As Bland The Second Time As The First #BladeRunner2049 #review #spoilers #movie

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

Meanwhile, the new billionaire (I assume he’s a billionaire but they never say) tech guy behind the newest crop of replicants is Wallace played by Jared Leto in a role that’s more wasted than your uncle Dale was at the last family reunion picnic. Dale know damn well he need help. He need more help than Jack on This Is Us, but I digress. Wallace is blind because... well, there’s no real reason it seems. It’s just a character thing, and that’s fine. He believes that creating replicants to use as slaves is somehow holy because it helps to further civilization’s dominance both on earth and throughout the galaxy, “but [he] can only make so many.” He has cracked the code on how to make better replicants—something that the original creator from the first movie couldn’t do—but can not figure out the ultimate trick that his predecessor could: how to make a replicant produce on its own. Upon hearing about this supposed baby, he wants it so that he can study how it came into being.

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.

Anyway, Luv is not just Wallace’s eyes, but is also the main person who runs his businesses and also seems to be an enforcer. She is overly suspicious from the start, seems to always have a brooding rage just beneath the surface and is almost always seen in white. It is rather unclear whether she is also programmed/made to be a pleasure bot for Wallace, as she is the only being he has almost any interaction with and is female. Though I see nothing on his part, she almost seems to be in a state of awe-struck yearning when around him as if she is not only there to learn from him but wants to love him (as her name implies) while also envying him. The actress’ performance is unique in its subtlety.

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

Joi’s inclusion is important only because K buys her an emanator which allows for her as a hologram to transmit anywhere that he takes this computer key thingy (so she can go with him out of the city), and to actually feel the touch of physical things but only for seconds at a time (she can feel his synthetic kiss).

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

He goes to this woman Dr. Anna Stelline who contracts for Wallace to help make the replicant memories. A bubble-girl like Jake Gyllenhaal, she explains how she doesn’t implant real memories but creates them from her imagination like an artist does a painting or poem. But when she says that she can examine his memories, she does say that this memory of the wooden horse that he had is a real memory. The way she says it is quite important.

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

K is rescued by an underground group of replicants who are set on revolution. Surprise, surprise, the replicant-hooker, played by the lovely Mackenzie Davis, is actually part of this group. A woman who has removed her right eye where her serial code would normally be is the leader. She not only has been tracking K’s investigation but she was there when the baby was born years ago. She says that the baby was a girl and that she saw it with her own eyes. And we finally get a few flashbacks to show that the doctor who makes the false memories is the real little girl, and we understand why she identified his memories as real the way she did. Somehow, either by accident or on purpose, one of her own memories got placed in his conscious almost exactly the way it happened to her when she was young and living as a homeless impoverished kid in San Diego.

CGI Sean Young 

Anyway, we get some fan service where a CGI’d Sean Young appears (seriously, they did a better job on her than when Jeff Bridges played both his young and old self in the recent Tron: Legacy) just to tempt Ford into giving up the location of his replicant child. But he has no idea where the child is and doesn’t even know the gender. Even more important, Wallace doesn’t know that his most prized memory-making contractor is the very “thing” he is coveting the most in life.

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.

One of the critics insisted that all of the female characters in the movie were only there as playmates or additives to the male characters. One didn’t like the cutesy names of the women (Joi, Luv) and another found the “gratuitous nudity” offensive and chauvinistic. Miss me with the BS. For starters, the main women of the film got more screentime than all of the main men. Wallace was not in a scene without Luv being seen. K, for large chunks of the film, was always in a scene with a woman: Joi at home, his captain at work, Luv while out detecting, or the hooker. The only one who stands alone and has enough screentime to merit him not being considered a minor character is Ford. If anything, the female characters have more depth than the male characters and allow the men to be shaped and constrained by their opposing energy.

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.

For starters, the reason why I still gave it a fairly decent score (the B-) is because, if you take this as its own film and not the sequel to a film that is 35 years old (literally older than most of its cast), then it is actually a fairly decent movie that is thought-provoking and has a great social commentary, even though it still doesn’t fully exploit the myriad of possibilities that are intrinsic in this narrative.

