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Blade Runner 2049

10/6/2017

17 Comments

 

B+
​3.33

A cop on the hunt for renegade cyborgs unearths a conspiracy.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, and Robin Wright
Review by Phil Crone

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Before diving into the review proper, let’s get a couple important questions out of the way…

SHOULD YOU SEE THE ORIGINAL? – Probably, but it isn’t required viewing.  A few pieces of the aesthetic might be lost in translation, but you really don’t need much beyond a basic understanding of who Deckard is, who Rachel is, and their relationship.  Everything else can be gleaned from context within the movie.

S
POILER-FREE, SHOULD I SEE THIS? – More than likely yes.  The pacing is a bit deliberate by today’s standards, but if you like Denis Villeneuve’s previous outings Sicario and especially Arrival, or you’re a fan of the original, you should see this.  And try to see it on IMAX or Cinemark xD or something like that, because this is a visual spectacle.

Ok, and with that, onto the show…

I should preface everything you’re about to read with the following disclaimer: I’m a huge Denis Villeneuve fan.  I love how he manages to take very broad concepts that are at the very core of who we are and gives his audience an impactful analysis of it.  I thought Sicario was the best movie of 2015 and provided an insightful look into the morality of choices.  I thought Arrival was the best movie of 2016 and gave us a great parable on the sociological nature of humanity.  2017 isn’t over yet, but so far, Blade Runner 2049 is the best movie of 2017 and provides an in-depth look at the very essence of what it means to be “human” all while providing an incredible visual experience in a world that feels like it experienced a natural progression from the 1982 original.

At the center of Blade Runner 2049 is K, an LAPD Blade Runner and replicant himself.  We see the opening confrontation with Sapper Morton, a replicant who has been on the run for close to 30 years and living a relatively peaceful life.  K ultimately does his job, but not before Sapper declares that K is who he is because he “hasn’t seen a miracle yet.”  This is a great introduction to who K is.  He’s an unquestioning loyal soldier, and that’s just how the LAPD wants him given the “baseline” tests he undergoes in a post-trauma setting.  We don’t receive much detail about who K is, but we can safely infer that he was created for the sole purpose to be a Blade Runner, and like Roy Batty and his gang of replicants, seems to be without empathy.  Society sees K for what he “is” as well, branding him as a traitor to his own kind and calling him a “skinner.”
 

The sequence where K heads home gives us one of our initial looks at LA in 2049.  We see more and more of LA throughout the film, and my biggest takeaway was how it looked like the logical progression of how the city would have aged from the 30 years prior we saw in the original 1982 movie.  It was very similar to 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in that the design was not based on how our universe has changed over the last 30 years, but rather how you would expect THAT universe to progress over the ensuing 30 years.  The wall of CRT’s as K eats a meal is right there, and the same company advertisements – even Atari and Pan Am – flash across the LA skyline.  Little details like that are critical to immersion into a world like this, and Blade Runner 2049 does an excellent job honoring its past.

It’s this first walk home and his initial encounters with Lieutenant Joshi that give the audience a sense that K understands who he is with grim perception.  I enjoyed the few interactions we get with K and Joshi, who discuss things like K’s “childhood memory” of hiding a small horse, a memory he knows is artificial given that implanting replicants with real memories is illegal.  Joshi gets one of the many great quotes of the movie in when K and Joshi discussing the nature of humanity and the need to be born to have a soul by stating “For not having a soul… You’re getting along fine.”  It’s an interesting perception as it provides one of our first looks into how humanity views replicants in 2049: they’re happy to be doing what they’re doing, unquestioning the motives of why they do it.  These conversations do set in motion the question Villeneuve looks to answer through K’s journey: what makes a being “human?”

