It’s as engrossing and hypnotic as it is ultimately draining. But I return to his brilliant work time and again because watching a film that feels so carefully sculpted in time is simply unlike any other cinematic experience. “Tarkovsky’s films are often exhausting experiences as they are both emotionally devastating and aesthetically challenging for the viewer. Our own Landon Palmer says it better in a 2011 review of the film’s Blu-ray release: If BR2049 owes it anything, it also owes to the work of Ingmar Bergman, in part just for it being made near Faro Island in Sweden with Bergman regular Josephson in the lead, and Bergman DP Sven Nykvist as cinematographer. Its story is about a man (Erland Josephson) who offers himself as a sacrifice to God if his family will be spared during the oncoming World War III. Like most of Tarkovsky’s films, The Sacrifice is quite long and feels even longer because it’s so slow-moving, but it’s still shorter than BR2049. But The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky’s final work, is not as well-known, and it too has been visually compared side by side with shots from BR2049 on Twitter (see here and here).
And hopefully you’re at least familiar with his most famous sci-fi feature, Solaris. I recently had that on the list of movies to watch after Atomic Blonde, so hopefully you saw it then. Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson went for a specific reference by recommending 1979’s Stalker. The Sacrifice (1986)Ĭritics and other cineastes have been likening the look and tone of BR2049 to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, with cinematographer Roger Deakins earning much of the praise in that comparison. Also, in both Logan’s Run and BR2049, the hero is in pursuit of something he believes to be true that doesn’t wind up being so. Eventually, this Blade Runner, ‘K’, has to go on the run but not for the same reason. He’s tasked with terminating replicants that didn’t have an internal shut-off mechanism and kept on living. BR2049 goes further in having a replicant Blade Runner (Ryan Gosling) who hunts his own kind.
There’s not really any connection to be made between the first movie and Logan’s Run except the idea of a maximum age, which is imposed on non-human replicants. The plot follows one of these Sandmen who tries to flee himself when he realizes his time is up. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s novel is set in a future where humans have a maximum age, and if they don’t comply with their imposed expiration when they turn 30, officers known as “Sandmen” track them down and terminate them. Michael Anderson’s adaptation of William F. While you wait to find out, here are nine movies that already exist that are worth a look after you see the new movie: Logan’s Run (1976)īecause many old films inspired the original Blade Runner, I wanted to only recommend stuff released since 1982, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this one. Perhaps the next 35 years and beyond will be filled with works influenced by the Denis Villeneuve-helmed follow-up. There are even three short films (Jake Scott’s 2036: Nexus Dawn and 2048: Nowhere to Run and Shinichirô Watanabe’s Black Out 2022) that officially link the first movie to Blade Runner 2049. The original Blade Runner is one of the most influential movies of the last 35 years, so there is a ton of stuff to see between Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic and its sequel.