Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Blade Runner 2049
2017 · Denis Villeneuve · Blade Runner 2049 on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how small Gosling is inside the frame. (staging)
Villeneuve and Deakins keep dropping K to the bottom or edge of enormous concrete halls, drowned gold chambers, empty desert. The architecture climbs out of the shot.
Payoff: The scale tells you what the dialogue won't: this man is one unit in a world that has no use for him. In the reading: the time-image. A figure who mostly watches instead of acting is what the reading calls the seer, and the frame keeps saying so.
Notice each location has one color and almost no other. (light)
Cold blue-gray rain in Los Angeles, sickly green and amber at Wallace, sodium orange in Las Vegas. Deakins lets a single hue swallow the whole scene.
Payoff: You navigate the story by color before you follow the plot, so each place arrives as a feeling first. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: the hue carries the mood of the scene instead of just lighting it.
Watch Gosling's face during long stretches when he says nothing. (performance)
K listens, looks, absorbs. Gosling keeps everything in micro-expression and bearing. Compare him to Hoeks's brittle Luv and Wright's clipped Joshi, who both push harder.
Payoff: The performance makes you do the work of reading him, which is exactly what the story asks about him.
Listen for the low synth drone under scenes with no dialogue. (sound)
Zimmer and Wallfisch push distorted analog-style tones into sub-bass. The sound design adds rain, wind, mechanical hum. It presses rather than accompanies.
Payoff: The score is a physical pressure on the room, so the film's dread reaches you through your body.
Count how long a shot holds after the information has landed. (cutting)
Joe Walker lets scenes run past their point. Across 164 minutes the cutting favors duration over montage, and transitions between color-coded places do the work montage usually does.
Payoff: You feel time passing instead of watching a plot get somewhere, which is what the slowness is for.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how small the people are, and how long the camera stays after they stop moving.