![blade runner 2049 joe blade runner 2049 joe](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.986885199.9745/flat,750x1000,075,f.jpg)
The surprise was sprung in a trailer, months ago, raising expectations that the new movie might clear up the conundrum that has plagued the brains of “Blade Runner” fans since 1982: Is Deckard himself a replicant? I am pleased to report that I still can’t decide.
![blade runner 2049 joe blade runner 2049 joe](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GuufC.png)
One coup, for Villeneuve, is the return of Harrison Ford, as Deckard. The result is at once consuming and confounding, a private puzzle cached inside a blockbuster.
Blade runner 2049 joe serial number#
The movie doesn’t seem slow, but its clues are minuscule-a single piano key depressed beside its neighbors, a serial number visible only under a microscope-and the action sequences flare up against a backdrop of inaction and an existential dread of getting stuck. Moreover, the plot is a small and coiled affair, involving a missing child, and the mood is as inward as anything in the annals of Philip Marlowe, with a dose of Marlowe’s glum self-bullying, as K investigates not only historical crimes but his own potential presence in the labyrinth of the past. Yet the bastions of power-the corporate ziggurats of L.A., cliff-high and elephant gray, which viewers of the first film will recall with awe-remain in place, unbreached, and the hordes at ground level seethe not with a lust for liberation but with a busy trade in high-tech assistance and lowly sexual favors. It runs for nearly three hours, and it looms as large as an epic, with a score, by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, that feels at times like an onslaught of monumental thuds. Not that the film is a hymn to revolution. If replicants were to rise up or-perish the thought-to reproduce, there might be no way to contain them. (He is played by Dave Bautista, who gets better and more solid, if that is possible, with every film.) What K discovers, buried on Morton’s property, is a box of bones, and what the bones reveal is unthinkable: a secret that could undermine the near-fascistic system, upheld by Joshi, whereby replicants do the bidding of humanity. K has been sent out of town to confront a hulking replicant named Sapper Morton. “It is my job to keep order,” she says, and that order is coming adrift.
![blade runner 2049 joe blade runner 2049 joe](https://cms-assets.theasc.com/Blade-Runner-2049-TRI-07200r3-Featured.jpg)
The director of photography, Roger Deakins, delights in drowning our senses: enemies clash by night in a frothing torrent, at the foot of a dam, and, in one telling image, K’s boss, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), is barely visible through a window, such is the deluge streaming across the panes. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink most of it is contaminated, and when K takes a shower it’s over in a two-second blast. It starred Harrison Ford as Deckard, a cop who hunted down rogue replicants across Los Angeles-a joyless Babel, blitzed by neon glare and lashed by the whip of dirty rain. Such is the premise of Denis Villeneuve’s ambitious sequel to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” which came out in 1982 and was set, with startling powers of premonition, in 2019. They have “open-ended lifespans,” and immortality, as ever, is not to be trusted. In fact, K is a Blade Runner: a synthetic human known as a replicant, physically redoubtable and emotionally dry, whose job is to find and to “retire” (a ghoulish euphemism) any early-model replicants who are still out there. He needs a real name, not least because it makes him sound like a real person-shades of Pinocchio, who longed to be a real boy. He’s with the L.A.P.D., and he’s officially called KD6.3-7 (Ryan Gosling), or K, for short, but somebody suggests Joe, and it lends him a little flavor. True, Sinatra is no more than a hologram, crooning to a couple of folks in the shell of a Las Vegas hot spot, and yet, when he sings the words “Set ’em up, Joe,” you soften and melt as if it were 1954 and he were singing them to Doris Day, hushing a crowded room, in “Young at Heart.”īy a nice twist, there is a Joe around. The only tree is sapless and dead, and the only farmer is harvesting weevils for protein. In “Blade Runner 2049,” the land is the color of a corpse, and the skies are no better. The good news about life on Earth, thirty-two years from now, is that people still listen to Frank Sinatra.