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.

Even more, there really isn’t a great big challenge of the concept behind the baby. Admittedly, the critique about the film being sexist almost made me ignore the very question that the film never actually poses itself, but is hidden within its layers: Is the child actually a good thing? Knowing Wallace’s intent for the birth algorithm, is it OK for us to actually root for him? Because he wants to make more slave replicants in order to expand humanity’s domination throughout the universe, make humans’ lives better. If you side with the replicants, that’s not a good thing. On the other hand, what would be the upside to replicants becoming every bit like humans both for humans and for them? In other words, what is the point to something gaining humanity? This question runs counter to the one most usually asked in cinema: What would it be like to gain the power of god?

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.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

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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Always Be Good To Her. Mother! #review #Mother #movie

Always Be Good To Her. Mother! #review #Mother #movies 

Wow! So, I just paced my house for the last 15 minutes trying to figure out what I wanted to say about this movie, yet it’s so simplistic in its message that I don’t think that I have to say as much about it as I thought I would. So if the movie was so simple, then why the heck do I like it so much? Is it even a good film? And how did Jennifer Lawrence’s top-nude scenes not save this movie? Let’s dig in and find out.

The movie mother! By Darren Aronofsky and starring mega-star Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem is a movie that, uh... was definitely marketed wrong. It’s not rare that I say that but it is rare that I start a review in that manner. I did it because I think that a great deal of this movie’s box-office floppiness is due, in part, to the marketing. Yes, the critics played a part in it too, either hyping it as something that is almost so smart and brilliant that most people are turned off by the pretentiousness of the critiques, and conclude that the film must also be pretentious. Or crapping on the film so hard for being... well, pretentious and overly preachy. Apparently, in this time of Trumpism and everything being divided either into a camp of Liberal or Conservative, the slightest whiff of any political message gets lambasted by both sides regardless of its artistic worthiness. And then there are that small sliver of critics who are just pissed about the baby. But before we throw the movie out with the baby water, or, wait... Is that how that saying goes? Hmph? I don’t know. Anyway, before you dismiss the movie for the baby scene, and yes there will be SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW (kind of impossible not to review it without spoilers. I’ll explain why later), remember that these are some of the same critics that praised IT. That’s all I’ll say for now until I get to the spoiler-heavy area.

So, in mother! Jennifer Lawrence plays a young woman (correction: young, beautiful, really hot woman; oh my god I don’t think I’ve been more attracted to her than here. Damn, with my comments about Laura Dern on my Twin Peaks post and my comments about Baywatch, I truly am becoming a dirty old lecher) married to Javier Bardem, who, while still attractive himself, is aging and looks it. Let me point out that the parenthetical above, while at first glance sexist and chauvinistic, is actually extremely apt for Lawrence’s description and character in this movie, and you’ll understand why later.

Bardem is supposed to be a writer, in fact, the author of this book which we’re not exactly sure was popular or not as he, like almost all writers, is self-deprecating and talks about how so few people have read it. Lawrence is his young housewife who is concerned almost solely with making their house into a home. See, Bardem (note that I will always use the actors names as the don’t officially have character names but designations. This is easier) used to live in this house before, but it burned down in a tragic fire we briefly see at the beginning. We later learn that he escaped that fire only to come back to the house and discover one lone thing left within the ashes, a clear egg-shaped orb with fiery veins that glow through it. That is not my best poetry to explain the beauty of this thing, but it’ll have to do for now. Now that he’s rebuilt the house, he and his bride have moved in to start their life. This is paradise. It’s a country home so there are no other people around probably for miles and they like it that way. Hell, Jennifer never even feels she has to leave the house it’s so amazing.

And then a man shows up.

A stranger, the man is supposedly a doctor come to the local town to do research at the school. He came to their house looking for a bed and breakfast and automatically seems suspicious to Jennifer because they’re literally in the middle of nowhere, so the man had to come really far out to happen upon their door. Bardem lets the man in and allows him to get comfortable. Well, as it so happens, the man is a fan of Bardem’s work. As Bardem takes him on a tour of the house, the man remarks on how beautiful Jennifer is and he also talks about the beauty of that orb, but Javier does not let him touch the orb, which is very important to both the story and one of my criticisms of the movie.