Outside of Joshi, Villeneuve uses a number of ancillary characters to point out the hypocrisy of society’s view on what is humanity, a view best represented by new savior of humanity and now mass producer of replicants Niander Wallace.  Wallace surely sees himself as human, but based on the presence of his own cybernetic implants and very unnatural method of seeing, it’s fair to ask the question what makes him more human than the newborn replicant he brutally murders (or is it just “retires?”) without hesitation as he discusses the need for quicker production and the logic of civilizations and their need of slave labor to ultimately flourish.  
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Wallace’s view of replicants and their nature is best personified by his assistant, Luv.  Like K, she is unquestionably loyal, but we see her shed a tear as Wallace slices the replicant open.  This isn’t the last time we see her cry either, as she always seems to be a reluctant actor in Wallace’s quest to find the child born of a replicant.  However, she continues to follow him throughout his mission, similar to K until the fateful events at the orphanage.

K is now on the case trying to find the replicant child as well, and his investigation leads him to an orphanage.  He does not go alone on this assignment though, as he now brings along his once-tethered live-in AI Joi, who provides one of the most fascinating commentaries on humanity by the end of the movie.  Joi is just a hologram, but she is very much sentient.  She is also fully devoted to K, turning down the “opportunity” to go where she may in order to be with K.  It’s a bit of a hollow offer given the receiver K carries, but it is important to note her reaction to get a gauge on her own version of humanity.

K quickly learns in the orphanage that his memory of the horse that he relayed to Joshi was a real memory, leading K to now question his very existence.  Is he human after all?  Were these memories “his” memories?  K tracks down Dr. Ana Stelline, a “memory creator” who builds the memories implanted in replicants’ heads.  She confirms the memory is real, and the result of this revelation is a very, well, human reaction from K.   He is now unable to get back to “baseline” following the experience, with Joshi allowing him to flee, with his quest no longer being about who the child is, but the very nature of his own existence.

Before leaving, Joi wants to give K a present of sorts – the chance for them to interact physically.  In a scene at first very reminiscent of Her, Joi brings in Mariette, a replicant prostitute K had a previous run in with.  The scene that transpired here with the “merging” of Mariette and Joi was a mesmerizing feat and should alone result in a Best Visual Effects Oscar.  Besides the visual wizardy, we get another look at Joi’s unwavering devotion to K as she callously tosses Mariette out once Joi is finished using her and returns to K to help him cope with everything that has transpired.  Joi takes the confirmation of the memory being real as a celebratory revelation, prodding K to take on an actual name and suggesting Joe as the name, a suggestion that will almost break K by the end of his journey.

K’s journey to find his true nature leads him to whom he believes is his father: Rick Deckard himself, now living in a casino with no companionship other than a dog and a lot of explosives.  I particularly enjoyed Deckard and K’s battle in the showroom, with K using the holograms as a form of cover to get the jump on Deckard.  Ultimately, the two end up deciding drinking is better than fighting, with Deckard getting some whisky for the two of them plus his dog.  “Is he real?” “Ask him yourself.”  It’s a great exchange between Deckard and K (now calling himself Joe) that pulls again at the question of humanity.  K and Deckard are having two different conversations in this moment, with K asking if the dog is “a dog” and Deckard correcting him by asking if it really matters on way or the other as long he is who (or what) he is.  This distinction becomes especially important in the ensuing action, as Villeneuve is now starting to draw a line in the sand of what “humanity” is in his view.

We then have the ensuing action of Deckard being captured by Luv, who then “kills” Joi in the ensuing fray.  Mariette arrives later to retrieve K to bring him to the beginnings of the replicant revolution squad, who add another “requirement” to humanity: a cause worthy of dying for.  Mariette uses the phrase made famous in the original “Blade Runner” and later Rob Zombie, calling themselves “more human than human.”  It is then revealed that K is in fact not the child of Deckard and Rachel, as he instead comes to the realization it is Dr. Stelline.  This reveal was reminiscent of the reveal in Arrival – it was staring you in the face the whole time, if you just bothered looking.  We see in “K’s” memory that he has hair when he hides the horse.  As was made clear by the visit to the orphanage and the memory, all the boys were shaved, so it clearly couldn’t be a boy who hid the horse.  It begs the question of what Stelline’s motives were.  Did she want to be found, implanting this memory in several Blade Runners until they finally made the connection?  It’s difficult to say, and we don’t get any clear resolution of this nagging question.

