Tag: Denis Villeneuve

Blade Runner 2049 (2017, Denis Villeneuve)

~ Ryan Swen ~ 1 Comment

replicants

Note: Per the requests of Warner Bros. and Denis Villeneuve, this review will not discuss the majority of the basic set-up of Blade Runner 2049.

First things first: it seems important to acknowledge that for me, and likely many of those reading this, Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction neo-noir is one of the crowning cinematic accomplishments of the latter half of the 20th century. This point is more salient than for the average sequel, given the relatively mammoth amount of time between the original and the sequel, the rightfully towering status of the first movie, and the debt, narratively and topographically, that this successor owes to its forerunner.

And to their credit, Denis Villeneuve and his collaborators only rarely feint towards slavish imitation of the original; certain scenes come off as echoes and evocations rather than simple copies – for example, a postmortem scan of bones corresponding to the photograph analysis in the original. Even though star Harrison Ford (albeit in a significantly less central role), scribe Hampton Fancher (subject of the magnificent documentary Escapes, which is a more enjoyable and insightful experience all things considered) and director Ridley Scott (in an executive producer role) all return, the contributions from all involved feel fairly fresh and distinctly modern.

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Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

~ Ryan Swen

arrival

The best science fiction films are often praised for what may seem like the antithesis of the genre: the essential humanity and drama in the face of spectacle and grandeur. So it is perhaps no surprise that Arrival, a film of no small ambition, takes as its subject nothing less than the human race, filtered through the unique perspective of expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams). It is an alien invasion movie without an invasion, and indeed it seems as if Denis Villeneuve is almost totally uninterested in the extraterrestrials except as vaguely benign, abstract concepts. Instead, he first focuses with minute detail on the great unknown of the potential threat of the pods (the twelve cavernous spaceships that land in seemingly random places around the globe) before lurching into grand displays of emotion that culminate in an entirely unexpected conclusion that radically recontextualizes practically the entire film.

Villeneuve’s strength is in his gift for immersive suspense, which he only truly gets to display in the first venture of Louise and her compatriots, including Ian Donnelly (a caring, amusing Jeremy Renner) and Colonel Weber (a stolid Forest Whitaker), into the pod. Elsewhere, his sensibility comes off as too dour, particularly in the opening scenes which lean too hard into the panicked yet muted reactions of the public at large. Adams provides a welcome counterpoint throughout, infusing Louise with equal parts sensitivity and determination and a dash of ingenuity that almost feels like a light in the darkness of the unknown.

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