Well, Bardem, much to Jennifer’s shock, welcomes the man to stay the night. Jennifer doesn’t like this, especially because the man smokes and does it inside of the house. Not only that, but the man is sick with something that Jennifer knows nothing about, which is another important point for criticism. She sees her husband holding the man while he vomits into the toilet, coughing up something that she can’t identify. As he is coughing, she finds his Zippo lighter and knocks it behind the cabinet in the room that they’ve now made into a guest room for him.

And the next morning his wife arrives.

Wait, he has a wife? Reader, you didn’t know he had a wife? Played by Michelle Pfeiffer who had conceivably dropped off the face of the earth (ha! I’m making myself laugh now. I need to stop), the wife is even more intrusive and rude the husband. She demands to have a tour, asks the all-important kids question, loudly wonders about the age gap between Jennifer and Javier, invites herself to stay with her husband and immediately starts drinking. For the first half hour, this movie plays as nothing more than a potential horror movie/psychological slow-creep thriller about very bad houseguests. Michelle tells Jennifer that she needs to spice things up in her marriage because Michelle immediately figures out that while Jennifer wants children, Javier either doesn’t (though he said he did) or just isn’t interested in them right now. Not enough to have sex with Jennifer, at least. This is what is bothering her. That, along with the fact that while Javier is claiming to work, he hasn’t been able to create anything new in a very long time. Things are beginning to get tense.

And then the wife breaks the orb.

Javier gets so mad about the orb breaking that he boards up his office so they can never get in again, but still allows them to be guests in the house.

And then their sons arrive. Two sons, they arrive in a ruckus. As it turns out, their father is so sick that he is about to die. He recently changed his will to have everything go into a trust rather than divvy up his fortune to his heirs. This way, his sons and wife all have to get along and make communal money decisions. But one son is so angry that he bludgeons his brother to death in the middle of one of the rooms. While Javier and the family leave to take the brother to the hospital (strangely disappearing as soon as they are out the door) and the murdering brother briefly returns to get his wallet, Jennifer follows the leak of the blood through a hole in the floor and down to the basement where she finds a room that looks like it has some kind of oil barrel in it possibly for the heating of the house.

The family comes back and hosts a bereavement gathering for the brother. And this is when things start to get hella weird because these people are even more rude than the family and Jennifer is losing it. They are using the bathroom without asking, sitting on unstable counters, using the couple’s bedroom to try to get it on and, in the weirdest twist, painting the walls. And this is legitimately the first moment in the movie where, if you haven’t been forewarned what’s going on, you will start to question what the hell you just paid for and either check out or try to figure it out. I would say wait, slow down, think about it, and try to figure it out because the second half of the film gets even crazier.

There Were Many Letters I Could Have Gotten But I Wanted One

After Bardem and Jennifer finally get the family out of the house, they have a fight in which she wants to leave, but he finally gives her the D and they wake up all happy. She immediately knows she’s pregnant after one piping and he suddenly has inspiration to create again. He starts writing immediately and she goes into full mommy-prep mode as she turns that once-guest bedroom into a nursery.

The one big problem? That hole where the blood bled through is not only still there, but it still seems to be bleeding. Even when she puts a rug over it, it not only bleeds but bleeds through the rug. Then she takes the rug away from the floor to see that the floor is no longer bleeding but its actually the rug. This is just one of the many problems that she has seen wrong with the house throughout its existence. See, every so often she’ll get a pulsing sensation through her heart and also feel the house’s “heart” beating. Often during these times she can see or feel the decay of the house, the old burnt pieces of wood and destroyed plaster, see the warp of the fire-damaged frame on which this house is built. She sees it on the walls and the floors and the ceilings and everywhere and then she straightens up, goes to take some kind of tonic (what the tonic is, we really never know), and then is fine again for a little while.

And here is where those people who don’t want to be spoiled (even though I’ve told you about half the movie already) step off the train and leave because literally once you read the next sentence, you can go into it knowing exactly what to expect and there should be no real surprises in the movie.

