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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the two bodies overlap when Joi projects over a woman. (camera)
Two images sit on one another, fingertips misaligned, a caress that belongs to no single body. Villeneuve never tells you which woman K is touching.
Payoff: The film refuses to say what is real inside its own most tender scene. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls this a crystal: the actual and the virtual circling each other with no way to separate them.
Track every moment the film hints K might be the child. (structure)
The wooden horse, the memory, the date carved in wood. The script raises his specialness and withdraws it. Fancher and Green build the mystery so the answer subtracts rather than delivers.
Payoff: Losing the answer is the point: what's left is a choice he makes with no reward attached.
Look at Rachael's face in the Wallace scene. (setting)
A younger Sean Young reconstructed digitally over a double. The skin holds, the eyes almost do. You are watching a manufactured person played by a manufactured image.
Payoff: The production commits the film's own anxiety about forged beings, on screen, in a scene about forgery.
Count how many shots have no one in them. (staging)
The orange Vegas void with its dead statuary, the rippling Wallace halls, rain on empty concrete. Deakins builds rooms where nothing can be done, only beheld.
Payoff: These places stop being stages for action and become the subject themselves.
Carry this in: Watch how small the people are, and how long the camera stays after they stop moving.