☆☆½
As lugubriously paced as your great-grandmother's funeral and about as fun to watch, Blade Runner 2049 at least has the advantage of its rapturous physical design, though even that grows wearying. This is a ponderous movie, whose appeal is largely based in nostalgia.
Consider for a moment whether Blade Runner 2049 would have any reason to exist other than paying tribute to Ridley Scott's 1982 original, which was only slightly more entertaining, primarily because everything about it was so damned new.
Thirty-five years later, Blade Runner 2049 (set, curiously 30 rather than 35 years after the original) is obsessed with the first movie. To some, this will come across as a fond tribute, but to me it felt like a laborious attempt at re-creation. Its story is another dull "examination" of what it is to be human in an age of robots, a topic that has been so thoroughly examined by movies and TV shows in aftermath of the original that it's starting to feel like so much nonsense.
From Cylons Battlestar Galactica to little David in A.I. to rampaging cowboys in Westworld to the self-aware sexy robot in Ex Machina ... come on, even Number Five was alive in Short Circuit. It's natural to hope that Blade Runner 2049 will have something new to say; more's the pity to find out it has nothing to say at all, new or otherwise.
There's some hoo-hah about miracles and mechanized disposable workforces and walls and breaking the world, all of which evoke Rutger Hauer's famous, poetic but still vaguely non-sensical speech in the original, but that's the problem with Blade Runner 2049: it's all meant to evoke something else.
The running time of more than two and a half hours wouldn't be the slightest problem at all if it didn't lead to more than a few fidgety moments. The script by Hampton Fancher, writer of the first film, and Michael Green (of "Heroes" and, ominously, Alien: Covenant) is directed with the same slow, dreamy stylishness that Ridley Scott brought to the first, though this time the filmmaker in charge is Denis Villeneuve, so far removed from the hair-trigger anxiousness he brought to Sicario that even he seems more to be aping rather than building on first Blade Runner.
The first Blade Runner didn't have much of a story to begin with: In a dystopian, overcrowded, over-commercialized future world, a detective called a "blade runner" has to find androids ("replicants") who took part in a violent mutiny and returned to earth. The trouble is, there's no way to tell them apart from humans.
The story is mostly the same this time around, as Ryan Gosling plays a replicant detective who needs to find the last few remaining rogue robots that ran amok the first time around. He finds one of them, then finds a mysterious tree that yields a buried treasure of sorts. He's got to tell his LAPD boss (Robin Wright) about it, and when they discover the contents of the box the story -- in theory, at least -- gets intriguing, because it looks like one of those old-timey replicants might have been pregnant.
Who was the child? What does this mean for the future? Gosling's character, named "K" (short for his serial number) goes wandering around looking for some sort of clues. But whether it goes anywhere is hard to say. Blade Runner 2049 is not a film eager to get to its plot; the script never met a two-minute scene that couldn't be played in 20 minutes, and is more interested in its visual style.
If Blade Runner 2049 had been the first, its visual sensibilities would have been overwhelming and enough on their own to see it at least once (which, I think, is largely why the original endures), but it isn't the first, and how many times in the last 35 years have we seen this sort of overstuffed future world? Everything from the aforementioned A.I. and Battlestar Galatica to the Star Wars prequels to Brazil have shown us this. For crying out loud, head to Tokyo and it's all made real!
So, then, Blade Runner 2049 better wow us with a stunner of a story, but the plot seems to be an afterthought here. Yes, Roger A. Deakins' cinematography and Dennis Gassner's production design are genuinely splendid, and the score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Walfisch suitably recalls the synthesized spa music that Vangelis created for the first, but the whole thing leads absolutely nowhere.
A little over an hour in, Harrison Ford finally shows up as Rick Deckard, the character he played in the first, and he lends a whole lot of Harrison Ford-style gruff apathy to the role. Perhaps that's because Deckard was never a character in the first so much as a recollection himself of hard-boiled film noir detectives from the '40s. Does his character hold a secret to some mystery that will, as Wright's character says, "break the world"? Far be it from me to spoil anything, so let me just say: No, he does not. Nor does he bring any more clarity to the occasional plot. He is in the film for the same questionable reason the film is on the screen: for some people, more Blade Runner seemed like a good idea.
The thing is, the reason we remember 1982's Blade Runner is largely because it fused together a panoply many familiar elements to create a vision no one had seen before. Blade Runner 2049 takes parts of things we've seen too many times and creates nothing new at all.