OK, so there are going to be spoilers for the entirety of the plot from here-on out. OK? Got it?

OK, so here is why I really don’t understand why this film is so split with people, save for if it is a criticism not necessarily of the film but of the two main people involved: Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence. The movie can be taken to have two messages, depending on how you want to see them, based on the same exact thing. The movie is a basic, almost overly simplistic allegory (more metaphor than allegory, frankly) of the story of mother earth, humanity and (here’s where the split is) either the first and last books in the Christian Bible, or an atheistic more nature/scientific look at the infinite loop of existence. In either case, it plays into climate change. While I could spend most of my time breaking down the latter, the former is what most people saw who understood the movie.

By now, you should be able to come up with the fact that Jennifer, who, as I mentioned, never leaves or even steps foot out of the house. (She does walk onto the porch, but for the sake of this film and I’m sure what was intended in Darren’s mind we will consider that still inside the house). Both she and the house are one as evidenced by the opening sequence in which the old house was already burnt down but everything remakes itself and the crumbled embers of a person lying in bed rejuvenates, puffs and grows back into a woman. She and the house are the literal interpretation of mother earth. So, anything that she does to the house also happens to her.

If she is mother Earth/nature then her husband must be... OK, here is where I will briefly mention the atheistic possibility, then go back to the Christian one. If looking at this from a purely atheist view (I mention this because Darren Aronofsky is reportedly a Jewish-raised atheist, though both this and his last movie Noah are heavily religious in tone), you can actually conclude that Javier is Father Time. You can conclude this for a few reasons starting with his age. He looks much older, much more worn. But his profession as a writer can also refer to the old line about life or certain events being “written on the sands of time” which are controlled by father time. Again, that is only there if you don’t want to see the religious aspect.

Now, back to the Judeo-Christian interpretation. In the loosest sense, Javier is God to Jennifer’s mother earth. I can see some other devout Christians understanding that and not liking it. Darren has to make some narrative compromises (not all of which are necessary) to fit in the movie. In the case of Javier not being the full-on creator as in the Christian bible, we can excuse that for sake of not giving the entire film away. Where as in the bible there was nothing, from which God birthed everything including mother earth, here both the basic structure of the house and the ashes that constitute mother are already in existence and he simply reconstitutes them. It is unclear and never shown whether or not he ever started from scratch.

So then if we have our God and mother earth, then you already know the man is Adam, his wife, Michelle Pfeifer, is Eve. Here, I have a criticism. This slight narrative alteration, while seemingly small, is exceptionally significant. I’m talking about the sickness. Again, I know that Jennifer is a feminist and I believe Darren is also, so I can see why they’d change this, but it still stuck out to me. In the film, when the man is introduced he not only already has vice (smoking and drinking) but he is also shown to be sick and ailing the night before his wife arrives. He is shown with an imperfect body (there’s some huge gash on his side where, presumably his rib was), and he’s throwing up. The thing he vomited up looks devilish.

In the Bible there is nothing wrong with Adam. As much as it may hurt to hear, Adam’s downfall from perfection and oneness with nature and God doesn’t come around until Eve is introduced. The fact that he shows that the man is sick and vice-filled enough to piss off mother earth with his smoking BEFORE Eve arrives betrays the original Biblical narrative of the Fall and suggests that mankind has always been inherently sinful. This is only further solidified by the fact that we never see a devil or tempting force that makes them go up to Javier’s office and accidentally break that beautiful crystal, which is meant to stand in as the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This purports the premise that man has always been an evil creature as opposed to just a sometimes stupid one that doesn’t listen. Legitimately, this was probably my biggest critique of the film as it puts almost all of the onus on Adam and very little on Eve.

