Blade Runner 2049

Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi opus “Blade Runner”, adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel, turned on replicants, androids, non-human humans implanted with false memories that some came to believe were real, blurring the line between human and automations, a line the film was content to leave distorted even as it concluded. This future was underscored by the celebrated, grim art design, where the skyline of 2019 Los Angeles seemed to stretch on into forever, the bright lights and flying cars drowning out the human beings scampering below as much as the omnipresent rain. Denis Villeneuve’s sequel, “Blade Runner 2049”, builds out that world. Shimmery and sterile interiors are contrasted against more dour exteriors with snow just as likely to fall as rain, evoking the ash of a fallen world, a fallen world laid out in the movie’s title cards. And the high rise holographic pleasure models don’t stay out of reach 30 years on, it seems, but emerge from their video screen to titillate right up close, a remarkable visual blurring that line between what is and isn’t real even more. And the further fuzziness of that distinction is also where “2049” sort of pushes itself to the brink. This is anything but a stale imitation, mind you, forgoing fan service for its own enigmas, dropping enough Biblical references to lead pseudo philosophers down the rabbit hole post-screening, but struggling to reach the emotional crescendos achieved by its predecessor, though that faint pulse doubles as its revelation.

The original blade runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), was human, tasked with tracking down replicants who had gone rogue and “retiring” them. If questions emerged about whether Deckard himself might have been replicant, that was thankfully left open-ended, and Villenevue gratefully honors that ellipsis. In 2049, however, suggesting technology’s eternally unremitting advance, replicants are now tracked by replicants, like K (Ryan Gosling), which only works because he is a newer model, built by Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), re-engineering these androids to be even better and more obedient. But a miraculous birth involving a replicant — shades of, well, obviously — becomes a possible game-changer, prompting Wallace to dispatch his right-hand replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to see if the story is true, while K is dispatched by his superior Joshi (Robin Wright) to ensure the story remains under wraps. The specifics of this storyline, while plentiful, ultimately matter less than the metaphysics surrounding it, which is not unlike the original, though there Vangelis’s atmospheric score better underlined these philosophical musings than Han Zimmer’s typical bombast.

Both K and Luv might be entrusted by actual humans to do their bidding, but they are still slaves, brought home in one of Leto’s monotonous monologues but better glimpsed in sequences between K and Joshi, in which a splendid Wright both exudes the obvious dependence she has on K and an above-him haughtiness. His chance at freedom, meanwhile, becomes part and parcel to the miracle birth mystery, one bringing him to the doorstep of Rick Deckard, imposed in self-exile in Las Vegas where Villeneuve exhumes great mileage from the remnants of a hedonistic society gone belly-up. If Ford played the original with something like his early career impassivity, here he dials up his late career gruff disinterest, which is not to suggest he is parodying himself. He functions as a deliberate jolt of presence, making it ever more clear, at least in this reviewer’s mind, that he’s a person.

Those attempts are most obvious in K’s relationship with Joi (Ana de Armas), something like a holographic romantic companion, a subplot borrowing heavily from Spike Jonze’s “Her.” Then again, while the titular Her was an artificially operating system not unlike Joi, the Him (Joaquin Phoenix) was a Human, as the film sought to push the boundaries of physical relationships in a high-tech world to their breaking point. In “2049’s” relationship, each person, so to speak, is A.I., and their tendency to sort of role play Married Life, which could have been hellacious satire, like a sci-fi send-up of The Donna Reed Show, eventually falls flat because Villeneuve treats it genuinely without giving it enough time to bloom beyond its introductory phony parameters.

Of course, the original’s central relationship, between Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant, was also underdeveloped, merely a means to an end, though the film’s saving emotional grace became Best in Show Rutger Hauer as feeling, living replicant Roy Batty. Gosling, on the other hand, while often charismatically charming in comedies, typically relies on a placidity where his muscles don’t even seem to be twitching in drama, like “Place Beyond the Pines”, which is why he is so impeccably able to interpret an android. And while K’s journey takes him to the point where he makes decisions intended to render him as more human than human, Gosling makes the conscious decision to still play these closing moments not with Hauer’s romantic sentience but with robotic detachment, like his watery confrontation with Luv.

Exactly where these two were when they went one-on-one, I was never quite clear, not that it mattered, because as Villeneuve cut between close-ups of the duo, the immovable contours of Gosling’s face became edifying in their emotionless. The conclusion is intended to offset this, but the conclusion comes across merely as a narrative prerequisite, less forceful than the translucent emptiness of K and Luv’s parting glances, and while watching them, I nearly wept because I felt humanity floating further and further out to sea.

