Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)

[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.