Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)

[Rico]

It's ok. Better than 90% of movies that come out each year. But perhaps I had too high of expectations because ultimately it left me with a big empty/hollow feeling.

One of the big things that bothered me is the complete lack of humanity. (Literally) It's established early that our protagonist is a Replicant and there are only a few humans he interacts with throughout the film. [

Show Spoiler

Many of those humans end up dead btw.

] The problem with most of the main characters being Replicants is that I just didn't feel for them the same way I would for a human protagonist or even a dog. So when K and Luv are having their big showdown it simply doesn't have the same impact as say Deckard struggling to survive against Rutger Hauer's Terminator impersonation. I never truly feared for K's safety. That is a problem.

The other problem I had was the pacing. Thinking about it further, it's not so much that the film is slow but rather there are a bunch of scenes that aren't very interesting, do nothing to further the plot, and add little to character development. The scenes I'm thinking about are [

Show Spoiler

1. Luv taking the bones. 2. The first Wallace scene. 3. K's Spinner being shot down (Although that shot of Luv dropping bombs on his attackers was pretty cool.) 4. Robin Wright's death scene.

] IMO we don't lose much if these scenes were completely cut out. Sometimes less is more.

With all that said, boy is it pretty to look at. The film is at its best when it actually allows us to explore the world and its technology.

[[ETM]]

The relevance of the movie's themes is becoming more apparent as I see more comments like yours, Rico. It's kind of unsettling.

[Grouchy]

In this film, the protagonist's struggle shifts to something even more inconsequential (to me): was I born or created? And my answer is: what difference does it make if the character in question has no discernible personality? This film bored me because I couldn't envision what was worth fighting for in this universe.

Well, I'm sorry, man, but those are the central themes of both the 1982 film and this one. The feelings of nihilism and confusion this world evokes are completely intentional. You might just not like science fiction or, more specifically, cyberpunk.

Where is the "Brazil"?

[Grouchy]

And then Harrison Ford shows up and, strangely not dissimilar to what happens with The Force Awakens, drags along a baggage of franchise connectivity with him. As in the former case, Ford himself is good, slipping into his old role seamlessly and affectingly, and his material is intriguing. But even more so in this case, the character's material brings a different kind of register and sensibility, not exactly worse but entirely more conventional. So Deckard's story feels like it eats up the place of K's arc instead of meshing with it, and that story even clashes with the portentous pacing previously perfect for K's journey, but now too languished for something more mainstream.

We discussed this point ad nauseum with my friend who was disappointed by the ending of the film. He also felt that changing the focus from K to Deckard hurt the film beyond repair. I disagree, but we reached an interesting point in the discussion where I argued that his feelings of detachment from the story once Deckard entered the scene mirrored K's own when he realizes he set himself up as a Messiah in his head. I thought that was a great detour for the screenplay.

I'm willing to agree with him on one thing, though. I thought K lying in the snow was a much better ending shot than what they went with because even apraising what I just mentioned as intentional by the filmmakers, the film still starts as K's journey. I'm more invested in his discoveries than I am in Ford's reunion with his daughter.

[Grouchy]

Anyway, this was freakin' amazing. Most awe-inspired I've been by a science fiction film in a long, long time and a theatrical experience that can only be properly compared to Mad Max in recent years. I'm glad I saw it on IMAX 3D despite my hesitations - the conversion was really well done and subtle. When they showed the trailer for Thor: Ragnarok I thought it looked awful and was a bit scared.

The film is... something else to say the least. I'm glad this project was done the way it was and, in a strange way, I'm glad it didn't do that well at the box office because I think an inmediate sequel would only hurt it. I'm fine not getting another Blade Runner for 35 years. Villeneuve deserves all the awards. He has done a worthy sequel to a seminal film, something that has failed spectacularly in recent years with the likes of the Alien prequels and Trainspotting 2. His Blade Runner story is very much in the spirit of the original but it successfully expands the world and convincingly projects the first one's technology 30 years into the future. The world building here is amazing.

Props to the casting. Every single character worked and some, like Carla Juri's memory designer, are unexpectedly memorable. I remember watching that scene and thinking "here's an exposition dump that's rendered incredibly effective by just having a great actress". What else can I say? Loved the open endness of the story. I don't mind that Wallace remains a bit of a mystery or that we don't know what will happen with the Replicant movement or Deckard. I don't mind that we don't know for sure if the toy horse memory was implanted on purpose or not and how many Replicants share it. The original film also hinted at more things than it showed and that's why it has stayed alive in the imagination of so many people. And there are some moments where the film toys with the audience's expectations of closure (the Rachael scene) in a brilliant way. Oh and, by God, the double sex scene is amazing.

