Blade Runner 2049 - Happy When It Rains

When it was first rumoured that a new Blade Runner film was on the way, I felt a lurch in my stomach.  How could it possibly match the wonder that was the original?  And even worse, what damage might it do to a film that I adored.  Ridley Scott wasn't involved, and neither was Vangelis.  Harrison Ford was present, but then consider the aberration that was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  I shouldn't have worried.

  

I remember it well.  Twelve years old and taking my seat with only four other viewers in Wigan's sole cinema The Ritz.  And then sitting mesmerised through the wonder that was Blade Runner.  Except I'm making that up.  Hardly anyone went to the cinema to watch Blade Runner when it was initially released: cerebral sci-fi, puzzling to the masses, and filled with the kind of longueurs that were never going to allow it to compete with ET.  My first visit to the Ritz Cinema, in fact, was to see Top Gun with a date who wouldn't speak to me, probably because I was too nervous to say a word to her.  And my first viewing of Blade Runner was in the early 90s, taped from the telly, probably ITV, and thus interspersed with tension-blunting ads, and suffering, after repeated viewings, from patchy drop outs and flickers.  I didn't get to see it on the big screen until a few years ago, and only then did I feel I could refer to myself as a 'massive fan' of the film.

The now defunct Wigan Ritz - I also saw Three Men and a Baby here

But then I go and ruin it all by taking three weeks to see Blade Runner 2049.  I can't even use the excuse that I didn't want it to taint the original; it has had superlative reviews and barely anyone has uttered a harsh word about it.  To make up for my tardiness I splashed out and booked myself a seat at the BFI IMAX.  So what's the verdict? 

For me a Blade Runner sequel will need to have three things.  The first, of course, is the aesthetic.  It must be invariably night.  The landscapes should stretch out into the distance, and the city-scape be made up of monotonous skyscrapers and apartment blocks, peppered with the occasional pyramid or ziggurat.  The colours should be blacks and greys, and if it does occasionally appear to be day, ochre.  Strange neons should look ironic and out of place.  

"I've seen things ...." 

Los Angeles as a kind of futuristic Hades, a deadened, inorganic world filled with millions of lost souls.  And those souls, whom we find when the flying car lands, should be lifted from the set of a multicultural film-noir, which will include our blade runner, ready to hunt down replicants, in the guise of a gumshoe detective.  Imagine Hopper's wonderful Nighthawks painting doused with radiation and you begin to get the picture.  

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks

And the new film achieves all of this spectacularly.  I was initially puzzled as to how, with nearly thirty years passing, they could update that aesthetic.  But there no need.  This is a world that is barely moving forwards, a mind-numbing purgatory, with the only advances being made in the technology and abilities of the replicants.    

Secondly, there is the music.  The only thing that comes close to Blade Runner here is Twin Peaks.  Take away the music and we would no longer be talking about either.  Vangelis's original score is wonderful - although, unlike with Angelo Badalementi's work for David Lynch, I find it difficult to listen to without the accompanying visuals.  Vangelis isn't involved in the new film, but his blueprint is all over it, with Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer taking those brooding, futuristic chords and lifting them to thrilling new heights.  At certain moments you hear what can only be described as the revving of a monstrous motorcycle that put me in mind of some of the jarring and terrifying noises that you find in the films of Gaspar Noé such as Irreversible and Enter the Void.  The decision to take in the film at the IMAX really paid off here.

"The rain falls hard on a humdrum town ... this town has dragged you down."

And finally, there is the rain.  An unceasing, dirty acid rain drenching Blade Runner's dystopian world, lashing at apartment windows, caging in the corporations that seem to run this world without political leaders, rolling down the slopes of those strange looking pyramids and ziggurats that spring from the floors of sprawling cities.  At street level the dirty rain finds its level, sploshing those that are forced to make their living here: prostitutes, street vendors, and, of course, replicant blade runners.  Not even Morrissey could stand such incessant precipitation.  But in the warmth of a cinema seat - as with gazing out the window on a rain-lashed day - it is quite beautiful.  

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain"

I won't go into details on the plot - some of you won't have seen it yet - but I adored Blade Runner 2049 and am definitely looking forward to repeated viewings, not least to try and get to the bottom of the film's use of Nabokov's Pale Fire (when Ryan Gosling's K returns from a blade runner mission he is required to go through the process of reciting passages from Pale Fire and it almost seems to be used as a kind of Bible for the replicant blade runners - Nabokov may not have approved, but his creation Charles Kinbote certainly would have).  Dennis Villeneuve has done a wonderful and audacious job and has, indeed, created a film that is that rarest of beasts, one that matches, and may even eventually surpass the original.