As
Bland The Second Time As The First #BladeRunner2049 #review #spoilers
#movie
All pictures courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Sony Pictures
Oh
god. Here we go again. You know, this year has been really tough for
me. Outside of starting my new episodic serial Extraordinary
(#Extraordinary season one out now), a third season of The Writer
(#TheWriter out now), trying to get the two mystery novels The
Knowledge of Fear (#KnowFear coming soon) and The Man On The Roof
(#TMOTR coming soon) out, and doing a ton of other writing projects
on top of blogging, I feel like a lot of the entertainment I imbibed
did not live up to any level of expectations. You can scroll back
through to read my Summer of Suck (#summerofsuck) reviews on all the
music, TV and films that came out this summer and see that I
understood precisely why the box office was in such a funk. And now
with the fall/winter/holiday/award season kicking into full gear, and
being just a few weeks away from Thor, The Greatest Showman, and Star
Wars, I am anticipating some pretty great entertainment.
Unfortunately, we can’t always get what we want. “Well, that was
fine and dandy, Michael, but what about the actual film you’re here
to review? You know, Blade Runner 2049?” Right? Well, is this film
franchise like the energizer bunny and has plenty of juice left in
the tank for great storytelling, or is it time for these movies to
power down (and maybe even reboot)? Let’s find out together.
Let
me first start by saying that I just recently saw the original Blade
Runner in preparation for this movie because I wanted to really see
this movie because I am an unapologetic Ryan Gosling fan and it
looked cool and I like sci-fi. For me, Blade Runner was always one of
those “gotta see” movies that you never can quite get around to
actually seeing until it happens into your lap one day. So, when it
was playing on cable last week, I recorded it and hurried up and
watched it before my Tuesday 2049 showing. Well, I have to say that I
wasn’t all that impressed with the first one and don’t fully get
why so many people say that the original Blade Runner was the film
that informed over half of all the sci-fi films and TV shows that
came after it, even unto today. But, giving it a hard think, I am
willing to concede that argument, as most sci-fi pre-80s (from what I
can think of) had a much lighter tone that mimicked something like
Star Wars or Star Trek, with the exception of cross-genre horror
flicks like Alien. If this—similar to how people talked about Twin
Peaks (that travesty of a time-waste)—influenced future
filmmakers, then so be it. With that said, I will keep most of my
thoughts about the original Blade Runner for later in this review,
but will mention the main plot as it was pertinent to 2049.
In
the original Blade Runner, a private investigator named Deckard
(played by Harrison Ford) has a special job in the future (at the
time, 2019) of decommissioning (read: killing; we’ll discuss this
further later) old or malfunctioning humanoid robots known as
replicants. This job title is known by many as a Blade Runner for
reasons that I can’t remember. Actually, I’m not sure they ever
explained why they have this name, but I digress. In that film, it is
becoming harder and harder for people to tell the difference between
the real humans and the robots, especially the ones who have escaped
their slave-worker camps to dwell in the grime that is future LA.
This is so difficult because they not only look human but their
creator has recently figured out how to implant fake memories into
them so that they can have an entire past life that they never lived.
Deckard falls in love with a replicant played by Sean Young, does
some stuff, then watches a replicant die. It’s all very “Oh!
That’s nice.” And the one big question from that film (I actually
didn’t want to include this so early in the review at first but
changed my mind last minute) is: Is Deckard himself a replicant?
Blade
Runner 2049 stars Ryan Gosling as one of the new Blade Runners 30
years into the future in 2049—self-explanatory. What’s
interesting about Ryan’s character who is called K but really has
no name, is that he is a replicant and knows that he is a replicant.
He’s one of the newest models who has been commissioned by the LAPD
to destroy or “retire” the older models. The older models have
been deemed dangerous because they never listened and obeyed their
end-users quite like the newer models. For those who haven’t seen
either movie, understand that these replicants aren’t like most
film robots. They live autonomous lives like regular people when they
aren’t slaving away “off-world” or on other planets, I assume,
harvesting their trees and fighting blue cat aliens. Still, the
end-users are their workplace bosses or their sex-work clientele if
they’re pleasure bots.