So, since this is Matchcut, here's some nitpicking:
- Sometimes the film seemed to be taking unnecessary precautions in case the audience was really dumb, repeating some concepts that had already been made clear. On that note, I thought the moment where K figures out everything that cuts to Deckard waking up in Wallace's lair was the dramatic peak of the story but I didn't need the short montage of flashbacks to follow K's train of thought. One line would have been enough.
- The scene itself is gorgeous like the rest of the film, but there's some sloppy editing surrounding Deckard on the final showdown. First he seems to be very relaxed while handcuffed to the ship. Then he suddenly has water up to his neck and is fighting the chains. From there on the water level is either below his chest or over his head depending on the moment. I get that the ship is rocking back and forth, but that moment seemed artificial in a way that the rest of the action scenes didn't.

Anyway, you can see how deep I have to go for nitpicking. Overall, I was just giddy with excitement.

[Irish]

I might see this today --- any opinions about IMAX over 2D?

[Devlin]

I didn't need the short montage of flashbacks to follow K's train of thought. One line would have been enough.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in movies being made today. The filmmakers don't seem to have enough confidence in the audience to remember an earlier moment or a line of dialogue, so they find it necessary to remind them visually with a flashback. It's bad enough when sequels do it to remind audiences something that happened in a previous installment (The Dark Knight Rises is a great example of this), but to do it within the same film for me insults my intelligence, and it basically is saying that we might not remember something that happened just one or two hours earlier. The moment K began to make the linear connection I was right there with him, then the flashback happened and it took me out of the moment. It's an annoying trend.

[[ETM]]

I thought it served most as another subtle reference to the first movie: "Too dbd she won't live... But then again - who does?"

[Lazlo]

I might see this today --- any opinions about IMAX over 2D?

Is the IMAX release in the US in 3D? It wasn't where I saw it. I liked the 1.90:1 aspect ratio and the size of the screen for the immersion factor, though Deakins has said he prefers the widescreen aspect ratio of the regular screen.

[Irish]

Is the IMAX release in the US in 3D? It wasn't where I saw it. I liked the 1.90:1 aspect ratio and the size of the screen for the immersion factor, though Deakins has said he prefers the widescreen aspect ratio of the regular screen.

This is just regular big screen IMAX, I think? The theater has another showing for "Real 3D."

But yeah, maybe I'll still to the 2D.

[Spinal]

I appreciate your support, kuehnepips!

[Rico]

- Sometimes the film seemed to be taking unnecessary precautions in case the audience was really dumb, repeating some concepts that had already been made clear. On that note, I thought the moment where K figures out everything that cuts to Deckard waking up in Wallace's lair was the dramatic peak of the story but I didn't need the short montage of flashbacks to follow K's train of thought. One line would have been enough.

Villeneuve did this in Arrival too. I was like, "Yo, I figured all this out 20 minutes ago."

[[ETM]]

And still I saw many people who still didn't get it... People are weird.

[[ETM]]

When they showed the trailer for Thor: Ragnarok I thought it looked awful and was a bit scared.

3D trailers for blockbusters are always terrible and overdone. Someone out there thinks poking our eyes out with 3D will make us want to see the film more.

[Dukefrukem]

And still I saw many people who still didn't get it... People are weird.

The Arrival is very poorly edited.

[Spinal]

Well, I'm sorry, man, but those are the central themes of both the 1982 film and this one. The feelings of nihilism and confusion this world evokes are completely intentional. You might just not like science fiction or, more specifically, cyberpunk.

Well, I like a movie like Brazil, which is why I referenced it. In that movie, there is a strong sense of the protagonist's dreams and ambitions. In that movie, his failure hurts because 'what could be' is so appealing. In this movie, I think the protagonist is a bore and his values are vague. This could be due to the film noir influence on the franchise. I think I like sci-fi all right. But film noir has always been relatively unappealing to me on a narrative level. (I like the visual aspect just fine.)

