Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Richard D — 07 Oct 2017

For a modern big budget film, this one was OK. However, it failed to evoke any feelings whatsoever. A dissection below.

Good things first. The movie is visually brilliant. It is believably rough and dirty where it needs to be, and stunningly beautiful when the story allows more artful scenes. There are some good acting performances (Harrison Ford, Dave Bautista (!), Barkhad Abdi). The basic plot is OK, one could build a very good movie around it. I very much liked how the movie handled the theme of relationships and contemplated to what extent AI could replace a physical partner. And the direct references and links to the original Blade Runner movie were very clever and graceful, they did not feel like fan service at all but natural and integral parts of this movie.

Why did it fail to evoke any emotions, then? (Disclaimer: most of the reasons are probably due to personal preferences, very subjective. Your experience may be completely different.).

One issue was the editing and pacing of the film. Pacing worked very well in the beginning, but the flow was lost somewhere in the middle, and the latter half of the movie was stagnant on several occasions, losing its grip of the viewer as a result. There were also a couple of occasions where despite the tranquil pace the movie failed to present key plot developments in a clear manner -- what exactly happened, why something was done, or how did we end up in this situation from the end of the last related scene.

Second issue was a combination of casting and screen writing. Ryan Gosling is a solid actor, but perhaps best suited to sympathetic heartthrob roles; in my opinion he lacks the kind of rugged charisma and screen presence that would be needed for playing this kind of role with such vast screen time. However, the role is extremely challenging -- to function as a focal point of the whole movie he should be identifiable, charismatic, memorable; on the other hand he should convincingly portray a machine without a free will whose job is to kill his own kind. Gosling makes a brave effort, but the end result is bland. The antagonists are simply trite. Jared Leto is miscast, stale at best and atrocious at worst; instead of a menacing, wildly ambitious genius he comes off as a fledgling cult leader who is practicing his first sermons. However, the actor was not given much to work with, the whole character is but a dim imitation of Dr. Eldon Tyrell from the first Blade Runner movie. Sylvia Hoeks does a good job with what she was given, but again, it was not much: the writers resorted to the cheapest B movie trope and imply that the bad guys are bad by making them use violence as the first and only solution to every problem, and Hoeks' character was not given any nuances apart from a sadistic streak that seems odd in a machine.

Finally, there was the soundscape of the movie. This film is practically devoid of emotional music. Sounds consist mostly of thunderous rumbles and shrill synth sounds instead of real melodies; there is also a Shepard tone playing during one key scene. Absence of emotionally manipulative soundtrack is often nothing but a positive thing, but it also means that the movie has one less tool to convey and evoke feelings with. In this case, the drab and monotonous score enhances all the wrong qualities of the film.