As K walks the bridge broken, his encounter with the holographic Joi advertisement gives an impressive revelation.  She also refers to him as “Joe,” and it clicks for K – Joi was programmed to be that way, without any remnant of true free will.  This is open to interpretation, but to me, this is the final piece of the humanity puzzle: free will.  This is what made Roy and his gang “human” by the end of the original “Blade Runner” – they revolted, embracing the humanity of questioning your existence.  Until the possibility of being homo sapien was presented to K, he never questioned this – it’s fair to ask if he was “human” until that revelation.  Was Joi “real?” Absolutely.  Was Joi “human?” Absolutely not.  Villeneuve is drawing the line in the sand that being sentient and capable of higher processing is not what being human means – it’s the messy randomness of us that make us “human.”  Joi provided companionship and unquestioning loyalty, but that was it.  Her sole “motivation” was to make K feel good, hence why she didn’t take the opportunity for freedom once given it.  Deckard had his dog, and K had Joi.

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Speaking of Deckard, we get the meeting between Wallace and Deckard where every Blade Runner’s fan’s biggest question is addressed finally: is Deckard a replicant?  It’s clear replicants can age (just look at Sapper), so an older Deckard living for at least 30 years makes it plausible.  I loved how the scene played out with the discussion, and Villeneuve offers a subtle hint to Deckard’s nature via the lighting.  In the original Blade Runner, the replicants’ eyes always seemed to have an orange, cat-like glint in the absence of light; we never really see that with Deckard.  But still, it continues to be fun to speculate.

After all this, we get our final showdown between Luv and K as K stages an ill-advised rescue of Deckard.  It’s a solid scene overall that results in K rescuing Deckard, but not without being mortally wounded.  It’s worth noting that Luv remains stoutly loyal to the end, despite her reservations.  Of course, this begs the question: is Luv “human?”  I think the answer depends on how you felt about K at the start.  Luv is ultimately a sympathetic figure: like all replicants, she was born into a life she never wanted.  Unlike K, she never found a mission to believe in that was “worth dying for,” and ultimately fell in the line of duty, living and dying as nothing more than Wallace’s slave.

Despite the warnings of the revolution, K returns Deckard to his daughter.  Like Freysa said, to find a cause like this is to be “more human than human.”  K’s final action is ill-advised, rash, selfless to him yet selfish to his journey, and ultimately costs him his life.  K’s final action, in other words, is distinctly human.

Blade Runner 2049 is another filmmaking achievement by Denis Villeneuve and is worthy of all the accolades it’s sure to receive.  I’m sure there are some things I missed above (like the bees).  The central narrative on the nature of humanity wrapped in an incredible world may only be recognized in the end for its technical achievements, but we would be remiss not to recognize the insights into our very being and K’s journey to becoming “more human than human."

Grade: A+

17 Comments
Sean
10/7/2017 02:26:06 pm

TL:DR
It was fucking long and worse it felt long. Later I'll read and comment about you being wrong.

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Phil
10/7/2017 07:50:44 pm

Did you like Sicario and Arrival?

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Sean
10/9/2017 12:50:06 pm

I haven't gotten around to Sicario, Arrival was good but hated the "what do we want-time travel when do we want it-its irrelevant aspect"

Joshua S.
10/9/2017 09:58:17 am

Unrelated to Blade Runner 2049, but have you seen Enemy? I'd be curious to hear what you thought of it.

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Jon
10/12/2017 02:21:49 am

That's the only English-language Villeneuve movie I have yet to see.

Obligatory ranking:
1. Incendies
2. Arrival
3. Sicario
4. Blade Runner 2049
.
.
.
5. Prisoners

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Sean
10/9/2017 01:37:26 pm

Ok, I've read it now. Great piece. You're still wrong on A+. Any movie that has me looking at the time so I can do the math on how much longer doesn't get an A. You talked me into a B+ though.