Back
to the plot, Gosling starts the film by decommissioning Dave
Bautista’s character who talks some gibberish about miracles and
how Ryan or K should be ashamed for putting down his own kind. Ryan
takes his eye, checks Bautista’s serial number, scans it into the
police database and discovers the replicant was a field medic. He
then is about to leave when he has his drone do a geo-mapping of the
area and finds a large box buried beneath a dead tree. His captain
orders the box be dug up and brought back to HQ. In the box they find
the bony remains of a woman who was previously pregnant but died in
childbirth. They think that the medic helped deliver her baby and
tried to save her. The big problem that they discover when looking
closer at the bones: the bones/DNA strands inside the marrow have a
serial number on them. That’s right, the dead woman who had given
birth was supposedly a replicant. But how could that be when
replicants are robots and robots, as we know, are inorganic objects
that can’t reproduce. This is the miracle the medic was talking
about.
So
now the police captain is intent on finding this baby (should be
around 30 by now) so that she can destroy it because if the world
knew this could happen, it would change everything and maybe they
wouldn’t be able to use replicants as mindless slaves anymore.
 |
| Billionaire Wallace |
Now
the race is on between Ryan/LAPD and Wallace to find this grown
child. SPOILERS AHEAD!
SPOILERS!
So,
if you are sorta paying attention, by now, you’ve probably figured
out that the female pregnant replicant in question is the same
character played by Sean Young in the first film. Yes, this also
means that the child is the son or daughter of Harrison Ford, hence
his appearance in the film.
But
before we get to Ford, we are introduced to a mix of other
characters. We have Wallace, who, as I said, is played by Leto and is
blind. He runs many companies, one of which is a farming company that
has saved the world from famine. Keep this salvation-theme in mind
for later. We have his righthand woman in Luv. Luv is a unique
character in that she, too, is a replicant that knows she is a
replicant. In fact, it weirdly seems that all replicants know they
are replicants, which, to me seems to defeat the purpose of giving
them fake memories. But I digress.
On
K’s side there is Joi. Joi is unique in that she is NOT a pleasure
bot. In fact, she is not a robot at all, but is an interactive
augmented reality-esque program. For those who didn’t see the
movie, think of her as if your Google Home or Amazon Echo had a
holographic projection of a woman. Her use is both weird and expected
from K (Gosling; trying so hard not to call him by his real name) the
replicant. He is, technically, a computer. She is, technically, a
computer program. Thus, they complement each other. Joi is K’s
live-in companion/spouse program. The funny thing about her is (and
I’ll really have to speak more on this when I get to the critiquing
section and talk about other reviewers calling the film sexist) that
she really is solely there to cheerlead him. As just a holographic
output of a program, she doesn’t cook, is not really shown
cleaning, though I assume the main computer hub-attachments can do
that, and can’t even sleep with him. Almost any sort of
objectification of this character in other reviewers’ minds is
purely fantastical and wishful hating. Oh, and even though this
character has little to no influence on the film, she is the
dark-haired button-nosed young woman featured in most of the
advertising.
 |
| Joi |
Anyway,
K has this memory from his early childhood (again, he never had a
childhood, so it must be false, right?). In it, he is running from a
group of boys who are trying to steal a hand-carved wooden horse from
him. All he has, he wants to protect the wooden horse at all costs.
He finds a hiding place for it in some abandoned factory then goes
back to the boys to catch his beating. Well, as he is going around to
other cities (the dump that is San Diego), checking for homeless kids
and seeing the seedy underbelly of black market child labor, he
happens to wander over to a man who had a child matching the
information that he found on this supposed replicant baby from 30
years ago.
