I · the wedge · the architecture aims at them
The Shot List · Cinematography Essay
Neon
Solitude
Isolation in Blade Runner 2049
The Shot List · Cinematography Essay
Isolation in Blade Runner 2049
It is one of the great crimes of modern cinema that Blade Runner 2049 was, by any studio accountant's measure, a flop. You could never fathom, while watching it, that Warner Bros. had swallowed a loss north of $80 million. Perhaps the signs were there. A sequel to a critically acclaimed cult classic that had itself failed at the box office, a contemplative film running nearly three hours, was always going to have a rough time filling theatres. It cost somewhere between $150 and $185 million, needed roughly $400 million to break even, and made $276.6 million worldwide.
What it lost in money it gained back in the only currency that outlasts a quarterly report. The film took two Oscars, one for visual effects and one for cinematography, and that second trophy ended the longest losing streak in the category: Roger Deakins, thirteen nominations and no wins, until this. What a movie to end it on.
It seems like every frame this movie has to offer paints a picture of a man who does not belong in the space we see him in. Deakins spends the largest shots in the film making K small, watched, or unreachable, and the reason they hurt is that they are gorgeous while they do it. He uses grandeur, and distinct beauty, to isolate both the viewer and K within the vast expanse.
Post-traumatic baseline test · Officer KD6-3.7
Three of the most masterful scenes come from when K makes his way to Wallace's office. In the first, a wedge of hard light cuts diagonally across a concrete void, and somewhere near the centre, on a lip of floor between one mass and another, stand two figures roughly the height of this sentence's punctuation. The frame is close to an empty, mostly unbroken surface in four values of gold, and Deakins puts the only living things at the point where the geometry converges, so the architecture appears to be aiming at them. Nothing in the shot is designed to help you see the people. They are in it to tell you how big the building is, which mirrors Wallace Corporation's erosion of humanity in pursuit of something "bigger".
In the second, a figure climbs a flight of steps toward a black opening, framed by concentric rectangles receding into the wall, with light rippling over every surface as though the corridor sat at the bottom of a swimming pool. The mechanism is beautifully simple: troughs of water lit from above, with the caustics left to do the decorating. The building is full of light behaving like ripples in water, but we never see the source of water. This mirrors the uncertainty and mystery through which we see the movie. K is insignificant, and uninvolved in what is truly going on. No matter what he tries, he is always a side character in a side plot. We never see the source, only the effects, and K attempting to make himself significant.
In the third, Wallace's office itself, water crawls over every wall in a symmetrical wide while the two people in the scene sit off to the right with a tea service between them: small, dark, and easy to miss. This is the most elaborate setup in the movie, a ring of lamps run on a programmed chase so that at any moment it reads as one soft source drifting around the actors. It imitates sunlight crossing a skylight that does not exist. Production designer Dennis Gassner's rule for the world was that nothing gets real sunlight except the Wallace building, and his phrase for it was "entertainment for a blind man". So the man who owns the most beautiful light in the world experiences it through drones, and everyone who can actually see it is photographed as a small shape at the edge of a room that was never for them. Everybody in these frames is a visitor.
I · the wedge · the architecture aims at them
II · the stairs · light with no source
III · the office · a sun that does not exist
Two colossal heads lean toward each other in the orange, mouths parted, eyes closed, a kiss frozen a metre from completion. Between their lips, at the vanishing point, a single dark silhouette walks toward the camera. The colour was made on the lens. Tiffen built Deakins three custom filter options for the sequence, one from a golden amber gel, one from a medium amber, one combining a Moroccan pink with an orange, and the haze was thickened until the background lost its edges. Deakins traced the look to the 2009 Australian dust storm, the week Sydney woke up under a red sky.
What the composition does with that colour is vicious. The largest depiction of tenderness in the entire film is a piece of ruined advertising, permanently unconsummated, and the film puts K in the gap between the two mouths so that the only human contact available to him in this landscape is a negative space he can walk through. He is a hundred feet from a kiss that will never land, and he is the smallest thing in the picture.
While it is true that much of what I said about the statues can be said about this frame, I think this is one of the greatest frames in the movie, for the pure isolation it invokes in me. There is no defining feature aside from K and the environment. He exists alone within it, with not even a horizon line as an exit. Here, the vastness becomes claustrophobic: we see the weather imprisoning him on every side. Deakins puts the emphasis on K, makes him the only subject in this vast frame, and yet K still feels so insignificant.
"Everything you want to hear."
Joi product advertisement · Los Angeles
The billboard arrives right after Freysa tells him he was never the child, and it is the cruellest cut in the film. K walks out into the rain and a forty-foot hologram of Joi leans down over the street, naked, pink, saturated in a way nothing else in Los Angeles is allowed to be. His Joi was small and clothed and lived in one room, and the only difference between the two is manufacturing scale. When the advert calls him Joe, it is using the name she gave him on the night he decided he was somebody, and the name turns out to be a default setting that ships with every unit.
Deakins shoots it with the arrangement he has been using since the opening. Tiny figure at the bottom of the frame, enormous object filling everything above him, the same geometry that made the seawall feel like the edge of the world and the Wallace ziggurat feel like a temple. Here it does something closer to stocktaking. The composition he has trained us to read as awe turns out to have been describing a market the whole time, and K is standing at the bottom of it looking up at a product line he thought was a relationship. He does not say anything. He does not need to, because the frame has already told him his size.
The last two exteriors are the only ones where Deakins stops using the architecture against K. On the plaza, the building sits in the left third and then gives up. The plaza dissolves into snow, and the light comes off an overcast sky with nothing built into it: no filter, no water rig, no ring of lamps faking a sun. Then he lies down on the steps and the snow comes down on him and the frame holds still. For three hours the compositions have answered his search for meaning with scale, putting him at the bottom of ziggurats and under statues and beneath a forty-foot advert. Here there is nothing above him except weather. He gets the frame to himself, and it costs him his life to get it.
Throughout the film K convinces himself that he is chosen, that he is the child of man and of replicant, the one whose existence rewrites the world. Deakins never agrees with him.
Every frame, we see K in pursuit of purpose past his insignificant self. And every frame, a denial of that notion: the world is bigger than K will ever be.
Reza Merchant
The Shot List