2049 is not called “Blade Runner 2″ for a reason. It is set in the same world as Blade Runner, somehow little changed in 30 years, but feels very different. I note here three ways it differs:

Plotting: Deckard is given a simple task in Blade Runner. K is given a simple task in 2049. But the way these tasks unfold is very different between the two movies. Blade Runner does not telegraph what Deckard’s next move is in any way. 2049 plainly lays out what K is going to do in order before he does it. Then he does the things he says he is going to do. Blade Runner obscured (to the viewer, but not to Deckard) what in video game parlance would be called the “critical path.” 2049 might as well give the viewer a quest screen with all the steps marked with checkboxes. 

Parable: I had originally called this “narrative style,” but that seems too close to “plotting.” Does Blade Runner directly ask any questions? If you showed the movie to an extremely literal person, they might ask some factual questions about the plot. The questions the movie causes viewers to ask (like “is Deckard a replicant” and what does that mean for our own humanity) are not discussed in the movie itself. 2049 takes on all of its questions head on, driven mostly by Leto’s character Wallace, who fancies himself a god. Tyrell was a man who built robots. Wallace is a lunatic. Blade Runner indicted all of mankind for its maltreatment of replicants. By having (George) Wallace preaching about the need to build great human achievements on the backs of slaves, 2049 takes some of the load off other characters and maybe the audience. 

Visual Style: Blade Runner was a dirty movie. It is a product of the 1980s. 2049 is either a product of no time (which is often how contemporary media feels), or a product of the mid-2010s expensive blockbuster era. All gorgeous cinematography unsullied by such imperfections as film grain, unbalanced color, and strange concessions to the challenges of shooting in the dark. When K is walking through the orange haze of a post-nuclear fallout Las Vegas and the camera hovers behind him about 20 feet off the ground, it feels like you’re floating behind him. Blade Runner never feels like that. 

(A film grain aside. I miss film grain! There’s a flashback towards the end of the movie where Deckard remembers seeing Rachael for the first time, walking towards him in the Tyrell office. It’s gorgeous through the grain, which picks up strange flecks from the super bright sun through the window. When the CGI’d Sean Young appears in the flesh to tempt Deckard into helping Wallace (more Leah in Rogue One than Tarkin in Rogue One), her very being appears slightly fuzzy, no doubt because they could not totally eliminate noise in the underlying footage that formed the basis for the CGI model they superimposed on someone wearing a green suit. I thought it worked, strangely.) 

Dialogue is also easier to follow in 2049 than in Blade Runner. Lots of scenes of two characters standing indoors talking to each other, with nothing obstructing the audience’s full view of each character’s face. Maybe I’m misremembering Blade Runner, but this feels like a difference. One example, Edward James Olmos now talks like Adama instead of like his character from Blade Runner. I didn’t get that. 

2049 is “Her” if instead of being an original screenplay, it was adapted from a Franz Kafka novel. The ending of Her is optimistic. This version of Her is deeply pessimistic. I like this one more. (The Kafka comparisons are laid out and analyzed by Walter Chaw, surprise surprise. I’m not smart enough to add anything to that). 

Chaw also says that the use of the themes of Her is less fresh in 2049 than in Her. But I think this movie takes the cake for the most disturbing scene depicting a romantic relationship with an AI. That would be K’s sex scene with the replicant pretending to be his holographic whatever-you-want-to-see-and-hear girlfriend. I enjoyed the times Wallace-employee Love refers to K as both a Wallace product and a Wallace customer. Love says to K “I see you’re a customer as well.” (Does she mean Love is herself also a customer, or is she saying “as well as a product”?) When Love kills K’s holographic girlfriend, she says “I do hope you were satisfied with our product,” while looking at the hologram, not K. What does it mean for a constructed man to be in love with a constructed computer program? What does it mean for the computer program? K’s relationship with the hologram is disgusting from beat one, when he comes home to her cooking him a holographic Americana dinner while wearing a classic 1950s housewife outfit. K’s relationship with the hologram stands directly opposite Deckard’s relationship with Rachael. We know what K, Rachael, and the hologram are all manufactured people. Deckard remains ambiguous. But who can love whom? Why is it so obvious to the viewers (and, eventually, to K) that the hologram’s love for him is gross, fake, and forced? But when K tells Deckard that Tyrell set up his meeting Rachael in that moment, so that he would fall for her, and that they could have a child together, why do we reject that hypothesis, or at least set it in the back of our minds and think only of the “real” love between Deckard and Rachael? Does it even matter if Deckard is a human or a replicant? What matters, I think, is Rachael’s interiority. Was she like K’s hologram, “programmed” to tell Deckard everything he wants to hear so that Deckard would eventually impregnate her? 

If it’s not obvious, I think that love is the most interesting theme of 2049. Humanity was the most interesting theme of Blade Runner. There’s another difference. 

(Another side note: that horrifying sex scene is a great example of the kind of storytelling that modern special effects make possible. That scene couldn’t have been done to look convincing anything more than 3 years ago. That the hologram is always very slightly see through is a cool effect too. The sex scene is very Lynch. One person becoming another, two people being the same person. Hmm.)

Miscellany

I liked Leto. Here’s something that Katharine Trendacosta wrote in her great review for io9 about Leto:

Leto’s Niander Wallace isn’t, thankfully, in this movie much. First of all, an unintended consequence of his “method” is that it’s now impossible to see him in a film and not think of him as Jared Leto. He doesn’t disappear into roles anymore. If you told me that in the future, Leto becomes a blind tech billionaire who speaks in circular riddles, I’d believe you. It’s just him now. Second, he’s also so over the top that, in a movie where everyone else is giving much lower-key performances, he’s impossible to take seriously.

I agree that all you can see in the role in Leto, but I don’t mind this. I had no trouble taking him seriously, which I chalk up entirely to the production design of the places where he speaks and of the props that he uses. All of the Wallace interiors are incredible, as are these floating robots that help him see. Wallace’s weird windowless floating office is such a great contrast to Tyrell’s insanely bright dining room/office in Blade Runner. Deckard first meets Rachael in both of these rooms. But the second one is a poor copy of the first. Something something commentary about sequels? 

Gosling is great. Ford is better in this than he was in Force Awakens, giving me some confidence about the new Indiana Jones. Deckard is a different person 30 years later. Han Solo was still Han Solo, even though both he and Deckard lost children. Robin Wright and Dave Bautista are also great. Sylvia Hoeks is better than either of them (but Bautista would have been better in a larger role). Ana de Armas was good in her creepy, creepy role. 

Why does K only experience anti-replicant discrimination in one scene and never again?

The baseline tests that K undergoes are instant classic sci-fi scenes. They are shot perfectly, cutting back-and-forth between K and the camera. They are offputting for reasons that are hard to identify. As this movie’s version of the Voight-Kampff tests from Blade Runner, they succeed.

I didn’t think the movie was over-long, but I do think there’s a very interesting sub-2h cut of this movie to be made. What would this movie be like without any of the scenes of K thinking he is the child? I also think it would be better without the couple of times there are flashbacks to help the audience make connections. I didn’t need to see K remembering Bautista’s character saying that it is good to die honorably before K dies, honorably.