Blade Runner 2049

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a fine sequel that could stand a firmer edit. It takes loneliness seriously enough to spend long stretches with someone who cannot easily express it, and Ryan Gosling gives that patience a purpose. The investigation matters, but we become more interested in what its questions do to the man asking them. At 164 minutes, it sometimes makes us wait after the point has registered.

Dave Bautista gives Sapper Morton an exhausted dignity, establishing the film’s seriousness without requiring a lecture. His restraint helps the questions about whose life counts feel worth asking. Hampton Fancher and Michael Green’s screenplay has the right instinct when it leaves those questions with the actors rather than spelling everything out. Its difficulty comes when the investigation requires more explanation than the images and performances do.

The scale of Roger Deakins’s cinematography works because people never become mere decoration. Production designer Dennis Gassner supplies neon-lit streets and ruined Las Vegas, and the spaces feel forbidding enough to make the characters’ isolation understandable. We are given time to look, and the detail rewards it; this is one place where the slowness earns its keep. The ruined spaces, in particular, make their occupants look painfully exposed.

We felt unexpectedly protective of ‘K’ in his scenes with Joi. Ryan Gosling’s reserve makes the companionship seem precious to someone reluctant to admit how much he needs it. Ana de Armas supplies a warmth that matters all the more against the film’s generally chilly manner. Her character’s status as a hologram keeps an awkward question present: how much reassurance can something made to please us provide? The film lets the relationship remain troubling without making its tenderness seem foolish.

Harrison Ford gives Rick Deckard a weariness that needs little explanation, and his directness is welcome in a film so fond of pausing. Jared Leto’s Niander Wallace is less persuasive: his solemn delivery makes the philosophical material sound more self-important than it needs to. The performance is controlled, but the control draws attention to the actor. The director gets more from his quieter performers, whose expressions leave us some work to do.

Joe Walker’s editing allows us to absorb the surroundings and study the performances, which is essential to the film’s appeal. There are also stretches where another pause adds little, and the investigation begins to feel unnecessarily protracted. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score is forceful enough to become tiring when the images have already done the persuading. The music can make the solemnity feel imposed, especially when a scene needs room for a smaller response. A firmer cut would preserve the patience while reducing the occasions on which we notice it.

For an evening of brisk science-fiction detection, choose something else. The pleasure here lies in staying with faces and places after a more anxious sequel would have moved on, and that requires some willingness to be still. We recommend it with the length firmly understood, rather than apologised away. Give it a quiet evening and a screen large enough to make those empty spaces count.