Blade Runner 2049 Review
Boring, Long, Feminist, and Overdone, Blade Runner 2049 is not as good as the original but still well made.
Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 film directed by Dennis Villeneuve and starring Ryan gosling. The film is the sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner which was based on Phillip K. Dick's novel called Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep. The film has received a lot of praise from the media. Blade Runner 2049 is set about 20 years from the original movie,in that movie Deckard, a blade runner (which is a government hitman who kills rogue replicants), hunts down a group of replicants (synthetic humans made by a corporation) who have escaped captivity. He hunts them all down, in the process he falls in love with a replicant named Rachel and she runs away with him. In the new movie the production of the old replicants has stopped after many years. Now there are new and improved replicants. K is a blade runner who himself is a replicant who hunts down old replicants who still linger from the first movie's time. After confronting a old replicant and killing him at the beginning of the film he finds a box with human remains inside. After analyzing the remains at the office he discovers that it's of a replicant who had a child. This is thought to be impossible. K's boss tells him to destroy the remains and find and kill the child because knowledge of the possibilities of replicant pregnancies may create problems with society. K wants to know more so he goes to the manufacturer of new replicants to identify who the remains are. He finds that they are of Rachel. He also finds out that a blade runner called Deckard is the father. The leader of the company Niander Wallace has been looking for a way to make his replicants procreate to make more profits. After hearing about the remains he sends his replicant enforcer named Luv to steal the remains and follow K in order to find the child. K while investigating a orphanage finds a toy horse which is in his childhood memories. Replicants don't have real memories there suppose to be implants but the discovery of the toy horse in the same location as his memory tells him the memories are real. Next he checks birth records and finds twins, a boy and a girl with identical DNA were born the same day, only the boy is listed has alive. K goes to see Dr. Stelline who makes memory implants for replicants. She tells him that it is illegal to implant real memories into replicants. K starts to believe he is the son of Deckard. Back at the office his boss is starting to question his loyalty has a replicant, she helps him after he tells her he killed the child. K next analyzes the toy horse and through its radiation tracks down a location. K goes to this location which is the ruins of Las Vegas there he finds Deckard. K and Deckard argue, with Deckard finally telling him that he left Rachel and the child with a replicant rebel movement in order for them to be safe. Luv and other enforcers arrive and capture Deckard. K is saved by the replicant rebel movement who tell him that Deckard and Rachel had a girl. K realizes hes not Deckard's son and that Dr. Stelline is the daughter since only she could have made the memories. The replicant rebel movement tells K to kill Deckard so that Stelline will be safe. K hunts down Luv who is transporting Deckard and kills her but is injured. He doesn't kill Deckard but instead takes him to see his daughter Dr.Stelline and dies in the steps to her office.
Blade Runner is a well made movie. This is not your CGI garbage sequel that hollywood has been throwing out there to make money on classic blockbusters. That being said it still doesn't live up to the original. If there are movie critics claiming this is somehow better than the original they are sorely wrong. The truth is it's no fault of the move makers, with a movie like Blade Runner (1982) you just can't make a better movie. This movie technically is a very good effort but still falls short. The reason isn't for lack of effort but instead because the filmmakers seem to have over done the dynamics of the original film. Blade Runner (1982) was marketed has a action film but never was, it was a science fiction crime drama what they call a neo-noir. Blade Runner didn't do good at the box office but gained a cult following later. The movie has a large fan base. As a neo noir the movie explored the issues of a society where humans and replicants interact. Empathy was a mayor theme explored in the movie. Strangely enough Blade Runner 2049 a movie from 2017 is actually slower paced than the first film. The reason is because of the length of the scenes and the boring acting. It's as if director Dennis Villeneuve wanted to respect the feel of the first film but wanted to outdo Ridley Scott. So location shots that convey the mood of the scene in the first film in the new film are double has long. The first film had story this movie has double the story. Even though this movie is not a remake and it's a sequel, it follows the same formula that many of these 30 year old in the making sequels have. That is imitate the basic plot of the original but tweak the story a bit, make the scenery more hip to the modern era and have the main characters related in some way to the