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Wednesday, April 17, 2024
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HOLLYWOOD BLADE RUNNER 2049
EDITOR'S PICK
'Blade Runner 2049': Bleak, pointless, this film is exhausting
(Review By Subhash K. Jha ; Rating: *1/2)
Do yourself a favour. Run away from "Blade Runner 2049" as far as you can while
you still have time. It is one of the most pretentious and ponderous sequels
ever, with thinly disguised dialogues taken from messages from fortune cookies
masquerading as words of wounded wisdom that civilisation, particularly American
civilisation, has discovered while sharing meals with Willy Wonka.
The film is almost three hours of talking plodding tedium with characters who
are either manufactured by genetical manipulations and are known as replicants
(more like repellents), or are real human beings inscribed with robotic
tendencies. Ryan Gosling, one of civilisation's most overrated actors, is unable
to determine till the end whether he is real or virtual. Does anyone really
care?
Gosling occupies most of the film's cumbersome playing-time. He is presumably a
replicant -- or is he? The entire film is about Gosling's search for his
identity. The search for self is like Kubrick-meets-Kafka's
ghost-on-a-sullen-unexciting-night.
What happened to all the fun and the ravishing action scenes from the first
"Blade Runner" film in 1982? There isn't even one spectacularly-staged action
sequence in the new edition of "Blade Runner". The entire reined-in velocity of
"Blade Runner 2049" hinges on Gosling's character and his search of an identity
which takes him from one depressing location to another. Los Angeles looks like
it has seen better days. Harrison Ford is dunked into gushing water at the end.
He too must wonder at what civilisation has come to since he last played a
Blade.
Ford can still make every frame featuring him look inviting. Gosling seems to
have lost his screen presence in "La La Land". Here this time around, he is
stilted and unsure trying to make sense of a crisis that no one quite
comprehends, let alone appreciates.
Unforgiveably, the very charismatic Harrison Ford appears after almost
two-thirds of the film is over. By then, the narrative so weighed down by its
own philosophical posturings, it would need more than Ford to revive our
interest. The asininity that the screenplay inflicts on all the actors big or
small is cognisable. Some appear more wronged than others as they stand around
mouthing dialogues that sound like Kangana Ranaut's pearls of wisdom carried to
an extreme of self-absorption.
Jared Leto, who appears with blind lenses, is an unintentional caricature with
his megalomaniacal take on civilisation's accelerated ambitions to populate the
galaxy with artificial genetics. He mouths the film's lofty aspirations with
platitudinous pomposity, igniting what looks like a conflict to save humanity.
It is actually nothing more than a collage of disembodied images accentuating
one man's pursuit of legitimacy and another man's (the director's) search for
immortality.
Shockingly, the film's epic design never rises beyond a show of contoured
bleakness. The film is shot at landscapes that suggest apocalyptic upheavals as
imagined by an art director who has his head too deeply buried in the sands to
know that beyond the bleakness that civilisation imagines for itself in the
coming decades, there is another reality whereby humanity searches for survival
with dignity.
"Blade Runner 2049" offers no hope to humankind. Forget redeeming civilisation,
it can't even retrieve Harrison Ford's character from the original film without
falling into paroxysm of puerility. As for Ryan Gosling, his relationship with
his virtual housemate (Anna De Armas) reminded me of Joaquin Phoenix and
Scarlett Johannson in "Her".
A few day before I saw this monstrously disappointing sequel, I saw an Indian
television journalist fawning over Ryan Gosling at an interview conducted in
Barcelona. The journalist gushed over Gosling and let him know that India has
numerous Gosling fans dying to meet him. Who are these fans? After "Blade Runner
2049", the affable but weighed-down actor would not have many fans to make him
feel about his ambitions.
Watch Gosling in "A Blue Valentine" instead. Or better still watch our film "Tu
Hai Mera Sunday" to see how heartwarming the depiction of metropolitan angst can
be when applied to lives that are prone to rise above their woeful destiny. In
"Blade Runner 2049", the characters love their misery and nullity so much they
make our future look not just bleak but also banal.
Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.