At
this rundown place, while he finds nothing of import on the baby
(the records have been removed from that year), he does see an
abandoned factory. Yep, the same factory from his memory. He follows
it down to where, in his fake memory, he placed the wooden horse. He
grabs into the hiding place and... Holy crap, there’s the horse
with the same date on the bottom and everything like in his memory.
Now he believes that he is the replicant-born child.
 |
| Sup, Doc |
So
now K is losing it. He knows that he is the kid but doesn’t know
what else to do. He goes home and has a strange threesome between Joi
and this street hooker-replicant which a lot of critics are talking
about. After reading a few non-spoiler reviews about this thing, I
thought I was gonna get something on a Caligula level that is draped
in weird and insatiable debauchery. Nope. The amount of outraged
reviewers is stupid and their claims unfounded. It’s actually quite
artistic and thought-provoking the way it is done. It reminds me more
of that Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man in which all he wants to
be is human.
OK,
so the setup is that Joi wants to finally make real love with K, feel
it, experience it as a real person. But, again, she’s just a
computer program with a holographic output that only allows her to
feel things in rather shifty intervals. But apparently if she
overlays her holographic programming over a replicant’s body, she
can interact with the real world more readily. So she essentially
steps into the hooker-replicant who wears Joi sorta like a second
skin. They make out with K a little and then we jump to the next
morning. That’s it! That’s literally all that happens. They don’t
even both get undressed. Yes, both Joi and the replicant-hooker start
unzipping and taking clothes off, but you don’t see anymore. The
way some reviewers talked about this scene, I thought I was going to
see two sets of naked breasts overlaid atop each other, zooming in
and out or two women orgasming at the same time or something that
geek-boy fantasies are made of. Nope. Nothin’. It’s literally the
next morning almost immediately and you get a silhouette of the
replicant-hooker naked from afar. Not to be a horn-dog, but I was
quite confused not because I wanted to see more nudity but because I
then took eight minutes to have an inner-debate about what the hell
people were so offended by. Moving on...
After
K tells his boss that he’s found the natural-born replicant
(doesn’t say he thinks it is him), she gives the malfunctioning
replicant time to flee the city. He then goes in search of his
would-be father Harrison Ford. He finds Ford in old Las Vegas in what
is now supposedly a radioactive orange wasteland. After they fight
for a while for literally no reason whatsoever, save to show that
Ford is and can still be a badass—and I’m completely here for
that—they have a chat about the kid. Ford says that the plan was
always for him to leave and get as far away from his kid and the
mother (Sean Young’s replicant character) as possible in order to
protect them both. K never intimates that he is Ford’s son and
doesn’t get a chance before Luv and her goons show up and bust up
the place. Luv had been tracking him and even killed his police
captain to figure out where he went after her own tracer went dark.
She crushes the program stick containing Joi on it and leaves him to
die.
 |
| Pleasure Bot Prostitute |
 |
| CGI Sean Young |
Admittedly,
I lost about a minute and a half of time at this point in the movie
because I was checking the time and couldn’t believe it was still
going, so I missed the reason for moving Ford. Just know that they
put Ford in a transport along with Luv to take him somewhere. Where,
I don’t know. But I do know that it must be outside of an ocean
city (maybe LA, maybe somewhere higher up or lower down the coast) as
the climactic fight takes place just outside a city sea-wall in which
the rain and storm-tide is crashing against the downed flying car and
threatening to drown everyone.
As
you can guess, K tracks them and fights with Luv one last time where
she stabs him a few times. He gets the best of her and drowns her,
then frees Ford and takes him to his daughter. And we get a
first-time introduction between Ford and the memory doctor while K is
slowly dying on the front stairs. The end.
What’s
my grade? I give it a C+, B-.
Again with the double grade, uggghhh! Why? Well, similar to what I
thought about FOX’s The Orville, I thought that this movie and to a
greater extent, this franchise, has a lot of flaws but that some of
the chief flaws can be fixed by making one or two large tweaks. Where
the Orville needs to pick one solid genre (either drama or comedy.
