Review of the film “Blade Runner 2049”
"Blade Runner 2049" was for me the most mesmerizing and impressive film that I saw in the cinema. It was as if I was in a hypnosis session, where the hypnotist himself was an incredibly talented and promising director of recent years – Denis Villeneuve. The continuation of Ridley Scott’s cult classic was not easy for him – he made a film that can safely be put on par with the original.
In his latest film, Villeneuve was able to achieve perfection in terms of visual storytelling. The world and scenery are not just a background, but tell a real story – the story of a world on the verge of depletion of natural resources, on the verge of extinction: the artificial fields of California over which the main character flies at the beginning of the film, a dead tree suspended by cables, the post-apocalyptic city of Las Vegas, where the only living creatures left are bees (and Descartes!), the city of Los Angeles, where behind bright neon signs and ubiquitous flashy advertising hides poverty and devastation, etc.d. Every location, every interior detail is worked out with incredible painstaking care, the world lives its own life. Villeneuve, cameraman Roger Deakins and all those. the team was able to not only create a beautiful world, but also made it tangible, alive, and convincing.
However, having paid attention to the development of the setting, the talented Canadian did not forget about the plot, telling a complex and complex story with a whole layer of philosophical questions and reasoning.
Over the years, science fiction writers https://reblzcasino.co.uk/login/ and filmmakers have asked the eternal question, which can be succinctly formulated as: “Man or robot?”?». What if people suddenly create a machine that will not only look like a person in appearance, but will also be capable of feelings and emotions?? Where the line between mechanical and human is blurred? And what if a machine is capable of compassion and mercy more than people themselves?? These are the questions Ridley Scott asked in his film Blade Runner. Denis Villeneuve was puzzled by similar (but far from identical) questions, and wanted to give his answers to them, in a continuation of the 1982 original called “Blade Runner 2049.”.
The main questions of the film this time are the search for individuality and the formation of one’s own worldview. Using the example of the main characters of the film, I would like to consider how they were affected and how they were revealed.
The main character, Officer Kay, played by Ryan Gosling, is a Blade Runner. His task is to find and arrest replicants (humanoid robots) of old models who have escaped from the outer worlds. Arriving at the right place, namely, the lair of the fugitive rebel replicant Sapper Morton, he successfully completes his task of “retiring” the aforementioned replicant. Kay’s very first encounter with Sapper characterizes him as a cold-blooded individual who skillfully does his job. The most interesting thing is that Ryan Gosling’s character is himself a replicant. But doesn’t he feel sorry for his brothers?? Not really. Kay’s emotional stability is monitored by the police themselves through occasional trauma testing – a more advanced version of the Voight-Kampff test from the original film. In addition, the attitude towards him not as a person, but rather as a slave force, formed in Kay internal passivity and depression of his own “I”. The officer’s only outlet is his girlfriend, the artificial intelligence Joy, who seems to “love” him (more on that later), but she is also only a projection, unable to get out of her holographic form into something more material.
It is worth returning to the question: “Man or robot?». Usually in science fiction works, robots/androids understand that they are not much different from people and should have the same rights and freedoms. You don’t have to look far for examples – replicant Roy Batty from the first Blade Runner. Being the main antagonist of the film, he, however, was one of the most humane characters in the film – he knew how to value life and was capable of compassion, and his atrocities were motivated by the desire to live, because his period of existence was short – 4 years. Everything is fine with Kay
otherwise. If Roy just wants to live, then Kay wants to understand the meaning of his life, B
one moment he discovers that his birth was carried out, perhaps not artificially, but naturally. This fact begins to awaken in him hope for the meaning of his existence. The most important goal for an officer is the search for self-identity and self-knowledge.
The complete opposite of Kay is Rick Descartes, the main character of the original film. Unlike Kay, who is looking for the meaning of his existence, Descartes has long since lost him with the loss of his two closest people: his beloved Rachel and his child. He doesn’t even care who he is: a human or a replicant (there were bold hints about this in Scott’s picture), since he himself doesn’t see any sense in it.
One of the most interesting and controversial things in the film is the love story between Kay and Joy. Joy, as mentioned earlier, is artificial intelligence. It was created to meet the needs of the owner who bought it. Joy is very sensual and sincere towards Kay and openly shows her love for him. On the other hand, during the course of the story, the question is raised more than once: what if Joy’s love was initially calculated by mathematical algorithms?? And will this be true love?? In one of the final scenes of the film, when Kay looks into Joy’s huge black soulless eyes, he is disappointed in her and in himself, having lost the only thing that seemed truly alive to him in a long-rotten world.
"Blade Runner 2049" is certainly a breakthrough film for all mainstream cinema of recent years. This is a film that goes beyond the typical blockbuster and enters the field of real auteur cinema, deep, intellectual.