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Jon
10/10/2017 03:15:29 am

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner begins with a gasp, as the bleak industrial LA skyline bursts onto the screen in one of the all-time opening images. I remember pausing and rewinding to experience it again, with it losing none of its impact after surprise had been removed. Scott was advancing his vision of science fiction forward from the space truckers of Alien by finding a place those characters could conceivably have been on and longed to escape from. What followed in Blade Runner never quite reaches the height of that opening sequence. Its noir elements, specifically Deckard’s clunky narration, dragged it down for me, but there are deserved reasons it’s still held up as one of the best of the genre. With Blade Runner 2049, we have another in an increasingly prevalent trend, a classic film gets a decades-later sequel from another director unafraid of genre filmmaking. Is this a Fury Road or a Tron Legacy?

Denis Villeneuve’s second consecutive sci-fi outing is certainly a film that he has put his stamp on. Whether or not that’s an asset is an open question. I know we’ve got some dedicated Villeneuve fanboys in the MMC, but for me, his signature scene is in Prisoners, where a character asks another to play his favorite song on the trumpet, and to the surprise of no one in the room, the trumpet player belts out the Star Spangled Banner. Prisoners was poking at US foreign policy with its preemptive war and ticking clock torture scenario, and that’s all well and good, but to shoehorn that song into the film in such a way is a prime example of what I think Villeneuve cannot help himself from indulging in: he sacrifices character to make a broader point. He engages in speechifying when a more natural conversation will do just fine. He’s a craftsman with a talent for attracting top-notch cinematographers, but with the exception of Incendies, I can honestly say I’ve never been emotionally attached to any of his characters.

Does that record extend to Blade Runner 2049? Sadly, it does. The rooting interest is diffused all over the film. I’m interested in the mystery inasmuch as I want to know what happens next, instead of what’s going to happen to the creatures pursuing it. Deckard was at least three characters removed from being the heart of Blade Runner, so his return doesn’t mean much to me, unlike the guy who woo-ed in my theater when he eventually shows up. The base injustice that exists in this world, where replicants are essentially slaves, was more ably communicated in Blade Runner. By making the world deeper, Villeneuve is inviting the viewer to ask more questions, and he fails in making me care about any aspect of it even with its straightforward slavery-is-evil dynamic ready to go. Instead of finding myself wanting replicants to not be murdered fresh out of their goopy dry-cleaner bag, I wondered about them contributing to the hefty quotient of misery that exists around every corner. What Villeneuve convinces me of is that this is not a world worth saving, something that was not present in the original. Sometimes, like in Snowpiercer, that works to a film’s advantage by setting up expectations and then organically snatching them away. Here, it makes any one individual’s desires and goals less meaningful.

If I give Blade Runner 2049 the full benefit of the doubt and get on its wavelength, it, like most movies featuring AI or robotic humans of any kind, is wondering what the barrier is between synthetic and sentient. Explicitly, I was hoping the word ‘soul’ wouldn’t be uttered in the film and was quickly disappointed. Implicitly, the film doesn’t learn from Blade Runner and makes the question too complicated. Blade Runner put the barrier as the ability to see one’s end approaching and make plans to avoid it at any cost. Because the owner of an existence put value on its own life, it was valuable, simple as that. 2049 has loftier ambitions, and in going for a big statement, I think the film is made worse. By marking its barrier with fluffier emotions like love and devotion, 2049 goes down the Interstellar path, muddying its hard sci-fi with saccharine sweetness. By incorporating a literal parental relationship at the center of the story, it diminishes the creator-created conflict that all these stories tend to have.

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Jon
10/10/2017 03:16:07 am

AI stories are already so fraught with moral tangles that anything extra isn’t particularly needed, but Villeneuve also puts in a Christ allegory, evident from the moment that Sapper Morton makes mention of a miracle. K believes himself to be the progeny of someone that isn’t supposed to be able to procreate (though, gotcha, Jesus is actually a woman. Mind blown.) A Herod figure in Joshi is after this foretold babe, and the kid’s got an absentee father. This metallic Messiah will usher in a new era for his people, where the last will be first and the first shall be last. This is all icing on a cake that already had plenty of icing. I’m not opposed to biblical allegory on its face, as I saw and liked mother! not too long ago, but it’s not needed in 2049.

