We are still questioning how artificial intelligence will fit into our world and we are still trying to comprehend how nature will be affected. Larger than these themes, however, are the deep soulful questions that both Blade Runners pose. 2049 may seem like the distant future, but if we’ve learned anything from the thirty-five years between the two films, it’s that while technology changes, the questions concerning our existence will remain the same.
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