And of course if those two are Adam and Eve, then their two sons are Cain and Abel. This, unlike the Adam smoking and being sick thing, is a needed narrative change because it would look strange for them to fight over the inheritance/favor of Javier’s character/God as in the Bible, when they don’t know him. It also makes the point of the first blood spilt on the earth from murder, as opposed to sacrifice, of extreme importance. The blood both leads down to the basement to the room where the oil is which we know becomes the instrument for the later destruction, and it leaves a stain on the floor that can never be healed. But even worse, it leaves a stain in the same room where mother, rather inexplicably, chooses to put a nursery. This is symbolic for mother earth and God’s ability to take the most horrifying event in life and bring beauty anew from it.

By this time, you’ve already guessed why I specifically called out Jennifer’s beauty in this film. Obviously she’s wearing makeup in this film as she does in all films (nature of the business) but here, in a great many of the scenes she is so brushed that she literally looks like a porcelain doll. She is noticeably perfect. The sheen is in the exact right place and she looks more perfect and enticing, while also being more innocent than she ever has before, even in real life on Oscars carpets and in her Hunger Games glow-up scenes. Yes, this is partially because she’s older and has the gloss of maturity on her, but it is also intentional to show the pure-driven innocence and untouched beauty of mother nature/earth in times and places where humans do not heavily disrupt what is already there.

Then, as the craziness begins in the second act of the film, if you figured the message out and the Biblical references in the first act, you are wholly prepared for all the insanity of the second act, even though Darren does take it slightly over the top with the messaging. You don’t necessarily need to be beat over the head with the message, but he does that just to make sure you’re getting it. Here, I can see people balking at its preachyness. And the other half of the audience that still hasn’t got it by that point in time (whether they just haven’t thought about what they’re consuming or are of a different religion that knows little about the Judeo-Christian creation) sees a hodgepodge of insanity that makes almost no sense until the end.

Let me actually back up to the beginning of that last paragraph and talk about the structure of the film because I think it’s important. To me, this film does not have the traditional three-act structure like so many writers—screenwriters in particular—talk about. Yes, you can make an argument for the calm-down after the baby’s birth being a third act, or even after the re-creation, however I wouldn’t count either of those as full or even partial acts unto themselves but rather elongated beats in the second act. I point this out because it mimics both our calendar concept of time (B.C. and A.D. or C.E.) as well as the division of the Christian Bible between old and new testament, casting away much of its Judaism and Islamic principles shared amongst all three religions and going strictly for the Christian path. Here, I can also see another minor criticism from other devout Christians popping up who understood the movie. It is quite easy for them to say, and rightfully so, that Christianity, for whatever reason is the most criticized and easiest to criticize in Hollywood or pop culture in general, both here and around the world. There are, however, other religions in the world and some that even predate Christianity, yet they field almost no criticism quite like Christians do. While I can see some people saying this, I was fine with it. I’m even OK with a declared atheist making religious films so long as he takes the time to understand the subject matter on a deeper level than just, “I don’t believe in this and these people are weak who believe in this so let me make fun of them,” like other atheist filmmakers have done in the past.

So, while mother is pregnant, her husband finishes his new word, his first new creation in a very long time. And before mother’s even done reading it, his publisher is already calling about how many copies are being made. This can be taken as another reference to Javier being father time in an atheistic interpretation. We as an audience have been well-trained to understand the passage of time in film so much so that we take it for granted when we see one image that is starkly different from the previous image. For instance, whenever you see a flat-tummyed woman in a scene saying that she’s pregnant and in the very next scene she’s now rubbing her bulbous ready-to-pop belly, we automatically assume that months have passed. Here, however, because of the blunt messaging of the film, we really shouldn’t blatantly assume such a thing. Just as Jennifer knows right away that she is pregnant the morning after she and Javier have sex, the very next scene in which she is near ready to give birth could very well be the next day or two days later, rather than months. I say this because of the speedy pace of the second act of the movie.

We go from the book being published, to her preparing a celebratory dinner for just the two of them, to fans showing up on their doorstep to talk about the new book, to the fans invading their home to talk about the book, to stealing things from the house, to trying to paint the house again, to raving and having parties and sex, and destroying the kitchen, to all-out chaos and troopers and police invading the house, to people looking at mother to check her teeth and treat her like cattle ready to sell into slavery, to people bombing the house, to people protesting and chanting gibberish against each other, to people yanking and grabbing and pulling at her and Javier, to people receiving Javier’s word and getting symbols of blood smeared on their forehead to she and Javier finally escaping back into his office he had boarded up from Adam and Eve so long ago after they broke that egg-crystal.