Sicario

As “Sicario” opens, a low rumble pervades the soundtrack, like thunder percolating in the distance. The picture comes up on the Arizonan desert as members of a SWAT Team dart in from screen’s right, a nondescript house their target. That low rumble grows, threatening, menacing and then... It explodes. An ARV smashes through the house’s wall. Shooting erupts. Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), commander of a high-tech top-notch kidnap unit responding to a call, kills someone. But what they find isn’t what they expected. Dead bodies, rows of them, victims of a drug cartel’s vengeance, rot inside the home’s drywall. These thick-skinned agents bend over and vomit. And it gets worse when someone opens a trap door, detonating a bomb, taking a few of the good guys with it. Lucky to survive, Kate sits in the post-blast dust, dazed, and sees a severed arm on the ground. This is American soil but it’s like the opening of “Saving Private Ryan.” The War on Drugs is a nifty label; you can use it in stump speeches; you can put it on bumper stickers; you can say we’re “winning” it or “losing” it or anything in-between. But it’s all distant ambient noise compared to the high-watt screams of this sequence. This, “Sicario” is saying with a punch to the goddam gut, is your War on Drugs.

Working in conjunction with Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay, one that favors keen subtext over explicit speechifying, Denis Villeneuve’s immaculate two hour film feels extraordinarily lean, packaged with nary a moment of dead air. His action set pieces are unfathomably intense, yet no less exhilarating for the way in which he genuinely, inexorably and breathlessly builds tension; he builds and builds and then…releases, quickly and viciously, maximizing the impact before barreling on. And if these and other events are brutal, he never glorifies the violence, giving us just enough sense of the carnage to grasp the enormous real world stakes and then cutting away. And “Sicario’s” photography, courtesy of the impeccable Roger Deakins, repeatedly ruminates in breathless images of the southwestern landscape, such as the red sun cutting through the low hanging clouds like arrows of flaming fire even as machine gun fire pops in the distance, nature’s beauty juxtaposed against the film’s ferocious anger.

Kate is our entry point this story of extravagant governmental murk and mire, enlisted to join a nebulous outfit captained by a guy whose position is vague but clearly high up, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, effortlessly rendering drug enforcement as dinner theater), introduced wearing flip-flops to a top level meeting, swift characterization that establishes his easygoing familiarity with such weighty derring-do that stands in stark contrast to Kate’s naivety. Played by Blunt with taciturn intensity, Kate is something of a cipher, but that’s deliberate rather than a writing failure. Matt ensures she has no family ties because he wants her to be a social nonentity. The film’s only real pause in momentum is a seeming cut-from-cardboard sequence of Kate going out for drinks that devolves into something horrifying. The horror, however, while conventional on the surface, expresses an existence where every personal relationship retains the possibility of being compromised. To lead her life, you inevitably see the world upside down, evoked in an indelible shot reflected in a coffee table of Kate at a delicate instant.

Physically, Blunt’s performance is rock steady. Her eyes, on the other hand, searching, skeptical, fearful, tell a dissimilar story, one in which confusion merely balloons by the moment; she’s down the rabbit hole. Normally a movie so devoted to withholding pertinent information from its protagonist would be guilty of a cheap ploy to prolong suspense; in “Sicario” it feels spot-on. Cryptic is the language of bureaucracy in this brave new world. Matt speaks in vacuous riddles. You keep waiting for Kate to transform into a fed-up ass-kicker taking names, the requisite unstoppable anti-drug action movie force. That doesn’t happen. The only real knowledge she gleans is the war’s continually moving boundaries. Anything goes.

Those moving goalposts pertain just as much to the movie’s narrative. If Matt seems the big cheese, that is proven partially illusory the more Kate gets to know his ostensible right-hand man, Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). His intent, his attitude, even his nationality, shift scene to scene, and that elusiveness is personified most in his relationship with Kate, one that persistently re-sets. If you think they’re friends, they’re probably enemies, and vice-versa. Fifteen years ago Del Toro won an Oscar for “Traffic” playing a Mexican cop, Javier, caught up in the War on Drugs on the other side of the border. Alejandro may as well be Javier with a lot more mileage on him. If Javier was hopeful, Alejandro, played by Del Toro with a fiercely inscrutable poker face, is dark and doubtful, and the lines in his face unconsciously evoke the toil this border battle takes.