[Grouchy]

Well, I like a movie like Brazil, which is why I referenced it. In that movie, there is a strong sense of the protagonist's dreams and ambitions. In that movie, his failure hurts because 'what could be' is so appealing. In this movie, I think the protagonist is a bore and his values are vague. This could be due to the film noir influence on the franchise. I think I like sci-fi all right. But film noir has always been relatively unappealing to me on a narrative level. (I like the visual aspect just fine.)

While I, on the other hand, love film noir narratives and love dystopian sci-fi - the combination of the two might be my favorite thing ever.

The comparison with Brazil is interesting, though, because I think they're different types of engaging the audience. On Brazil Sam is a clear audience surrogate - we are meant to identify with him at all times, which is why the ending is so devastating. But I think the Blade Runner cinematic universe (heh) has us a bit more outside the protagonist, wondering how much we know about him and what does he really want. I mean, in the 1982 one, we don't even know if he's human.

[Irish]

Whelp, this was pretty much what I expected it to be. I was grinning like an idiot during the first flyover of LA, but that feeling didn't last long.

- Several times during the loooooooong fucking runtime, I thought of Spinal's post. I like heady philosophical stuff when it's subtext. Not when it's text. Not when the characters literally speak the themes in dialogue (and in between bouts of exposition).

- These characters are empty and dull and they are played empty and dull. For half the film, Officer K doesn't seem to want anything. For the other half, I couldn't tell whether he gave a shit whether he found what he was looking for.

- It was both a weird -- and staggeringly dumb -- choice to tell Deckard's story by proxy.

- None of it would make sense if you hadn't seen the original. For a $155-$200 million commercial film, that's terrible design. (Didn't anybody ever learn a lesson from "Wrath of Khan," FFS? You wanna do a sequel decades after the fact, watch "Khan.")

- The movie is a compendium of all the stupid things Ridley Scott has said about "Blade Runner" over the last 25 years. "2049" includes everything I disliked about Scott's posturing bullshit: "skinjobs", animistic totems, memory implants as plot devices, etc. It turns out that my suspicions all these years was right: Watching robots fight each other is really, really boring.

- Also, FFS, did anybody writing this remember the original? "We're not computers, Sebastion, we're physical." Yet, here's Officer K manually scanning records like he's a machine.

- Also weird that Scott et al reduced the two movies to "stoic dudes fall for artificial woman."

- I liked the Joi stuff better when Spike Jonze did it, and I didn't like "Her."

- Were there any people in this movie? I mean that figuratively and literally. I think I counted maybe 3-4 human characters total. More literally, the crowd scenes at street level in the original film was packed with extras. Typical of modern, CGI-based movies, there were almost no extras and almost no crowd scenes in "2049."

- This is the first time I've ever seen Robin Wright give a flat out bad performance. I don't blame her entirely though. The dialogue in this movie was atrocious. Like sub-Lucas level of crap. Wright was stuck delivering melodramatic junk, and almost all of it was exposition.

- There was absolutely no reason for this to be 3 hours long. The main plot is maybe 40 minutes of screentime. The subplots aren't interesting.

- Harrison Ford has such enormous cultural baggage he becomes a distraction. Also, it'd be nice if one of these movies acknowledged that he was a 75 year old man and his character behaved liked one.

- Leto is a bonehead. I can no longer tell if Gosling can act. I did enjoy how they both looked constipated when trying to express emotion, though. :/

- I would have laughed at the one-eyed replicant leader --- that whole set-up was like something out of SyFy's adaptation of "Dune." But instead, it just made me depressed. Everybody is running around looking for Replicant Jesus. Who cares?

- Vangelis carried just about every emotion in the original film. The score here, or more pointedly the lack of it, is noticeable to the point of distraction.

- Uh, why was the giant hologram at the end naked? This movie has a lot of regressive ideas in it. I'll skip by most of them and just say: Darryl Hannah's Pris was 100x more interesting than any woman in the sequel.

- The reveal at the end is like bad tv police-procedural, right out of "Law & Order's" typical structure -- oh, you mean the person I saw briefly at the start is the one everyone's looking for? What a fucking surprise.

- My biggest disappointment is that the film did not look good. Some of the single-shot compositions were eye-popping, but there was no cohesion to any of the images. The original film looked like a singular, real-world place with texture and weight. The sequel looked like 6 different movies, and completely lacked detail. The use of space was unremarkable and too consistent. The costumes were bland and uninteresting. Movies like "Blade Runner" and "Road Warrior" are 35 years old and still driving visuals and design today. Did everyone's sensibility completely stagnate in 1982?