She gives birth and the people give gifts and want to see the baby but she doesn’t want her baby to be seen by them. Here, both the atheistic and Christian narratives mingle to give us two meanings of equal weight and caliber. In the Christian narrative the child is Jesus—a child created not by man but by God and mother earth/nature. In the atheistic narrative which also serves as interpretation for what and who Jesus is, the child is every gift both big and small that this earth gives us, which is basically everything. We would have nothing without the earth’s (and God’s) generosity. The child is oil, food, medicine, wood for houses, metal for electronics, everything you can think of that we “need” in our lives today. But because mother has already given so much of herself, of her house to people, she wants this one thing to herself.

But God loves everyone including mother earth, so while he understands her hurt over their house having been half-destroyed, he still wants to just show them his pride and joy. They play a game of attrition that she finally loses by falling asleep for a second. He takes the baby and shows it to the crowd but she runs after it and then we have the baby scene. In it, the baby’s neck audibly snaps as the crowd passes the baby around. If you’ve seen Aronofsky’s Noah, then think of that lamb scene in which they throw the animal into the air and the people tear at its limbs while it is still alive. Then, for a brief second, mother gets to an altar at front to see that the people have eaten the baby, picked it’s bones clean. And I actually started laughing only because the quick flash of the picked-over carcass looked exactly like the leftover bones of a roast chicken. And I literally thought, dag, did Perdue pay for some advertising in this movie?

The crowd then rages at mother, half stripping off her shirt and beating her. On an off-screen, on-screen note, I was wondering how Jennifer Lawrence and a lot of these female stars that have been hacked in recent years felt about onscreen nudity now. I’m not saying that the hack effected her decision and I don’t know if her breasts at the end of the film were hers or if that was a body double because in the midst of the fight, it did look like someone different at times, but I do know that her breasts in the sheer top at the beginning of the movie were all her and I did like them. Shame me for liking breasts if you want to. I don’t care. But I will say that if they were hers, then I think she chose the right film in which to sort of snap back against the invasion of privacy of the hack and reclaim rights to her own body. Here, her bare breasts were shown, in both instances, with artistic meaning. It wasn’t just enough to appreciate the nakedness of the female form but to say that mother earth started as an innocent stripped down form of beauty, now man has come in and seeks to strip her once again but not to admire her beauty but to strip her of said beauty. It, in some ways, is a poetic mirror to the picture hack controversy.

And in the end she grabs Adam’s Zippo lighter that has been sitting behind the cabinet for all this time, runs to the basement and sets the house on fire, blowing it up. Only she and Javier survive: him without a scratch and her charred crispy which is precisely what is suggested will happen to this earth in the book of Revelation (because God’s already destroyed the world with water with the great flood) and by today’s climate change scientists. Javier talks to her about why he let the people in and how he can’t help it because he has to create (which is almost the exact same thing I wrote in one of my books that I never got published). He then reaches into her chest cavity, pulls another one of those beautiful crystals from out of her and watches as she dies and turns to ash. He takes the crystal and places it on a special holder he has in his office and the house peels back the char, repaints a lot of itself and gets to humming again. A woman even puffs back up to fluffy in bed just like in the beginning and everything starts again, ending this whole story with a Buddhist reincarnation-like twist like in one of my works.

The meaning is straight forward: we humans have come into and been gifted a land of beauty and perfection but we’ve taken advantage of it so much that we are destroying all the things this world has and is giving us on an environmental level. Eventually, it will turn on us and decide that it either doesn’t want to live anymore or try to destroy us if we haven’t already destroyed ourselves and it by that time. This, when taking some of Revelation and the other disciples’ scripture literally, is actually the exact thing said in the Bible too. For people like me, who see the parallels to what we are doing both to the ecosystem/environment and what we are doing to each other, this message is not lost. I have long been an avid eco-warrior. Longtime readers should know that I have wanted to make a Captain Planet film for a very long time because I think that it is important. And I have always believed that regardless of your religion (but especially if you’re a Christian), one of your chief concerns should be treating this earth right because it has given so much to us all. This is probably why I was able to overlook the preachyness of the film and the undertones that serve as an indictment against religions being bad and destructive (everything influenced by man is bad and destructive, including atheism and science) to really enjoy this movie.

