Philip K. Dick – Memphis Flyer

“I can’t help thinking it’s a lot like making a sequel to Casablanca,” tweeted author William Gibson while on his way to see Blade Runner 2049. Gibson has the distinction of being one of the first in a long line of creators influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. He was about a third of the way through his first draft of Neuromancer, the novel that invented cyberpunk and indelibly shaped our conception of the internet age, when he saw the film. Neuromancer and its sequels are set in a decaying urban world that looks a lot like the hellscape Scott created for Blade Runner.

Casablanca has been described as having a screenplay made entirely of cliches — but the reason they’re cliches is because subsequent screenwriters stole them from Casablanca. Something like that happened with Blade Runner visually. “It affected the way people dressed,” Gibson said in a recent Paris Review interview. “It affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.”

Blade Runner was released in the summer of 1982, sci-fi’s cinema’s miracle year, in the company of classics like Poltergeist, The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and The Dark Crystal. But Scott’s groundbreaking visual masterpiece had the misfortune to be released two weeks after Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had declared Morning in America, and audiences wanted a feel-good story about a brave, healing alien more than a glimpse into the dystopian future. Even having Harrison Ford as the lead couldn’t put asses in seats, and Blade Runner flopped hard, almost destroying Scott’s career.

But the legend grew over the decades, and so Scott, acting as executive producer, tapped Arrival director Denis Villeneuve to helm the long-awaited (or perhaps long-dreaded) sequel, with screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who had adapted Philip K. Dick for the original film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who worked with Villeneuve on Sicario, was chosen to follow up one of the most visually influential films in history.

Blade Runner‘s opening shot identifies the setting as “Los Angles, 2019.” Blade Runner 2049 begins with an echo of those images: An eye, in extreme close up, and a flying car gliding over the ruins of California. In the ensuing three decades, the ecological crisis has only deepened. The only way to grow food is in vast, climate-controlled greenhouses. When the car lands in one lonely agricultural outpost, K (Ryan Gosling) emerges. Like Rick Deckard, he works for the LAPD hunting down artificial humans or replicants, who have gone rogue. Unlike Deckard, he is unambiguously a replicant himself. At the farm, he finds Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), an android on the run who berates him for killing “his own kind.” He wouldn’t do that, Sapper says, if he had “seen the miracle.” K kills him anyway, but the words ring in his ears. What miracle?

Those fearing a cookie cutter remake of the original will be pleased to discover that this is not the case. Blade Runner 2049‘s story builds logically on the original — a seemingly impossible task pulled off gracefully by Fancher and co-writer Michael Green. Resonances come not out of slavish fan service, but because both films are essentially noir detective stories. Some elements feel more like a sequel to Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? than Scott’s film, such as K’s relationship with his holographic A.I. Joi (Ana de Armas)—two simulated beings experiencing possibly real emotions. Gosling gives by far the best performance of his career. When his investigation leads him to an aged Deckard living in the irradiated remains of Las Vegas, he goes toe to toe with Ford and a malfunctioning Elvis hologram in a bravado sequence that alone is worth the price of admission.

The only element of 2049 significantly inferior to the original film is the music. Vangelis’ improvisational synth score is as big a part of the Blade Runner mystique as John Williams’ soundtrack is for Star Wars. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch created a conventional, pounding, atonal soundscape that feels much less subtle.

The film’s running time is hefty, but its pleasures are deep and satisfying. Villeneuve’s direction is brilliant, and if Deakins doesn’t win an Oscar for this cinematography, the award has no meaning. See it on the largest screen you can find.

Blade Runner 2049
Now playing
Multiple locations

In the opening scene of A Scanner Darkly, director Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel, a man wakes up covered in bugs. Scratching furiously and fruitlessly, he runs to the shower to wash them away. But just when he thinks he’s clear, the bugs re-emerge from his skull and cover his body again. Twitching and panicky, he grabs a can of insecticide and sprays it all over his body.

The bugs aren’t real. They’re a hallucination caused by a drug called Substance D, which the man is addicted to. The scene is gripping, but what makes it even more interesting is the far-from-accidental casting. Playing the drug-casualty Freck is Rory Cochrane, the actor who, 13 years earlier, was the happy-go-lucky stoner Slater in Linklater’s beloved Dazed and Confused.

This is a telling juxtaposition. Because as much as A Scanner Darkly explores the themes seemingly important to Dick (addiction, surveillance, identity), it also feels very personal for Linklater. In following a makeshift family of thirty- and fortysomething SoCal addicts, Linklater uses A Scanner Darkly to return to the dropout culture he chronicled in early-’90s classics Slacker and Dazed and Confused. And it isn’t a pretty picture. The gaggle of paranoid, pontificating druggies (which include, also crucially, Gen-X icons Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr.) stuck in crash-pad squalor feel like the kids from Dazed and Confused, still dazed and still confused more than a decade after they should have cleaned up. The result is poignant — Linklater’s feel for the milieu still provokes laughs but with an undercurrent of sadness this time.

And as much as Dick’s and Linklater’s respective concerns merge easily in A Scanner Darkly, so does Linklater’s visual strategy with the film’s story. Linklater uses the same “rotoscope” animation that he used on 2001’s astonishing Waking Life. As deployed by head of animation Bob Sabiston and his crew of artists (I counted 42 animators credited for A Scanner Darkly), this rotoscoping allows digitally recorded footage to be painted over. The result is the best of both worlds — real personalities and performances along with the freedom of animation. In Waking Life, each character had his or her own animation style. In A Scanner Darkly, the look is more uniform, but the heightened expressions and shifting tableaus (the film’s frame moves like a living organism) add to the hallucinogenic quality of the story.

Set “seven years from now,” the central character in A Scanner Darkly is Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), an undercover narcotics officer who gets addicted to Substance D — a designer drug that’s ensnared 20 percent of the population — while trying to work his way up the supply chain. Arctor has ensconced himself in a druggy clique that, in addition to Freck, includes hyper-paranoid conspiracist Barris (Downey), completely fried surfer dude Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and dealer/quasi-girlfriend Donna (Ryder).

“There are no weekend warriors on the D,” Barris says. “You’re either on it or you haven’t tried it.” But as Arctor and his pals descend into a D-fueled haze (they sometimes call the drug “death”), you sense that there may be larger forces pulling the strings, from the surveillance-minded government agency Arctor ostensibly works for to the shadowy corporation New Path, which may be working both sides of the “death” divide.

Arctor wears identity-morphing “scramble suits” on the job, and, as Substance D takes over, this conceit rhymes with Arctor’s own internal shifts as different spheres of his brain battle for dominance. With Arctor’s sense of reality and identity crumbling — he’s so disjointed at one point he isn’t sure what woman he’s making love to — A Scanner Darkly can be hard to follow, although many of its questions are eventually answered.

But, ultimately, this confusion serves the film well. A Scanner Darkly takes you into the skittish, scorched-synapse world of its protagonists. Despite ostensible riffs on the drug war, surveillance society, corporate power, and suburban decay, it’s not a message movie. It’s too self-contained, too justifiably and rewardingly navel-gazing to make grand statements. It’s a woozy, paranoid pleasure that stays with you long after the credits roll, and it demands repeat viewings. And it’s further proof that Linklater — America’s most versatile director — can do pretty much anything.

A Scanner Darkly

Opening Friday, July 14th

Studio on the Square