If I don’t think Blade Runner 2049 has anything meaningful to say, that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a sensational cinematic feast. Arrival didn’t make my Best of 2016 list, but I would unequivocally say it was one of the best looking films of that year. I would say the same thing for 2049. Though it never elementally awed me like that opening shot of Blade Runner, it keeps the wow factor high. Roger Deakins is at the top of the cinematographer pile, and he demonstrates why with shot after shot. If I thought the set-pieces were often dramatically inert, that doesn’t mean they aren’t highly watchable thanks to Deakins and the visual effects team. The score is distilled Hans Zimmer, mostly the foghorn blasts from his Inception score but without the interstitial other instruments. I say that as a compliment. Zimmer’s 2049 industrial score merges effectively with the urban decay of the setting. The acting is also uniformly strong, with a game Harrison Ford and Sylvia Hoeks’ Luv standing out the most. Luv is clearly a robot where K is not, and I loved the precision of her physical performance.

This is a film I’m ultimately warm to mild on, even as I sat down wanting to be white-hot on it. There’s a good bit of disappointment associated with the experience of watching 2049. It looks as spectacular as advertised, but that’s not at the top of my cinematic priority list. I wish I was able to connect more to it, but this is pure eye-candy coasting on the intelligence of its to-be-reviewed cousins Ex Machina and Her. B-

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Jon
10/10/2017 11:10:06 am

Letterboxd review of the original.

https://letterboxd.com/jon_kissel/film/blade-runner/

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Jon
10/10/2017 08:33:04 pm

In direct response to Phil's review:

If K is engineered to be more obedient, how is he still able to disobey? I feel like this should be his main impetus and arc throughout the film but it loses track of it once it places him in the Messiah role.

" they’re happy to be doing what they’re doing, unquestioning the motives of why they do it." If that's what separates humans from replicants, then there are millions of replicants living among us right now.

I take Luv's reaction to the replicant disembowling to be disappointment she shares with Wallace that they are still unable to engineer self-replicating replicants. I detected no wavering loyalty to him in her portrayal. She was a potent Terminator character, to great effect.

I never understood the fascination with replicants that can have babies from Wallace's view. Surely it's quicker to engineer full-grown models than to raise child replicants. Did I miss some throwaway line justifying this from a pure efficiency standpoint?

Can't believe I missed the Joe name designation in my discussion of the Christ allegory, short for Joseph, history's most famous cuckold.

The distinction between replicants and AI's like Joi is muddy. If Joi is manufactured to be pliable in all things to the need of her owner, why aren't replicants like K manufactured in the same fashion?

Taking an easy shot on the bees: the one that lands on his hand is far away from the main hive, signifying his rejection of the role that society has placed on him. It also could be an homage to Gosling's role in Only God Forgives, where he puts his hand inside his dead mother. It's a weird movie.

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Phil
10/11/2017 11:08:50 am

Why do I feel like you spent 75% of the time playing "find the trope?" You bring up a messiah trope, what an AI movie should do, connections to multiple characters, etc. And frankly, I don't think we watched the movie the same way at all. I watched it as a bit of a treatise on the question "what is human?" with each character being a reflection of what is or isn't human, with K's journey just funneling us to that answer. In that sense, I think the movie is a triumph.

As for Wallace's obsession with self-producing replicants.... I don't care, and I'm not sure the audience should. As long as you buy into his motivation and hand-wave the mechanics away, good enough for me.

I could go on and on, but we clearly have a philosophical difference on our interpretation here. I think both are valid, but we definitely watched this movie through a different frame of mind.

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Jon
10/12/2017 02:55:30 am

Whenever I write a review, I'm trying to interrogate the emotional response it did or did not inspire in me. For whatever reason, Blade Runner 2049 was an unemotional experience, so the review gets turned to why that didn't happen. If the opposite were true, I might've written a review more like yours, where I'm working backward from that response to find the various throughlines and thematic consistency.