The “Traffic” comparison is imperative. Steven Soderbergh’s fine film encompassed all aspects of this unwinnable war, from corrupt Mexican cops to DEA agents stuck between a rock and a hard place to the drug war coming home to affluent America. “Sicario” deliberately takes a narrower approach, presenting the front lines rather than the fallout, money poured into the logistics and gear to maintain a fight where the finish line is an omnipresent mirage. One scene finds Kate descending into a drug tunnel beneath the border where yet another harsh revelation awaits. Emblemizing the entire film, she is made to burrow deeper and deeper, hoping to reach the bottom of this crusade, only to find the bottom repeatedly giving way to more layers, more and more, on and on into forever, etc. It's a cynical viewpoint, yes, but from that cynicism emerges a paradoxical clarity, the only kind that can exist in a conflict of such awe-inspiring ethical elasticity. The further she plunges into darkness, the closer she gets to seeing the light.

Prisoners

There is an arresting visual moment in “Prisoners” when we literally see the gray raindrops that have been present essentially since the film’s grave inciting incident begin transform into wet snowflakes, fall giving way to winter right before our very eyes. It is not unlike an earlier moment when this thriller’s already unhinged premise seems to transform into something so sensationalist it jumps the shark. It would be nice if film could simply exist in a vacuum I suppose, but the recurring real world situation that kept populating my mind was Cleveland and the abduction of those three girls and the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon them. How can we know what anyone is truly capable of and what terror unknowingly lurks behind every door? This is the unsettling truth “Prisoners” grasps and throttles – for better or for worse – home.

A pair of families gather for Thanksgiving. All seems normal until the youngest daughter of each family suddenly goes missing. When they do, the rain begins to pour and Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has never not solved a case, shows up. Speculation on an abductor centers around a musty motor home where the two young girls were seen playing. The motor home belongs to Alex (Paul Dano), whose glasses, hair and complexion are like Thriller Suspect 101. Alas, Alex, possessing an IQ of 10, can hardly mumble a sentence. After the requisite holding period he is released and returns home with his Aunt (Melissa Leo). Loki has his doubts about Alex’s innocence and so does Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), the blue collar father of the younger of the two missing girls.

Convinced Alex is responsible for the abduction and maddened by what he views as police inaction, Keller acts by abducting Alex, locking him up in an abandoned house and relentlessly torturing him in an effort to unearth the truth. This is not a spoiler if you have seen the preview nor is it really a spoiler if you haven’t, for this “twist” occurs fairly early and “Prisoners” is – to quote its own metaphor – a maze that far exceeds any single reveal. The film, in fact, is a good two-and-a-half hours. Overlong? It is, but I dare say director Denis Villeneuve’s intention is to actively impress upon us that length – just when we feel the road to whodunit? straightening out, we hit another curve.

“Prisoners” is the sort of the film that allows quality actors to delve deeply into the finer points of characterization. Jackman turns a sickly shade of pale and purposely plays at one note – thunderous. Gyllenhaal outfits his character with twitchy eyes, blinking repeatedly and rapidly in such a way that suggests they have been made to see more than they can believe (and says as much if not more than the stock introductory scene of his Thanksgiving dinner at a Chinese restaurant). So too does he come equipped with the teensiest tattoo of a cross on his thumb which plays directly off Keller’s own fascination with faith – the cross dangling around his neck and from his rearview mirror. Faith hangs over the whole film like its low skies, often fairly insistently, but often people of faith are very insistent in theirs.

Gyllenhaal and Jackman are, of course, not alone in the cast, joined by the adept Viola Davis as well as Terrence Howard – both of which comprise the couple of the second missing girl – and Maria Bello as Keller’s wife. Skilled as this trio is, they are primarily – interestingly (curiously?) – relegated to the sideline. Bello spends most of the movie zonked out on sleeping pills. Howard (sporting an excellent homage to the Cosby Sweater in his first scene) and Davis are meant to function as the conscience to Keller, but his conscience seems of little consequence and so they are more or less moved aside. The push and pull of Keller and Loki is the movie’s center.

The ethics at play in “Prisoners” are not convenient, and for that reason it is able to rise above its genre restrictions and requisite red herrings (particularly in the frustrating form of one character that just gets dropped in to distract the narrative). Ultimately its most fascinating theme is that of Keller’s absolutism. Faith, let’s face it, can be just as frightening as reassuring, and there is underlying commentary here about the modern day misappropriation of faith – I’m Right/You’re Wrong/No In Between.

That is what makes the end a puzzle. It's less ambiguous, I would argue, than a choose-your-own adventure, a modern-day Lady or the Tiger? Villeneuve is saying the question of what happens after the final cut is one not to be lightly considered, and not for him to presume to set himself up as the one person able to answer it. And so he leaves it with all of us: should one be made to pay for their sins or be left to wrestle with them in their own mind?