[TGM]

- None of it would make sense if you hadn't seen the original.

I can confirm that this is not true. >_>

[transmogrifier]

Yeah, my wife hadn’t seen the original and she followed it just fine. I pretty much disagree with all of Irish’s other points as well.

[Watashi]

I also don't get the Wrath of Khan sidepoint. Khan came out three years after The Motion Picture.

Most sequels require a lot of preexisting knowledge of the first film. That's why they're sequels.

[Spinal]

I agree with everything Irish said, except the part about the naked hologram. I liked the naked hologram.

[Rico]

I also don't get the Wrath of Khan sidepoint. Khan came out three years after The Motion Picture.

Khan the character first appeared in the original series.

[Grouchy]

- Several times during the loooooooong fucking runtime, I thought of Spinal's post. I like heady philosophical stuff when it's subtext. Not when it's text. Not when the characters literally speak the themes in dialogue (and in between bouts of exposition).

I agree with you on general principle, but just think about this - at one point this was going to be written and directed by Christopher Nolan. *shudders*

- These characters are empty and dull and they are played empty and dull. For half the film, Officer K doesn't seem to want anything. For the other half, I couldn't tell whether he gave a shit whether he found what he was looking for.

I don't understand this complaint. I understand that Spinal or others might have trouble relating to a protagonist who's a robot, but K's motivations and character arc are very well done. He works for a system that despises him doing a job that hurts his own people. He's assigned a case which makes him question his own identity. He comes to believe he's the Chosen One for his kind. He discovers this is not true. He decides to make his existence worth something and sacrifices himself to help Deckard. The end.

- It was both a weird -- and staggeringly dumb -- choice to tell Deckard's story by proxy.

Why?

- None of it would make sense if you hadn't seen the original. For a $155-$200 million commercial film, that's terrible design. (Didn't anybody ever learn a lesson from "Wrath of Khan," FFS? You wanna do a sequel decades after the fact, watch "Khan.")

This has already been said, but I think a sequel has a right to address the audience assuming they have seen the original. Otherwise, why are you not watching that? I get what you're saying about this being a huge blockbuster and as such, it should aim to have as large an audience as possible, but I don't really care about how much money it makes. I went to see it because I love Blade Runner and I have seen it numerous times.

Regardless, the only thing that's impossible to understand without watching the original is Deckard and Rachael's relationship.

- The movie is a compendium of all the stupid things Ridley Scott has said about "Blade Runner" over the last 25 years. "2049" includes everything I disliked about Scott's posturing bullshit: "skinjobs", animistic totems, memory implants as plot devices, etc. It turns out that my suspicions all these years was right: Watching robots fight each other is really, really boring.

I haven't really followed every detail of the development of this. Is this something he had talked about? The racism against "skinjobs" seemed natural to me. Who are you calling an animistic totem?

- Also, FFS, did anybody writing this remember the original? "We're not computers, Sebastion, we're physical." Yet, here's Officer K manually scanning records like he's a machine.

I have no idea what you're talking about here. This film takes place 35 years after the original. The Replicants are different and made by someone else.

- Also weird that Scott et al reduced the two movies to "stoic dudes fall for artificial woman."

Except that the two relationships are different. When Deckard first meets Rachael he thinks she's human - that's the whole point of that scene. Joi is not even a physical presence, more like a futuristic gadget. The kiss under the rain scene shows that K knows their love is just a game of pretend.

- I liked the Joi stuff better when Spike Jonze did it, and I didn't like "Her."

Well, I think Her is a great movie, but I imagine the lenghty development of this screenplay started before 2013.

- Were there any people in this movie? I mean that figuratively and literally. I think I counted maybe 3-4 human characters total. More literally, the crowd scenes at street level in the original film was packed with extras. Typical of modern, CGI-based movies, there were almost no extras and almost no crowd scenes in "2049."

This is actually something we discussed at lenght with my friend who liked this a lot less than I did. He was disappointed by the depiction of the city for those very same reasons. I argued that the lack of city crowds and street-level mayhem was deliberate - again, this takes place more than three decades after the original and we know society changes a lot faster than it did years ago. People seem to live their lives in enclosed spaces, much like what happens today in technology advanced countries like China or Japan.