There are a lot of critics that are trying to parse out one message at a time similar to what fans of Twin Peaks do. But as I said there, sometimes you can get stuck on the little things and make them into something larger than what they should be rather than looking at the big picture. To say that this movie is against protesting or police brutality or something like that just because that is shown briefly, is to miss the point of the movie. Yes, those things are important but in the whole of it, they are quite minor. While the movie is overly artsy at times and goes from a gentle caress of a massage in the first act to a heavy-handed deep-tissue thump in the second act, it is ultimately as bubblegum Hollywood as you can get with the simplest message: we as a species need to figure out our danged problems real fast and start learning how to treat each other right, as well as this beautiful earth that has been gifted to us, otherwise we’re going to lose it. And while God can, and most likely will start over (and in this movie he does bear some of the blame here for mother’s breakdown), he only wants us to find an equilibrium where all three of us can live in perfect and pure harmony. See? Simple. Don’t let other reviewers tell you otherwise. You can further extrapolate from there.

My big problems is that in many interviews both Jennifer and Darren straight said that she was mother earth. I think it was a mistake to tell the message of the movie before people have seen it. That is one thing that Darren can certainly learn from David Lynch. It almost feels like telling the mystery of a film before seeing the film. I know, there are plenty of people who will read a book that something is based on, then go see the movie which, even though I hope for the same thing later in my career with my works, always found to be a little weird. I think this would’ve been better if audiences had a little more mystery going into it.

Also, I found a lot of critics’ reviews stupid. Chief among the complaints (which was a problem with Jennifer’s last movie Passengers) is that the film was called out as being too misogynistic. Give me a break. Some reviewers have suggested that the film has a “muse” problem and that Jennifer is too passive to Javier’s controlling masculinity in which he dictates what can and can’t happen in his house. It’s almost as if they don’t understand that God is God, or the story as a whole. He created her. She comes from him. And this goes back to my Adam sickness and Eve’s responsibility critique, beside I find that the movie makes it perfectly clear what the power dynamic is. Michelle or Eve makes it a point to call attention to their age difference, suggesting that they are, in no ways equals here. To me, her criticism is the exact same criticism that the critics have. She’s not supposed to be treated equally. She is actually pedestal-ed as his last creation. In essence, she is equal to all of the guests of their home because God loves them, too. Saying that she is not strong enough as a character misses the point of the metaphor. It would be like saying one of my books (my creation) is not fairly treated in relation to me. It makes almost no sense. Again, you have to view this through a biblical paradigm. The earth has no true personality of its own because it is never given freewill of its own nor spirit nor soul but is always coddled by God. It is only given the tools to defend itself and not be of itself. It is vessel.

What do you think? Have you seen mother!? If not, do you think you will now after reading this? If you did, how did you like the movie? Did you understand it while you were watching it? If you didn’t understand it but get it now, do you think that understanding the meaning of the movie before seeing it would have influenced how you felt about the movie? Honestly, I thought I was going to see a horror movie and had only seen one trailer (I tried not to suffer from multiple-trailer fatigue this year for any film I saw) and was briefly disappointed before being pleasantly surprised by the story. Let me know what you think in the comments below. 

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “You didn’t send your mother a birthday card but you sent one to your dry cleaner?”

‘Well, my dry cleaner always keeps me looking clean and stylish.’

“Hm? OK. Fair enough.”

P.S. The release date of this movie is super strange as it is not really in the prime spot for awards season fodder nor is it in a good spot for box-office success. If they wanted a horror movie box office, they should’ve released it in October. Awards? November. Box office? Either during Easter or on Mother’s day. Wasted opportunity. Anyway, I’ll try to come up with a better sign-off next time.

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