Blade Runner Blackout 2022

My colleague Whitly wrote about the announcement of Shinichiro Watanabe's Blade Runner short recently. Now that it has been released, it's time to take a look at the short itself. You'd think this would be for the sake of the reader in order to say if it was worth watching or inform them of details they might have missed, but really, this is almost totally for my sake. If I may be allowed to break my playful-yet-analytic tone to open the fanboy vents for a moment....

...HOLY SHIT, A NEW BLADE RUNNER MOVIE IS COMING OUT AND IT SEEMS LIKE THEY'VE DONE EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER NOT TO SCREW IT UP! Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies of all time (though I do admit it's something I have to be in the mood for, and even with the final cut, there's still not a definitive version), and the new movie looks amazing. Aside from getting Jared Leto instead of David Bowie because of that asshole cancer and an odd shuffling of composers (I want Vangelis to play my funeral. The music is of upmost importance here), the cast and crew is pristine. The trailers have been nothing short of jaw-dropping, especially the retro-future cyberpunk aesthetic with the U.S.S.R. still being a thing and Atari maintaining status as a monolithic mega-corporation towering over everything in fluorescent lights. THIS IS MY HOLE! IT WAS MADE FOR ME! I'M EXCITED AND NOTHING THE INTERNET CAN DO IS GOING TO STOP ME FROM BEING EXCITED!


Deep breath, and back to our regular programming. When it was announced Watanabe was doing a prequel short to the new movie, my excitement compounded. In the extraordinarily picky parts of my mind, I would've preferred one of the directors from the eighties or nineties when a ton anime was dictated by the consumption of Western culture. The art direction for any future cityscape from Bubblegum Crisis to Akira was pretty much handing over a piece of paper that read, "BLADE RUNNER," and someone from that era directing could've made one fascinating cultural echo chamber. But cel animation is a thing of the past, talent like Koichi Mashimo (Director of the first half of Dominion Tank Police which lifted the police station design directly from the Ridley Scott film) aren't faring well on the creative front these days, and hey, you have the fricken' guy behind Cowboy Bebop who has already proven he can handle these kinds of projects from his two shorts on The Animatrix, an anthology that has only gotten better with age.

Before we discuss the animated short, "Blackout 2022," we must first address the shorts that came before it, which means...

REAL PEOPLE! Your world of waifus will return shortly... unless you consider Dave Bautista a waifu. I do not judge. Watanabe's work is the last part of three shorts that clue the viewer into what's happened in the 30-year in-story gap between the original and 2049. Mostly, the first two are meant to introduce major players Niandar Wallace (Leto's character) and Sapper Morton (Bautista's). The director Luke Scott was picked by 2049's helmsman Denis Villeneuve to showcase his work, but the style of both of them almost entirely mirrors the look from the new movie. The real difference comes from the actors themselves with Leto's creepily mechanical method acting ("Thank you. For. Your. Patience.") and Bautista's easy humanity mixed with brutal physicality. They are both punctuated by moments of visceral violence that are hard to watch, however. These are good, but they're obviously meant to be appetizers that aren't fully satisfying until the main course comes around.

"Blackout 2022" is an entirely different beast. While Watanabe got to work on two stand-alone shorts in The Animatrix, this is more akin to Mahiro Maeda's "The Second Renaissance" which explained the advent of the machines that would rule the world while giving a brief glimpse into Hell to boot. The story in the Blade Runner short covers the defining event that separates the first movie from the second: A blackout that led to the prohibition of replicants, artificial humans used as slave labor and other specific tasks. The Tyrell Corporation, seemingly undaunted by having their genius founder's eyes gouged into his brain by a Nexus 6, unveiled the Nexus 8, replicants with the lifespans of humans. To balance this, the federal government created the replicant registry on Earth. The result is a human supremacy movement that looked up and murdered (sorry, "retired," according to this universe's language) every replicant they could get their hands on. In response, terrorists cells led by replicants attempt to destroy the registry in one night.

Since massive scope isn't exactly Watanabe's bag, the work goes instead to his standard two guys and a girl setup (He's rarely gone a project since Macross Plus without it). The lead is escaped soldier android Iggy, who saves sex replicant Trixie from attempted rape. Two out of the three shorts feature attempted rape. I know these works by their nature don't have oodles of time to establish character, but there has to be less lazy and icky way to do it than half the R-rated movies from the eighties and nineties. Anyway, they initiate their plan with the help of human sympathizer Ren and most of the short takes place the night of their operation.

