Screenwriting Lessons from BLADE RUNNER 2049
This is all pure spoilery stuff
I really enjoyed the movie. I did. It’ll likely be a top 10 of the year for me. When you’ve seen as many movies as us old cine-dudes, anytime a genre film feels like it’s crafted by great filmmakers who made the movie they WANTED to make not necessarily the one they were hired to make it’s a cause to celebrate.
So yay…celebrate…play Kool & The Gang. Pop some champagne. Whatevs.
But you’ve seen the tweets. The Mehs. The box-office.
I was so enamored by the craft and world-building and performances and Blade Runner-ishness of the whole thing.
But this was no Fury Road. It had a different pace. Not the norm. Especially in modern day sci-fi or film noir or movies in general.
So I wanted to dive in and say ‘why?’ from a screenwriting sense. There are other criticisms that are almost beyond ‘screenwriting matters’. Slow/ponderous scenes that could be nipped and tucked or trimmed. Lingering shots that go on for 20 seconds that could be sliced up. There is an argument to be made that the movie could be 30 minutes shorter without cutting a single story beat or line of dialogue.
A case could be made that we’re just not used to watching 2 plus hours of content at a time anymore.
And slow pacing extends beyond running time. There are movies that are 90 minutes that feel like 3 hours and others that you wish could go on forever. I don’t think it’s usually about running-time.
But let’s talk screenwriting:
STRUCTURE
Typically slow movies have structure errors.
For my own purposes, I’ll define the end of ACT ONE at the moment a Hero has a goal, there’s a significant obstacle holding keeping him from getting it, and there’s life or death stakes if he doesn’t solve the problem. It’s the setup of the movie we’ve come to watch. It puts our hero on a mission, the mission is the premise we signed up for.
Most ‘slow reads’ or ‘slow movies’ take a long time. Imagine if Indiana Jones didn’t even find out about the Lost Ark until the one hour mark or Neo didn’t take the pill until 50 minutes in. We’d have a sense of ‘get on with it!!!’
There are movies that fudge this a bit — slow burn movies that ooze with tension — they take 35 minutes to setup the premise instead of 25. There are movies that don’t have a strongly defined premise to them or ones that shift goals enough that’s it’s not clear.
All of these things run the risk of getting boring.
Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t do this. It’s a mission movie. And almost from the begining the movie is putting the hero on a mission.
The hero gets a goal — find the baby, an obstacle — ‘the mystery, the fact the baby was hidden’, and stakes — ‘this could break everything’ — pretty much right on target.
There was another issue for me. A sense of urgency. One test I like for premises and act breaks is ‘why does this have to happen RIGHT NOW!’
Imagine if Indiana Jones knew about the Ark…but also knew the Nazi’s really weren’t actively hunting it. It’s the fact that the Nazi’s have a headstart that gives the movie its urgency.
Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t really have this. The finding of dead Sean Young is sort of random and lucky. It could have happened this year or next year. It didn’t need to happen right now. Our hero has a big head start on the case. He can take his time.
I never bought into Robin Wright’s urgency. Sure philosphically this could break the world but it doesn’t resonate with the audience. Or maybe it’s that we don’t empathize with it. I think most of us having lived with replicants since the first Blade Runner feel that the baby’s reveal would be a good thing.
Additionally, the baby has been hidden in the world all this time without being revealed. If the characters DO NOTHING they’d probably be better off. This hunt seems foolish from the beginning.
For me, I think it’s a screenplay issue. Something where I didn’t buy in and feel anxiety/tension about our heroes mission. I felt they could fail and not much would change.
The real urgency shows up when the case gets personal. It’s the old want vs. need. Ryan wants to find the baby and do a good job. But Ryan needs to find out why he has memories associated with the missing baby. Is he special? Does he have a soul? Is he the one?
Additionally, as Jared Leto’s forces slowly ramp up…it provides a bit of a race and tension. It’s slow developing and Leto’s forces are always behind our hero. But still, it feels like the story is more engaged when we have the double-dose of personal urgency and bad guy tension in the story.
It’s great stuff for a story engine. I’m not sure it’s deeply explored.
EMPATHY
We’re introduced to a replicant who seems to exists to ‘do his job’. The opening scene shows him murdering someone who seems ‘more human’ and more deserving of our empathy.
It’s a key to the story, as the plot revolves around our hero finding his own humanity…or his soul. But it’s some dangerous ground to tread. In order for the movie to hook us, we need to get inside this ‘skin’ (no pun intended) and feel what he feels. But the movie works hard to keep him robotic. He doesn’t even feel serious pain and just glues himself back together. Some common techniques are used in the opening — he’s pitted as an underdog, he’s lonely, he’s great at his job and he suffers intense prejudice and injustice from the world around him. He also longs for something. He wants. And it’s human nature for audience members to jump on board that journey.
Wall-E is an example of a movie that takes great pains to get us inside a robot’s brain. Wall-E — obviously a very different animal — takes great pains to personify the robot. He has many human traits and quirks. He’s fun/funny and he even tears up watching Hello Dolly. He longs for love much like Goslin in Blade Runner. And we’re given evidence to Goslin’s longing in the hologram ‘relationship’ he’s in. He buys the upgrade. He wants this thing. It’s shown completely in actions and not in the typical manipulation of audience feelings or putting us more in his POV.
We almost get a voyeuristic view of his secret life.
And our hero barely reacts or cares and it’s hard to get inside him. He doesn’t have the tools yet to love. But he wants it.
Whether or not this clicked for you emotionally is a personal thing.
It’s a choice the filmmakers/writers are making. They’re working hard to keep it ‘real’ and not overtly manipulating the audience. This can lead to audience responses of ‘the movie left me cold’. It’s muddier. We’re not purely on team Goslin. We watch his story unfold but don’t feel it. We don’t take the hits. We don’t cheer the wins. It’s not a sign of failure, just a different choice. Everything from The Shining to TV’s WestWorld has been levied with such criticisms…but in both cases there’s a certain creepy tension derived from not following the typical path.
I struggled with it in Blade Runner 2049 at times. Which meant the movie became more intellectual for me than emotional. When my heart takes over, my analytical brain shuts off. I’m along for the ride.
It’s risky to be in pure intellectual territory. It means your ‘great ideas’ and ‘philosophies’ have to carry the weight instead of a roller-coaster of plot and character turns and thrills and twists.
The longer it takes for us to ‘get on board’ with the main character the slooower the movie will feel. Most movies get you there so you can ‘feel’ the character’s tension, trials, successes. Otherwise, we as the audience just sit in a sort of dispassionate judge mode. Judging the character, the filmmakers, the plot, etc…
When Harrison Ford shows up…it’s almost a relief…suddenly something …HUMAN to latch onto. It was my favorite recent Harrison Ford performance.
I felt the same way about the memory scientist. What at the time felt like an expositional scene was a great relief. She was so very human.
Because of Harrison…for me…the movie ended strong. And mostly that’s what I took with me when I left the theater. It was Deckard and his daughter that provided the emotional momentum and kicked me out of ‘intellectual land’. But it also proved how effective Goslin’s character had been in his search for humanity. When a real human shows up it’s like a blast of cold water. We’re shocked by it.
I don’t see any of these as screenplay problems. The filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing. Their choices can be polarizing. It’s not lowest-common denominator storytelling.
The film has a Kubrickian feel or a Blade Runner feel. It’s not for everyone. And that’s what I love about it. I hope more people go see it. There’s a lot to admire. And learn.
