The Real and Unreal in Blade Runner 2049
The Atlantic
I hardly expected the movie to be so drenched in Tarkovsky (“The Zone” and Solaris, maybe a bit of The Sacrifice), and the now-famed sex scene draws from Bergman’s Persona. Overall, the colors and palette were stunning, and the use of sound was as impressive as in any movie, do see this one in IMAX. It hardly makes any concessions to the Hollywood vices of this millennium and indeed much of the Tysons Corner audience seemed to be baffled.
Think of the main plot line as showing a world where the Christ miracle is invertedand what that would have to mean for everything else. Much of the plot is sprawling, some of the references are too heavy-handed or scattered (Moses and the Dalai Lama and Kafka and Star Wars 1-2 are thrown in for good measure, and few will grok the Galatians reference), and the whole thing could have been fifteen minutes shorter. Still, this is a worthy sequel to one of the best movies of the 1980s or is that the 1990s? Carla Juri steals the show, and furthermore it resolves the main plot puzzle of the original Blade Runner rather economically.
Also on the plus side, Adam Driver does not appear in this movie
For many, Blade Runner remains his high Cold River watermark and its influence can be felt in the recent wave of retro-synth scores including the Netflix series Stranger Things to Dunkirk.
Scott might have hired Zimmer to score Blade Runner had he made it a few years later. Scott collaborated with the German composer on Black Rain in 1989, and continued to use him on Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and several other movies. Zimmer, 60, was a natural choice for 2049, not only as the reigning king of blockbusters, but as a lifelong synth enthusiast whose career and style rode in on the wake of Vangelis.
Bkade Runner 2049 pays homage to original score
The idea of dangerous, inhumane artificial intelligence taking over the world is familiar to many of us, thanks to cautionary tales such as the Matrix and Terminator franchises.
But what about the more sympathetic portrayals of robots? The benevolence of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character in the later movies of the franchise may have been the exception in older portrayals of AI, but human-like machines are often represented more positively in contemporary films. Think of Ex Machina, Chappie or A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
This shift is very likely representative of a wider shift in how we think about these technologies in reality. Blade Runner 2049, long-anticipated sequel to the original 1982 Blade Runner film, is a part of this shift.