original characters in order to have a cameo of the original characters. All these movies are like this and Blade Runner is basically no different. You could switch out K with Deckard and call it a remake just a longer and more boring version of the original. The original Blade Runner is great because it balanced the theme and the action pretty well. Sure it wasn't a bloody action thriller but that's not what it was supposed to be, it was supposed to a bloody action thriller with brains. Blade Runner 2049 has too much brains that you might be sleeping at the end. It doesn't help that Ryan Gosling mumbles throughout the whole movie, half the time I don't know what the fuck he was saying. That's not to say much about the other actors most of whom are foreign and have thick to moderate accents. The movie is dark like the original but not in the same way. The original had a gritty over populated, over criminalized world, the new movie feels too polished, too high definition, it feels over populated but too clean and perfect. It seems the film makers tried to make up for this with lighting which in the end just makes the scenes more boring. The movie is dark not in a dystopian way but in a sleepy way. Music in the film imitated the original which is the safest bet but it seems when Hans Zimmer could he over did it. Or maybe it wasn't Hans Zimmer but Dennis Villeneuve for example the impending doom music you hear at the end of the movie sounds more like Johan Johanson's soundrack to Villeneuve's Sicario. This music has no place in Blade Runner and sounds generic since it has been imitated a lot since Sicario. The original movie had a theme that this film although long and full of dialogue doesn't seem to have. Take away the theme and you're basically left with a run of the mill space opera. It kind of felt like a Star Wars prequel and that's not good. Interesting enough they were still able to enter politics in the film although the first film had none or it's politics were harder to find and more intellectual. What are the politics you say? Well it's Hollywood it should be obvious but man is it blatant. Women, women, women and more women. If you look at Villeneuve's movies you might think this man is obsessed with women. You might think to warn your women about this man. Villeneuve is obviously a male feminist crusader. Let's dive in to these politics. The big surprise in the movie is that Dr. Stelline a female is the child of Deckard and Rachel, K's boss is a female, Luv the replicant enforcer is a female, and the leader of the rebel Replicants is a female, I think you get the point. In fact it's almost has if in 2049 men are basically useless and only good for procreation, hmm kind of sounds like what a angry feminist would say. Ironically K's sex life is basically his love for a half hologram half replicant female named Joi, who is basically a future sex doll, seems to be an analogy of the modern man who lives on his computer and his sex life is lotion, porn fantasy and anime. Maybe it's a unintentional warning to men, if you become overly emotional and live a sexual life of fantasy, woman will take over society. Then again maybe their making fun of said men. When K realizes he is not half human he has to die to save this women led society. Anyways the problem isn't the female characters but the lack of a theme. The only theme I could think of would be the death of K at the end of the movie in order to save Deckard and reunite him with his daughter. The only theme I get from this is that K empathizes like a human but this theme is unique in the movie and doesn't really go with the rest of the plot. In other words the rest of the movie is space opera vapid. That leaves the politics which honestly don't take away to much from the action of the movie but is a stupid generic theme for a movie and doesn't compare to the first film. It's kind of like if I made a sequel called Black Blade Runner with a mostly black cast and I claimed it was a exact sequel to the first movie.
To be clear Blade Runner 2049 does have some great scenes. Not withstanding the feel of the film, they successfully created a much larger Blade Runner world so to say. I was thrilled to see the shots of the city streets from the spinner blade runner vehicle. It gives you an impression of how large this city is. You also get to see the waste lands beyond the cities. I was impressed. The CG were well made and believable in other words it was real enough it wasn't distracting. Although the music would go off on the Sicario tangents, for the most part it stayed true to the original music by Vangelis. My problem with the acting is that it was boring but not always bad. I was most impressed with Ryan Gosling (K), Ana De Armas (Joi) and Carla Juri (Dr. Stelline). Gosling acted well when he wasn't talking. Ana De Armas is gorgeous and played the role of a female fantasy perfectly. Carla Juri also did good has a woman who lives inside a bubble making memory implants. Each scene was well made. Although the story follows the same formula than many of these so called modern sequels, the writer added just enough to make the story interesting. The problem has I mentioned before was the film was over done and lacks a theme. I give this movie a B.
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