It’s not good as a hybrid of both), here, both the original Blade
Runner and 2049 need to be shorter.
To
me, the producers who first bought the short story “Do Androids
Dream Of Electric Sheep?” from Philip K. Dick (RIP to him. Outside
of never being read, one of the worst things to happen to an author
is to die before you’ve seen your work truly influence others; he
died before the release of the original Blade Runner, FYI) created a
two hour movie that should’ve been about fifteen minutes shorter.
Blade Runner 2049, as a sequel, took an already longer-than-need-be
film and added almost an entire extra hour, when in fact it should’ve
been even shorter than the original. You could seriously cut a full
hour, maybe hour and 15 minutes from this movie and lose almost
nothing. Some fans will say, “But you’ll lose the spatial
dissonance and artistic integrity and—” No, you won’t. Almost
every single scene in this movie went on for too long. Consider this,
I went to see this movie at 11:40am in the morning, expecting to sit
through about 12 minutes of commercials and be out of this movie
around 2:30. I checked my phone’s time at 2:00pm just after the
Vegas confrontation with love and thought, OK, this is good timing.
From
there, there was literally still about 45 minutes of the movie left.
But check this out, of those 45 minutes (excluding credits) there was
only about six (seven if ultra generous) scenes left in the movie.
They were: 1) K awaking to the underground replicant rebels, 2) Ford
meeting and being interrogated by Wallace, 3) K seeing the Joi
program advertised on a big digital interactive holo-display, 4) the
climactic sequence with the flying car crashing into the water and
the fight (again, you can divide this between the crash and the fight
if really generous), 5) K and Ford arriving to the outside of where
the doctor is, and 6) Ford meeting the doctor. Frankly, even that is
being generous as I counted what should technically be one scene in
Ford meeting the doctor and them arriving where she lives as two
scenes. That’s six scenes. Six! That averages to nine minutes on
every scene. This is already after almost two hours of the movie. The
climax alone took at least 15 minutes, which still seemed like too
long. And climaxes are always alotted the most time in a film outside
of, maybe the opening sequence.
 |
| Look At All The Vast Amounts Of Wasted Time |
Right
now, some fans are calling me a smartypants and egging me on to find
places to cut. For starters, everything doesn’t necessarily need to
be cut but some stuff can be sped up in the editing bay. But I’d
cut at least a minute from the opening convo/fight with Bautista, cut
K smelling the gruel (why include it if we don’t see him eating any
and he doesn’t even make a hard enough face in either way of liking
or disliking what he sees/smells for us to understand his thinking).
Frankly, as much as they tried to make this a love story, you can
pretty much cut Joi as she is wholly superfluous to the story, which
means you can cut the Joi advert scene at the end too. Again, you
lose almost nothing by cutting her character completely or having her
in far fewer scenes. K’s reach to be more human-like could be
better explored by having more interaction with the replicant-hooker.
By playing them off each other more often, you could explore how the
humanity or perceived humanity of others influences our own. This was
tried and failed through the Joi character. Plus, the hooker at least
has an important role in bringing K in contact with the underground
group which is clearly a setup for future films.
Cut
three minutes out of the fight with Luv, another two from the fight
between K and Ford. Speed up the scene where K is shot down by the
San Diego scavengers. Speed up the scene where Wallace is introduced
to the new replicant he quickly kills. And finally, speed up the
Vegas scene in which he is walking around the outside of the city.
Again, by making these alterations, making the characters walk
faster, talk a little faster, snipping camera shots two seconds
sooner, you can easily get this film down to two hours and still have
a plethora of informing silence which is what the fans love so much.
Silence from characters is great when used properly.