Aside from a brief appearance by Gaff, Edward James Olmos' multi-lingual policeman who played mind games with Harrison Ford's Deckard in the original, that's really all there is to the plot of "Blackout 2022." It's a very no-nonsense, cut-and-dry short down to visuals. Watanabe does his best to recreate the look of both the old movie and the new movie. The text prologue maintains the red underlining of words like replicant while an impressive animated mockup of the Los Angeles from the opening of the original scrolls across the screen. When jumping to the story proper, the overhead wide shot is very close to a shot used in the trailer to 2049. These touches are intentional and perhaps maintain too much reverence for the source material.

What this has the feel of is a sequel that is hewn too close to the original. The story is different, but elements are overly familiar. Iggy and Trixie have the same sort of relationship with Ren that Roy Batty and Priss had with J.F. Sebastian except Ren is quite a bit younger and is turned with a different sort of temptation. Symbolism from the previous work is forced like the appearance of a dove familiar to those whose memories are lost in time. It's not just Blade Runner, either. Many plot elements will be familiar to those who've seen Terror in Resonance, and even with Watanabe's one original visual flair showcasing Iggy's experience in warfare as a moving watercolor painting devouring all within it, it cuts a bit too close to the backstory of Vincent, the villain from Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.

All of this would be forgivable since it's a short, and most of it still is. The issues arise with the script, which is occasionally clumsy and ham-fisted. One of the best subtle details from the 1982 film is whenever the light reflects off the eyes of a replicant, revealing a red glow. This is used in "Blackout 2022," but couldn't be simply underlined in a scene where Iggy talks about how they'll only be able to identify them by their red eyes after all of this. The shots then hold on Iggy and Trixie's eyes for five seconds. Remember how I said it was a SUBTLE detail in the original?

I've been ragging on this short for awhile, but it's still pretty good. Call it impossibly high expectations. When Watanabe has a Hollywood budget, he tends to use it on fluid hand-to-hand combat when he can, and here he's transfixed on Trixie's flexibility and movement. Take Pris' gymnastic abilities and inject them with steroids. Trixie gets to fully flex when she takes on a wall of guards with style points. Music in a Watanabe joint is also a highlight, and this is no different. Rather than his constant collaborator, Yoko Kanno, the composer this time around is Flying Lotus, an L.A. music producer/D.J./filmmaker who is aptly able to do the same genre-bending Kanno is famous for throughout the short.

In his work lately, Watanabe hasn't had brilliant shows as a whole so much as brilliant moments. Kids on the Slope is a minor story in so many ways, but has more than enough scenes like "Lullaby in Birdland" that captures the perfect emotion the moment requires. Parts of Terror in Resonance are thinly written and I don't think the leads quite thought their plan through, and yet the ferris wheel sequence is as amazing as some older film critics describe every single second of cinema from the 70s. "Blackout 2022" has a few of those, even if they are smaller. The previously described scene with Trixie is one, and so is how the ending shot calls that back to the beginning of the short with the changed meaning between both.

The dubbing by Sentai Fimworks is fine. With the exception of landing Edward James Olmos for ten seconds (which is probably a bigger deal in my mind than it actually is), it's a fairly standard anime dub that's performed well, but with the usual archetypes in voicing. Not that the script gives them much room to stretch. The characters are generally downplayed and poor Ren only gets about five lines, one of them an overly on-the-nose reference to the original.

What "Blackout 2022" turns out to be is ultimately a standard Blade Runner-inspired story that just happens to be taken as official canon. It certainly has its qualities and aside from not charming leads (Not that this works in particular needs it), utilizes the strengths of its director well. What keeps it from being elevated to something more is its lack of the source material's want to challenge the viewer (At least, the later cuts) or the sequel's confidence to take up the gauntlet of making something separately just as original and creative in the same universe. Good is good, but one can't help but think it might've been something more worthy of excitedly ranting about at 5 a.m. My drooling mess of a first couple paragraphs certainly showed I was primed for it.