Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Cold W — 08 Oct 2017

Well, I hate to spoil it for anyone, but this is a clean miss. I'm according it three stars for "effort," but I doubt if many of the fans of the original will be more than luke warm about this film. In a nutshell, it brought the worst things that have happened to cinema since the eighties to this remake, and failed to capture any remote connection to the mise-en-scene evoked by the original. Worse were the frequent snippets of "homage," immediately recognizable to those who've seen the film many times over the years, but ham-handled here. Worse the soundtrack wasn't even in the ball park of the Vangelis original, and the addition of the obligatory bada boom crash scenes and ninja fights just showed the lack of imagination compared to Besson's original.

Final impression hit me about half-way through: this is analogous to those Pacific island "cargo cults" that build little mock-ups of the runways and planes in hopes of attracting the war bonanza to return and lift their dismal economies. They have no idea of the cause-effect for the phenomenon that came and went, but they're desperate to regain it. Fail.