I
have to jump around a little here because I had a succinct train of
thought on what I would hit one point after another but lost it. So
let me jump to the criticism that I thought was unfounded about this
film. I thought the sexism criticism of this film was unfounded and,
frankly, kinda stupid. I know I sound, yet again, like a misogynist
who is trying to silence a few female critics out there, but critics
of all kinds have really burned my oatmeal this year with their
over-bloated infatuation with movies that weren’t worth a damn. I
read three criticisms from much higher-paid film critics than me (all
three women) who said that the movie was overly sexist and that if
you were a woman you weren’t going to like it because you can only
view everything through your righteous feminist hat, and I’m like,
“What?” First off, give women some credit. Second off, this movie
was hardly sexist. And third off, you don’t have to be a woman to
not like this movie.
On
top of that, the females are shown to have at least four notable
archetypes, something the men aren’t given. We have Joi who is the
1950s quintessential mother posing as the Nurturer. She is there to
nurture K, yet the fact that she doesn’t conform to other supposed
50s standards as cooking and cleaning like a housewife strips what
little sexist criteria that would exist away from the character. We
have Robin Wright’s Boss character. She is the one who drives K to
complete the investigation and knows or at least thinks that she
knows what is best for the world by destroying this baby. We have the
replicant-hooker who stands in as our stories Jezebel of sorts who is
supposed to be a temptation for our hero, but then, in a narrative
twist, actually turns out to be an ally in disguise when usually all
we get in films are traitors in disguise. And finally we have our
rather complex Luv who stands in as our ultimate foil and personified
avarice and jealous ex and strong-willed, strong-headed woman. She is
literally what a lot of people think about when they think of a
modern feminist as opposed to what feminist ideal-ize themselves as:
she is strong, independent-thinking, takes little to no shiznit from
anyone, is always well put together and is always on task. And yet,
if looking for it, there is always this slight twinge of softness and
vulnerability when in the presence of Wallace. It seems that she
knows how valuable she is to him while also realizing that she is
wholly disposable to him because she is nothing more than a creature.
As
far as the nudity, gratuitous? Hardly. As I said, they didn’t even
have an actual sex scene in the supposed “threesome,” and the
only offense I could see from that scene is some notion that it is
disgusting for a man to be thinking of having sex with a different
woman while with you, but even then women do that just as much as men
do. And while I saw no detailed full-frontal nudity of a woman
(usually filmmakers even in modern days will have women either “grow
it back” or put some kind of privates wig down there for full
effect) we did see multiple shots of full-frontal male nudity in
tanks. Yes, we saw the breasts of the newest replicant, but this
scene hardly played as sexual, especially after Wallace gutted her.
Now, I can see a complaint of racism from this with its
not-too-subtle allusions to slave auctions, but sexism? No. I will
concede that the giant statues of women in Vegas and the superfluous
scene of Joi at the end were both unnecessary but even then I can
hardly call them sexist. And even while they are playing into the
idea of the male gaze in media, they also are informing of both the
environment and the characters at that point in time.
And
finally, the scene in which Sean Young’s character is shot in the
head was a very “eh!” situation. Yes, all of the female
characters in the film die save for the hooker and doctor, but this
is not an indictment on the disposable nature of women in film;
rather, it is confined to the actual plot of the film. I hate when
film criticism is more mired in social justice or political causes on
either side that it can’t see the very nature of the film and what
it is trying to say. EVERYBODY IN THE FILM WAS DISPOSABLE! How is
that not clear? To point out that it is just the women is alarmist
and looking for offense. Hell, K seems very much to be dying on the
stairs and nobody gives a single damn at the end. Or what about all
of the nameless, faceless male characters that die throughout the
film. Was the San Diego dump bombing scene necessary? No. But who
were killed? All men. A brigade of them. Coco in the police force is
smacked in the back of his head and we can’t be bothered to care.
We hardly even feel anything for Bautista’s character at the
beginning and lord only knows what the hell happened to that black
dude who was in, like, what, two scenes? Wouldn’t be surprised if
his character’s name literally was Token.