Viewed October 18, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1630
Consider for a moment whether Blade Runner 2049 would have any reason to exist other than paying tribute to Ridley Scott's 1982 original, which was only slightly more entertaining, primarily because everything about it was so damned new.
Thirty-five years later, Blade Runner 2049 (set, curiously 30 rather than 35 years after the original) is obsessed with the first movie. To some, this will come across as a fond tribute, but to me it felt like a laborious attempt at re-creation. Its story is another dull "examination" of what it is to be human in an age of robots, a topic that has been so thoroughly examined by movies and TV shows in aftermath of the original that it's starting to feel like so much nonsense.
From Cylons Battlestar Galactica to little David in A.I. to rampaging cowboys in Westworld to the self-aware sexy robot in Ex Machina ... come on, even Number Five was alive in Short Circuit. It's natural to hope that Blade Runner 2049 will have something new to say; more's the pity to find out it has nothing to say at all, new or otherwise.
There's some hoo-hah about miracles and mechanized disposable workforces and walls and breaking the world, all of which evoke Rutger Hauer's famous, poetic but still vaguely non-sensical speech in the original, but that's the problem with Blade Runner 2049: it's all meant to evoke something else.
The running time of more than two and a half hours wouldn't be the slightest problem at all if it didn't lead to more than a few fidgety moments. The script by Hampton Fancher, writer of the first film, and Michael Green (of "Heroes" and, ominously, Alien: Covenant) is directed with the same slow, dreamy stylishness that Ridley Scott brought to the first, though this time the filmmaker in charge is Denis Villeneuve, so far removed from the hair-trigger anxiousness he brought to Sicario that even he seems more to be aping rather than building on first Blade Runner.
The first Blade Runner didn't have much of a story to begin with: In a dystopian, overcrowded, over-commercialized future world, a detective called a "blade runner" has to find androids ("replicants") who took part in a violent mutiny and returned to earth. The trouble is, there's no way to tell them apart from humans.
The story is mostly the same this time around, as Ryan Gosling plays a replicant detective who needs to find the last few remaining rogue robots that ran amok the first time around. He finds one of them, then finds a mysterious tree that yields a buried treasure of sorts. He's got to tell his LAPD boss (Robin Wright) about it, and when they discover the contents of the box the story -- in theory, at least -- gets intriguing, because it looks like one of those old-timey replicants might have been pregnant.
Who was the child? What does this mean for the future? Gosling's character, named "K" (short for his serial number) goes wandering around looking for some sort of clues. But whether it goes anywhere is hard to say. Blade Runner 2049 is not a film eager to get to its plot; the script never met a two-minute scene that couldn't be played in 20 minutes, and is more interested in its visual style.
If Blade Runner 2049 had been the first, its visual sensibilities would have been overwhelming and enough on their own to see it at least once (which, I think, is largely why the original endures), but it isn't the first, and how many times in the last 35 years have we seen this sort of overstuffed future world? Everything from the aforementioned A.I. and Battlestar Galatica to the Star Wars prequels to Brazil have shown us this. For crying out loud, head to Tokyo and it's all made real!
So, then, Blade Runner 2049 better wow us with a stunner of a story, but the plot seems to be an afterthought here. Yes, Roger A. Deakins' cinematography and Dennis Gassner's production design are genuinely splendid, and the score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Walfisch suitably recalls the synthesized spa music that Vangelis created for the first, but the whole thing leads absolutely nowhere.
A little over an hour in, Harrison Ford finally shows up as Rick Deckard, the character he played in the first, and he lends a whole lot of Harrison Ford-style gruff apathy to the role. Perhaps that's because Deckard was never a character in the first so much as a recollection himself of hard-boiled film noir detectives from the '40s. Does his character hold a secret to some mystery that will, as Wright's character says, "break the world"? Far be it from me to spoil anything, so let me just say: No, he does not. Nor does he bring any more clarity to the occasional plot. He is in the film for the same questionable reason the film is on the screen: for some people, more Blade Runner seemed like a good idea.
The thing is, the reason we remember 1982's Blade Runner is largely because it fused together a panoply many familiar elements to create a vision no one had seen before. Blade Runner 2049 takes parts of things we've seen too many times and creates nothing new at all.
Viewed October 18, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1630
