Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
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- Despite a very rocky opening weekend, Blade Runner 2049 went on to gross over 5x its initial budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
- Unlike modern films, the massive explosion sequence in Blade Runner 2049 used zero CGI. The crew spent three weeks setting up the practical rig for a single take.
- If you look closely during the crowded sequence in the second act of Blade Runner 2049, the original author of the source material makes a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo.
Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 American science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve, a sequel to Ridley Scott's landmark 1982 film set 30 years later. Ryan Gosling stars as K, a replicant "blade runner" employed by the LAPD to track down and "retire" rogue older-model replicants. When K uncovers evidence that a replicant once gave birth โ thought to be biologically impossible โ he is drawn into a mystery that connects to the legendary blade runner Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, who has been missing for three decades.
The discovery threatens to destroy the fragile social order between humans and replicants and sends K on a journey that forces him to question his own identity and memories. Blade Runner 2049 was an extraordinary artistic achievement that faced an almost impossible challenge: creating a worthy sequel to one of the most revered science fiction films in history, 35 years after the original. Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins created a visual masterpiece, expanding the original film's noir-soaked cityscapes into vast, desolate wastelands of irradiated orange deserts, drowning coastal cities, and sterile corporate towers.
Deakins won his long-overdue first Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on the film. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch's thunderous score honored Vangelis's original while establishing its own identity. Despite universal critical acclaim and 13 major award wins, Blade Runner 2049 earned only $259 million worldwide against a $150 million production budget, a commercial disappointment attributed to its 163-minute runtime and deliberately contemplative pace.
The film has since been widely reassessed as a modern masterpiece, much as the original Blade Runner was only appreciated years after its initial commercial failure.