My
point is that just because you see a few naked breasts and choose to
ignore the naked male penises, or see the female characters die (replaced quickly with new ones for a sequel: the hooker, the memory
doctor and the rebel leader) that does not make the movie sexist. In fact,
they showed women in a wide range of character archetypes, bein
careful not to have most of them overlap for fear of showing these
android-beings as being too human.
Now
that that’s outta my system, let’s talk about the generality of
the movie. I thought that this was rather boring and bland just like
the first one. Do I get it? Again, yes. The thing I dislike about
critics these days is that they have gotten so high on themselves and
what they think about film that they carry an air of superiority that
the fans do too. When I read on Indiewire how if I thought the movie
was too long I, apparently, didn’t get it and couldn’t be an
intellectual like the author thinks of himself, I was rather pissed.
Even in gist, calling someone stupid for not liking a movie is
abrasive to say the least. Yes, I called the sexism criticism stupid
but that is because it is very overblown. Again, if you want an
actually sexist movie watch Ex Machina, this year’s Wonder Woman or
Nolan’s Inception. I thought this movie failed on a few levels.
If,
however, you take this film as a sequel to the original Blade Runner
(the C+), then I think that it fails, like most sequels do, to live
up to the catch of the first one. The original Blade Runner had a ton
of room for improvement but it had a few things going for it. It was
an old-fashioned Noir, gumshoe detective story with a detective who
meets a beautiful (synthetic) dame and has to figure out a crime. Deckard had the usual flaws of a Noir PI: he drank too much, had a
weakness for women, hung out in seedy places and had an air of
cockiness about him. In the film, he spouted off dime-story
philosophy to try to sound deep and all the fanatics of the film took
said spoutings as being deep. It was highly stylized and gave the
future a dark and brooding dystopian-like aesthetic when most people
were used to bright and cheery sci-fi like Star Trek. Deckard kept us
informed of his thoughts at all times and possessed a certain
street-tough, louse-ish charm that endeared audiences to the
character. But the biggest flaw of the movie was that in this Noir
detective story, very little detective work was performed. Deckard
looked hard at a photo and followed a person around for a while, but
that was generally it. No, administering the human test does not
count as detective work. He lucked into the end after being told
where the replicants he sought were (at the house of one of their
makers) and ultimately couldn’t even defeat the main replicant,
instead being saved by him in a huge twist. This was Blade Runner.
While
Blade Runner 2049 does make one huge improvement—the character is
actually seen doing real police work—almost everything else is
changed or discarded in the new version. There is no self-kept log of
K’s feelings or facts about the case as a whole. K, while Gosling
does possess a certain natural charisma, possesses little to no charm
or even foibles like Deckard had. Is he a hard drinker? A druggie?
Had he tried to have some kind of strange replicant wife? When did he
learn he was a replicant and how did that impact him? None of this is
explored and while we are given hope for some kind of charm in the
opening scene, it is quickly wave-crested by his arrival back home to
Joi who, seemingly, sucks all of his joy out. Yes, an allowance can
be made that he is almost devoid of any personality because he is a
replicant, however, the discussion in the pop culture realm
surrounding the first Blade Runner is so heavily entrenched in the
“Is Deckard a replicant?” question that it almost seems like a
betrayal that this new replicant isn’t allowed to have a
personality. K acts cold and inhuman, not even bothering to straddle
the line between human and robot. It almost seems like the movie,
while trying to skirt answering the question about Deckard’s
humanity as it is never answered whether he is or isn’t human,
inadvertently answers it twofold: by having allowed him to show far
more humanity than any replicant character so far and by allowing for
him to have had sex and father a baby. Or it just brings up another
intriguing question about how real all of the replicants are, like...
you know what I’m getting at, right? Right? Like, do they
produce... bodily fluids of all kinds?