This all goes back to one of your previously stated criteria for movie criticism: did this accomplish what it set out to do? I just wrote a short Letterboxd review for Upstream Color, Shane Carruth's follow-up to Primer, so Primer's on my mind. That is a movie whose time-travel plot surely makes sense if it gets charted out through a dozen rewatches, but for me, because the puzzle revolves around dead-eyed, monotone, boring characters, I do not care how tight a story is wrapped around them. If Carruth's motive was to craft a realistic time travel story, then great, mission accomplished, but I don't watch movies for math problems. It's the same with 2049. If I don't connect with any of the characters, whatever grand theme is trying to be communicated gets lost.

Jon
10/12/2017 03:00:13 am

Also, Villeneuve is inviting a game of 'find the trope' with all the references he includes to literature and religion. I caught several, but there's plenty I missed, as summarized by this extensive AV Club article.

https://www.avclub.com/forget-it-kinbote-it-s-chinatown-a-blade-runner-2049-1819179477

Lane
10/13/2017 07:55:12 pm

As a recent participant on the “Better Know a MMC Member” podcast, I did some reflection before the interview on why it is that I love movies. I just wanted to be prepared in case the question came up. I didn’t really get to pontificate on that particular question in the podcast as there were many other good things to pontificate on, but the answer that I came up with is that I, like many others, find some of life’s greatest pleasure in getting lost in fictional worlds.

This is why, out of the books I read, about 85% are novels; it’s why I studied literature in college and history in grad school (the study of history, while consisting of objective truths like dates and people, is really the re-construction of worlds that don’t exist anymore and trying to figure out why they existed in the first place); and I think, even, it’s why I’ve made a career in religion. The things I love about religion have much less to do with morality and rules and doctrine and more to do with the idea that religion, at its best, is telling a story about how the world was made, what went wrong, and how it gets fixed. In the biz, we call that “narrative theology.”

All this pontification is meant to explain why I really liked “Blade Runner 2049,” though I hope to also explain in a bit why I fell short of loving it.

Villeneuve’s stab at the worlds of Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott is, if nothing else, its own incredibly well realized fictional world. Villeneuve, using all his auteuristic heft here, makes sure the world is his own while remaining true to the canon that Scott created, and even throwing some bones to the original world of Dick’s novel. Like the original film, it is an immersive experience, but in a Villeneuve way. Villeneuve makes much more use of natural landscape and open space than Scott did in the original. While the original Blade runner gave the viewer a dark claustrophobia, “2049”, like “Arrival” and “Sicario” is at its best when scenes are happening in big open spaces—depleted farmlands, radioactive desserts, Egyptianesque burial-like lounge rooms, and vast Vegas simulacrum stages are the canvas that Villeneuve uses to create his world, and they are beautiful and immersive and represent everything that is good about going to the movies.

When Scott made the original “Blade Runner” in 1982, he was attempting to invent a new kind of noir film. The original was chock full of cinematic references to classic ‘30’s and ‘40’s crime films, and Villeneuve is smart to stay in the mystery genre. Like Spielberg in “Minority Report,” Villeneuve understands that the science fiction of the film should really be the window dressing to what compels audiences. This is, by the way, my chief complaint with most superhero films: they mistake spectacle for story. But Villeneuve doesn’t make this mistake, and here’s where he gets really good at world creation—he gets the details right. From Deckard’s bottle of Johnny Walker Black to the dated tube TV technology of the computer screens, Villeneuve is staying true to Scott’s world while advancing his own.

(I’ll insert this aside here to note that one detail, the bee scene, is a nod to Philip K. Dick’s original novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” In the novel, animals have mostly gone extinct, and the first to go were bees, which would of course be a significant loss in any ecological disaster. Bringing them back in Deckard’s neighborhood suggests that this guy, besides being a bad-ass former cop, seems to be super good at bringing impossible life into the world. It’s a little detail that that the ecologically minded Villeneuve is uniquely qualified to reference in the Blade Runner universe.)

