The assignment: Start a revolution in 60 seconds.
Do it by airing a TV commercial about a product launch, which never shows the product, but is an unofficial film adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984,” where the ad reveals the physical innards of the state; a blue-gray silo of pneumatic tubes of human cargo, where men – with shaved heads and shorn identities – march to the beat of their own boot heels, in this audiovisual form of sensory overload, while police officers (in riot gear) chase a woman (in red shorts and a white tank top) who hurls a sledgehammer against a giant screen, thereby shattering the image of Big Brother and unleashing a blast of truth and light.
Cut to a scroll of black text, where the voice-over says:
“On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like ‘1984.’”
We nonetheless get to see Ridley Scott’s version of “1984,” a directorial masterpiece that equals or exceeds his vision of the year 2019 in “Blade Runner.”
Start, then, with the opening sequences of “Blade Runner” and “Apocalypse Now,” the two best introductions of their kind in the last 40 years.
Start with huge bursts of fire.
Start with a pyrotechnic display that upends our ideas about war and peace, where palm trees sway like matchsticks and a city famous for its palm trees has no trees whatsoever, where music and motion synchronize to the respective compositions of a poet and his keyboardist, as well as a composer who performs his own instrumental works, where the sound of helicopters slows to the speed of ceiling fans, in one film, while a flying car speeds by, in another, where the past looks like a jungle and the future is a concrete jungle of pyramids and electric lights.
Start with “Blade Runner’s” depiction of Los Angeles.
A city of continual rain, where pedestrians carry translucent umbrellas lined with exterior lights, where the view from above is of a sea of invertebrates –– colonies of jellyfish that are as artificial as any mechanical owl or snake.
That motif recurs in “Blade Runner 2049,” where Denis Villeneuve preserves Scott’s cityscape of Mayan ruins and rooftop signs for Pan Am and Sony, in addition to huge billboards for Atari and a holographic ingénue from the successor to the fictional Tyrell Corporation, while making Las Vegas his own.
Where Scott gives us fire and rain, Villeneuve gives us sand and snow.
He transforms Las Vegas into the Red Planet, a radioactive desert with its own “Face on Mars,” where this hollow icon – with its exposed sections of twisted metal – lies on the surface of this earthbound equivalent of Cydonia, where there lives a man and his dog, but no Venetians or guests of The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino.
Villeneuve gives us the Overlook Hotel, free of spirits but with plenty of spirits and whisky to drink. The bar looks as sleek as the one in “The Shining,” minus the actor Joe Turkel who plays Lloyd, the ghost of a bartender who slips Jack Nicholson a bottle of bourbon and some ice; the same actor who plays Dr. Eldon Tyrell, whose corporation manufactures replicants.
Villeneuve also pays tribute to filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick and Terry Gilliam, by way of retro-modern devices such as a belligerent computer with a fisheye lens, a binocular machine for viewing DNA records, a video jukebox with a clear glass dome, a Berlin Wall of a card catalog, and boxes (and boxes) of paper receipts.
Both films address how we perceive reality, with a blind demigod in the sequel and a shortsighted idol, in the original, who loses his eyes – and his life – at the hands of his creation.
Both films end with water, like tears in rain and frozen droplets of rain, leaving us wanting more of everything.
Both films are works of genius by a pair of geniuses.