I
guess that the answer to that question is assumed but it really only
begs more questions. Now I am going to delve into a little bit of
real sexism here and do some mansplaining. It doesn’t take a genius
to know that for years a great deal of nerds (most are male) have
wanted to build life-like replicas of females (girls and women) so
they wouldn’t have to interact with the real thing either out of
fear or frustration. If they have the ability to one day do this, why
and what sense would it make for them to create a bot that is so
life-like that it even has the supposed “icky” (again, something
nerds or a sexist would say) parts of a woman (or a man for that
matter) as any bodily fluids outside of lubrication and saliva?
Wouldn’t the replicant who got pregnant have to have had a
menstruation? This would literally be a flaw for replicants in either
of their two main uses: off-plant laboring and/or sex work. Even when
allowing for the possibility that, like 2049 supposes, she was made
specifically for that meeting with Deckard so he could fall in love
with and impregnate her, it then seems almost to negate the entirety
of the original film. Because the only reason Deckard meets her is
because he goes there for info on the rogue replicants. We would
therefore have to assume that the original creator knew of those
replicants and possibly even freed them himself to give the LAPD
purpose to come visit him. But again, I digress.
Back
to 2049, not only is the hard-boiled noir style gone, but so too is
the aesthetic style and the music palette. Don’t get me wrong, I
absolutely loved the visuals in the film which is one of the biggest
reasons why it hasn’t sunken down into the D-grade territory, and I
also really like what Zimmer has done with the remnants left by
Vangelis on the soundtrack, but it’s far different than the
original to me. Where the original Blade Runner was like looking at
everything through a gray smoke-screen of futuristic decay, this film
was far cleaner, far crisper and had many of its visual cues from
more recent Tom Cruise sci-fi pics Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. In
other words, it wasn’t unique. Maybe that’s just a product of the
times but it felt like they were going too much for new-age cinema
style rather than an update to what had been established. This, to
me, is the difference between Mad Max: Fury Road and this film. Where
Fury Road felt like a poet or writer going back to re-edit an old
work after growing and learning newer words or how to write more
poetically, Blade Runner felt like the original author had died and a
new author came in to continue the franchise (example: The Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo/Millennium series). Yes, I know the Blade Runner
films had two different directors so it should feel that way, but
still, this felt more like one of those sequels from the Cloverfield
universe. For those who don’t know, instead of writing actual
Cloverfield sequels, they buy cool specs and tweak the concepts to
fit into the Cloverfield mold. Blade Runner 2049 seems like a spec
script that was co-opted into the franchise and given that name
because execs thought it’d make more money.
Also,
I think that one of the biggest misses of the film is its lack of
good philosophy to build on from the first one. Here, we are heavy on
religious philosophy, allegory and metaphor which I find to be
perfectly fine, but I didn’t feel that it made a real point to
challenge or say anything of value that hadn’t already been brought
up in the first one. Where the first one challenged what it was to be
human and how the unknown of death influences how we live (Batty’s
whole struggle is not to be human or more human-like but is really
with time. Death is not what he is angry about having, but the fact
that he knows when he’ll die and that his time alive is so finite
and wasted in-part by trying to gain more time is really what’s the
most heartbreaking issue rooted in his final speeches), this one
didn’t really challenge anything so much as it gave us a bunch of
cool what-if scenarios to ponder. There is never a question about K’s
humanity neither from him nor anyone else because we already know he
is a replicant. And the idea of dying for something being noble is
really only prevalent at the very end of the film. But even that idea
is not thoroughly realized because there is little to no ponderance
of what death truly is, truly means and how it frames our lives.
There is no pull for him to become more human-like, nor does there
really seem to be a thrust for him to shy away from any unprogrammed
humanity. And even his pursuit of the truth and the idea of reality
being an easily manipulated fiction is hardly breathtaking. We’re
just sort of seeing this mystery unfold.
Finally,
to the idiots who insist that because someone may not like something
they automatically don’t get it, give me a break. I got how this
story was an allegory/metaphor for God, the devil and Jesus’ birth.
I understood that, as it was so blatant it almost got on my nerves.
