Blade Runner 2049 (2017) ***

Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner” came out in 1982, and since then it has become a part of the canon, a litmus test for college students judging the taste of potential friends, and a standard by which sci-fi films are judged. Harrison Ford played Deckard, a cop who specialized in hunting down rogue biorobots. These biorobots, called Replicants, look human, but they are built with a 4-year lifespan, to keep them from becoming too independent and too human. That doesn't work, as Deckard learns. The Replicants have the same feelings and existential questions we all do: “Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?”

Denis Villeneuve's “Blade Runner 2049” picks up a few decades later, on an earth that sucks even more than in the first movie. The cities are crowded, and the countryside is a wasteland of techno-farms, with occasional ghost-cities made uninhabitable by terrorist attacks. Those who can, move off-planet, but colonizing new planets and preparing them for human habitation is labor-intensive, and that's where Replicants come in.

New model Replicants are less likely to rebel than the ones from Deckard's day. A few of those old models still exist, however, hiding out, and they still have blade runners to hunt them down and “retire” them. One of these is “K”(Ryan Gosling), a Replicant himself.

On one of his jobs, K discovers the bones of a dead Replicant. On autopsy, these reveal something inconceivable: She appears to have died in childbirth. Replicants were not designed to be able to reproduce. K's boss, Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright) recognizes this discovery as a huge threat. The possibility of Replicant reproduction would likely inspire even new model Replicants to demand human rights, while inspiring a backlash of fear among humans. She instructs K to find and destroy the child and all evidence of its birth. Meanwhile, the mysterious Niander Wallace, creator of the new model Replicants, wants to find the child to learn the secret of Replicant reproduction.

The central question of “Blade Runner 2049” and the original “Blade Runner” is, “Who gets to be considered a Person?” At the heart of this question lies the reason Replicants are needed in the first place. Wealthy earthlings are eager to get off the blighted earth. In order to have pleasant planets to move to, a large army of workers is needed to terraform the planets. Earth is full to overflowing with poor people who would happily do the work, but once they had made a new planet habitable, they would likely demand their own place on it. Part of the reason those with means leave earth is to escape the unwashed masses. They don't want to bring them along with them. Replicants can be used to do the work, then discarded.

There's also a new candidate for personhood in Denis Villeneuve's future: Artificial Intelligence. K has an AI program called Joi in his apartment, which talks to him and projects a 3-d image of a beautiful woman (Ana de Armas) to keep him company. Joi is just a computer program, as widely-available as Windows 10, but we come to see that K's Joi has a personality of its own and is in love with K.

The Replicants and AIs that populate the film obviously have their own thoughts and feelings. In order to use them as the slave-bots that they were built to be, people have to dehumanize them. It's the same thing we have always done, selecting a group of people to be treated like animals rather than people. It's sad to think that we might one day have flying cars, but still depend on the exploitation of fellow sentient beings.

It's also sad that Denis Villeneuve couldn't make a better sequel to “Blade Runner.” Don't get me wrong. “2049” has a lot to recommend it. The scenes are beautifully shot, the cast is good, and the story is fairly interesting. Ana de Armas is so beautiful, I could watch a whole movie about just her. It was also nice to see Harrison Ford again. The problem is that the movie is slow as molasses. It clocks in at almost 3 hours, and it just isn't worth that. Every scene drags on forever, and despite all that, there were points in the film where things didn't quite make sense, and I got the feeling that some explanatory footage had been cut out.

None of that changes the fact that, as a fan of “Blade Runner,” you are going to have to watch the sequel. Just moderate your expectations.

3 stars out of 5