And this leads to what I imagine will be the chief complaint of most MMC members about this film, and that is the pacing. Phil politely calls the pace “deliberate” in the original review. Let’s call it what it is: slow. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. It just is what it is, and I’m sympathetic to those that might complain about it, even if I ultimately disagree if it’s a bad thing. The length and pace are, I’m sure, factors in why the film is pretty much bombing at the box office and I’m not going to be an apologist. I’m generally pragmatic, and there are a dozen ways I can think of that 45 minutes could have been shaved off this film so that it would have fit more neatly into our 21st century expectations. Even the climactic fight scene was drawn out. David Blaine would be jealous of how long Luv held her breath underwater while being choked to death.

But length and pacing was not what kept me from loving the film. When it comes down to it, the issue really was all about love (as o

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Lane
10/13/2017 07:56:05 pm

(as opposed to Luv?), and specifically, the lack of it here. In the original Dick novel, empathy was the test for whether one was human. Scott held on to that original idea, but as Phil noted, added the dimension of self-preservation. What Villeneuve, in my opinion, is trying to add is the dimension of love. It’s the idea that, what truly makes us human is our ability to find love. Even to be created for it (as Jarred Leto suggests to Harrison Ford). And it’s a good thought, and I would agree with some of it, but for a film that wants to expound on the nature of love, there just isn’t much of it here.

Would it have helped to have gotten more of a sense of the Deckard/Rachel relationship post original film? Yes, but all we get are clues and a few lines of explanatory dialogue. Could there have been a richer parental dynamic between Luv and Jared Leto. Absolutely, but Leto’s character is too thin and too scant for that to play out. The best example is the relationship between K. and Joi, and perhaps the deepest line in the whole film is when K., resisting Joi’s request to be deleted from her mainframe storage, replies that the loss would be “just like a real girl.” Dang, that’s some woke Pinocchio truth right there, but then we barely see her again in the film and her “death” seems expected and loses its emotional resonance.

One of my favorite novelists, Michael Chabon, once abandoned a novel he was writing after five years and 1,500 pages. It’s still never been published in full and who knows if he’ll ever return to it. The reason he gave up on it, he wrote later, is that novelists must make choices—characters must do this or that, stories must turn left or right, and in that particular novel Chabon just couldn’t make choices, so he eventually gave it up. “Blade Runner 2049” feels a bit like this to me. The problem with world creation is that you, as creator, often become so passionate about your world that you want to explore every nook and cranny. Alas, while film is the ultimate venue for visually expansive storytelling, it’s also the venue where narrative storytelling is perhaps most constrained. There were some choices that could have been made here, but weren’t. Even I had to make choices in this review—there were about five other things I wanted to talk about including the Nabokov references, the way Joe K. alludes to Kafka, and how the dynamics of good guys and bad guys are turned upside down (think about it—if you root for the cops, you’re rooting for fascism. What if Jared Leto is actually the good guy?). Alas, I’m at almost 1200 words and will be lucky if you’ve kept reading this far. Choices.

So maybe we’ll see a “Blade Runner 2099” where this can all be fleshed out again, though I doubt it. And maybe this is where I ask the big criticism question that I ask of any film—it’s a little different than the “did this accomplish what it set out to do” question. The bigger question, for me, is did this film accomplish what the genre of film sets out to do. It shifts the question from whether a film is internally consistent to whether it is consistent with what a movie should be. For me, “2049” is an unequivocal yes. And hopefully, that answer proves I’m human.

Grade: A-

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Bobby
10/24/2017 12:36:03 pm

Damn, that was long enough to make me not want to write a really long review.

I liked it enough... I enjoyed the connections to the original, the visuals, the acting.

It was incredibly predictable, however. The minute they showed Stelline making memories, it seemed clear who she was. And confirmed when she cried.

Did we even see what happened to Wallace? What about the one eyed lady and her band of replicants? Are they both just left I'm the dark for another sequel one day? Why would Wallace, wherever he is, think Deckard is dead if Luv isn't alive to tell him so? Did I fall asleep and miss all of this, or should I not care?

Again, I did enjoy the movie overall, but agree with Riley about checking the time. I wonder what Kubrick could have done with this material. :)

B-

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New Jersey Asians link
3/5/2021 08:05:26 pm

Awesome blogg you have here

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