“Every memory has a piece of its artist.”

‘Blade Runner 2049’, directed by Denis Villeneuve in 2017, is an American dystopian science fiction thriller. A sequel to the 1982 movie ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Blade Runner 2049’ takes place thirty years later. A cop, played by Ryan Gosling, has the special responsibility of hunting down and killing androids but finds himself drawn into a mystery that revolves around the actions of the lead character in the earlier film. Harrison Ford reprises his role of Dekkard, the ‘blade runner’ from the first film, now retired and in hiding, but before he retreated from the world, he concealed a secret that has the potential of causing a war and rewriting the past of Gosling’s character. It’s a long, meditative film, taking it’s time to build up an atmosphere and to immerse the audience in the fantasy universe of the original film. The connections between the two movies are intricate: that same balance of the scale of the grim cityscapes and the small details: the origami animals of the first and the wooden carved horse of the latter film. This move has a different preoccupation, however, as it is told more from the android’s perspective. There is an interesting thesis to be written comparing this with the television reboot of ‘Westworld’, both concentrating on the nature of reality and how life is formed through memories and dreams. The film is a rich, dense and spectacular piece of work, futuristic, but somehow retro, taking inspiration, as the original did, from tangled 1940s noir crime thrillers such as ‘The Maltese Falcon’.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s long and demands attention, but the richness of plot and visual detail make it an irresistible film. It’s worth watching in the cinema for the full effect.