For those that didn’t see or get this, consider some of these
things if and when you re-watch the film. Luv is, essentially,
Lucifer (see how they share the first two letters of the name). At
first, I thought that the name was silly too and you may think that
my inference just off the name is silly if you didn’t see any of
these religious undertones. OK, consider this: there is almost not a
single scene in which Luv is in where light doesn’t play a role.
For instance, when she and K are walking through the Wallace Industry
archives, notice that the lights are always crawling on the walls and
often toward her. At first, the BR fan might easily dismiss this as
an ode or nod to the scenery during the Deckard test in the original,
but this is done on purpose in multiple scenes through the movie.
Why? Because Lucifer is the “Morning Star (angel),” the “Bringer
of Light.” Hell, even when she enters the captain’s office, the
first thing she says is something about the light and turns it on.
She always wears light colors or white to try to symbolize her purity
though she has none and has to stand through all of Wallace’s
musings on angels and creation.
So
if Luv is Lucifer then that, by default, makes Wallace God or at
least some form of god (argument can be made that the original
replicant maker from the first film is actually god in this
interpretation). With that in mind, his blindness actually makes
sense as an allusion to God’s supposed blindness to the plight of
his creation. Yes, the replicants are suffering but why would he
care? He sees what he is doing as necessary for the universe.
You
have the child as Jesus—funny how this is 30-some years after the
baby was supposedly born, right? She is a doctor so you know she is
smart. She was also raised in a rather tough upbringing. Biblical
scholars believe that Joseph either left the family or died sometime
in Christ’s youth, hence why Ford’s character is not around.
She’s born to a “virgin” replicant or someone who, for all
intents and purposes, should not have been able to give birth, and
blah, blah, blah. Look, there’s more allusions in there but I am
running out of time and this review is already too long.
Ultimately
I feel like they have made two fairly lackluster films in this
franchise, both of which supply great visuals and music but are
sorely lacking in excitement. While this film made for a coherent
plot, it did nothing to win over new audiences. I think that this
idea has, to a great extent been squandered and almost deliberately
so. Realize that we still haven’t seen any off-world stuff, nor any
place outside of the US west coast and have no idea why they speak
the language they speak. There is so much untapped potential here
that this could literally be a shared cinematic universe all itself,
and yes I am still including the artistic integrity of each picture.
You don’t have to remove the philosophy, weird parts or even a lot
of the slow, brooding silence, just add in more action and let the
replicants and the humans have slightly more personality, then give
each film to a visionary and explore off-world colonies, other places
in the world, hell even show a full-on war rebellion or something.
There’s so much to do here. Yet, for some reason I feel like in the
last few years we are being punked by Ridley Scott. As one of the
exec producers on this, it seems as if he’s tried to ruin his own
legacy of decent/good/great films by going back to retread them in
some way. He did it with Alien, he’s doing it here. If I hear
anything about them trying to do a sequel or prequel to Gladiator, so
help me God...
Should
you see it? Eh! If you were a fan of the original Blade Runner, then
chances are you probably already have seen it. I can’t say that
you, as a new fan that knows nothing about this film should go see
it. Gosling fans feel free, Ford fans feel free, but again, it might
not be satisfying after nearly three hours of runtime. It’s just an
OK movie.
What
do you think? Was I too hard on this film? If you haven’t seen it,
do you plan on going now? If you have seen it, what did you think of
the film? If you think it’s a masterpiece then tell me how. And do
you think K actually dies at the end or no? Would you be willing to
see a sequel? Let me know in the comments below.
Until next time, “What do androids
dream of?”
‘What every thing dreams of:
something better.’
P.S.
You can’t tell me that if you’re a fan of Blade Runner you don’t
like that sign-off. OK, it probably won’t work well as my ultimate
sign-off for everything, but it works here, doesn’t it? No? You
don’t like it? Not thought-provoking enough? Fine. Whatevs! My
feelings aren’t hurt. Nope. I’ll think of a better sign-off next
time.
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