Regardless, I might be arguing against myself here, but the last of the short films (the Dave Bautista one) showed a slice of life scene much more consistent with the original Blade Runner.

- This is the first time I've ever seen Robin Wright give a flat out bad performance. I don't blame her entirely though. The dialogue in this movie was atrocious. Like sub-Lucas level of crap. Wright was stuck delivering melodramatic junk, and almost all of it was exposition.

Seriously? Her scenes were some of the best stuff in the movie. Some of the scenes on the film were particularly heavy with exposition, I agree, but not particularly Wright's. The one where she visits K on his apartment had nothing to do with exposition and everything to do with developing her character and making her death scene more interesting.

- There was absolutely no reason for this to be 3 hours long. The main plot is maybe 40 minutes of screentime. The subplots aren't interesting.

Well... I dunno. Movies are not summaries of information and this, like the original, has a very deliberate pacing. The plot of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly could also have been told in under two hours.

- Harrison Ford has such enormous cultural baggage he becomes a distraction. Also, it'd be nice if one of these movies acknowledged that he was a 75 year old man and his character behaved liked one.

Eh, could be. But what would be the alternative? We already knew from the trailers that Deckard was in the film. I don't know what could have been gained from making him more decrepit. Hell, the actor himself doesn't look like a 75 year old man. He survived a plane crash not too long ago.

I wish we'd seen less of the meeting with Deckard in the trailers. The two huge statues in front of the casino are a great image, but as soon as I saw it in the film, I knew what was going to happen next.

- Leto is a bonehead. I can no longer tell if Gosling can act. I did enjoy how they both looked constipated when trying to express emotion, though. :/

*shrug* I thought Leto was very good here. It made me feel bad for him in Suicide Squad. Like, if the movie wasn't so terrible maybe he could have been an interesting Joker.

And Gosling can act, just see The Nice Guys. He's just developed a movie persona that comes too easy for him.

- I would have laughed at the one-eyed replicant leader --- that whole set-up was like something out of SyFy's adaptation of "Dune." But instead, it just made me depressed. Everybody is running around looking for Replicant Jesus. Who cares?

Well, I cared. But I agree with you that the one-eye was too cliché. Every Resistance leader worth his salt must have an eyepatch.

- Vangelis carried just about every emotion in the original film. The score here, or more pointedly the lack of it, is noticeable to the point of distraction.

Agreed with this too, actually. Davis even pointed it out before watching the movie. Zimmer is just a dull composer.

- Uh, why was the giant hologram at the end naked? This movie has a lot of regressive ideas in it. I'll skip by most of them and just say: Darryl Hannah's Pris was 100x more interesting than any woman in the sequel.

See my point above about Joi being a gadget. The giant hologram was advertising.

- The reveal at the end is like bad tv police-procedural, right out of "Law & Order's" typical structure -- oh, you mean the person I saw briefly at the start is the one everyone's looking for? What a fucking surprise.

I don't know what to say about this is except that it worked for me and it wasn't any random character. Besides she appears more or less in the middle of the film.

- My biggest disappointment is that the film did not look good. Some of the single-shot compositions were eye-popping, but there was no cohesion to any of the images. The original film looked like a singular, real-world place with texture and weight. The sequel looked like 6 different movies, and completely lacked detail. The use of space was unremarkable and too consistent. The costumes were bland and uninteresting. Movies like "Blade Runner" and "Road Warrior" are 35 years old and still driving visuals and design today. Did everyone's sensibility completely stagnate in 1982?

You're in agreement with my friend yet again on this. I don't know... matter of taste? It might have been the IMAX but this was my biggest visual orgasm since Fury Road.

I hope you appreciate the effort I took in manually typing "Irish" everytime so you know I'm quoting you.

You seem to be a very critical fellow with a lot of films, and I appreciate that since it generates a lot of useful discussion which is what this site is for, but let me ask you a question that's impossible to answer... I'm assuming you like Blade Runner a lot. If you watched it today for the first time, would you still like it as much? Some of your usual criticisms about plot would apply to it. For one thing, it's very murky why Roy Batty just gives up and dies in the end.

[Irish]

Working my way through your post, Grouch, but that's a terrific and detailed response.

I owe you serious rep.

I hope you appreciate the effort I took in manually typing "Irish" everytime so you know I'm quoting you.