Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Overpaid — 06 Oct 2017

Bloated, portentous and worst of all, dumb posing as smart, for a Blade Runner obsessive like myself, Blade Runner 2049 is pretty much a worst-case outcome from the decision to “reboot”.

​​It combines the ultra-slow pacing of a Russian art-house movie, with the implausible action sequences of a mainstream blockbuster. It has intellectual pretensions, but no real ideas, other than some half-baked biblical referencing. It takes a lazy, hand-waving approach to its plot and world-building. For me, that’s all unacceptable. If you decide to make the sequel to one of the most revered movies of all time, you need to get your quality bar pretty damn high. Blade Runner made its name by being genuinely intellectual, and having an insane level of attention to detail. This film fails to achieve either.

There are plots holes you could fit the Tyrell Corporation's headquarters through. I can’t talk about those without spoiling, but lets just note that the core premise of the movie as spelled out in the opening crawl, the invention and legalisation of unquestioningly obedient replicants, is in direct contradiction to almost everything that follows, including the rationale for the mission the protagonist is sent on. The acting is fine, good even, BUT the actors are doing their best with horribly written characters who constantly make decisions that are absurd, often in order to set up action scenes that shouldn’t logically occur. Where the original revelled in moral ambiguity, we get a cartoonish boss villain who looks and talks like an evil-yoga instructor and appears to live in a health spa, and an even more cartoonish hot-lady-assassin henchwoman. In keeping with that Holywoodisation, all the women in the film are presented as lust objects, either evil or victims, and not in the knowing sense of exploited Zhora or Rachel, but as sadistic titillation.

There are a bunch of scenes basically nicked from other movies, in particular Spike Jonze’s brilliant Her.

Where the original asked genuinely profound philosophical questions about what it means to be human, this one has some quasi-religious guff about miracles and souls that jars badly with the paranoid, psychological Dickian source material and the post-religious bio-technological world that was presented in the first film.

The world building is terrible.

The world we are shown also doesn’t tie in with the mostly deserted, “kibble” strewn dying earth of the original. That was a place where almost all the able-bodied have left for the off-world colonies and the only remaining animals were manufactured. Despite some kind of second eco-disaster and a tech disaster both fleetingly referred to in the opening crawl (and in Matrix2esque short films on youtube), the world presented here is less dilapidated, more progressive, more organised, etc. than in the original. Fading art -deco has been replaced by Scandinavian design.

The technology is all over the place. Again, that’s hard to talk about without getting into spoilers, but basically the film assumes that flawless AI’s and super functional “normal” robots/drones exist, and then doesn’t in any way address the ramifications of how those facts would impact the whole idea/purpose/issue of replicants, and how and why they are used, and how/why Blade Runners are used to track them down. I think that comes back to a recurring problem ideas being included because someone thought they were “cool” rather than being story/world driven.

There are constant heavy handed and unconvincing analogies beween replicants, and real-world slavery and racism which the film then does nothing to explore.

In some ways it’s a bit like the Force Awakens, another recent reboot that I hated. It’s a technically competent film that heavily references the original, in terms of props, characters and art style. It even features Harrison Ford. It has a plot driven by a series of improbable coincidences and chance discoveries that seems more like an excuse for “cool visuals” than a logical, character driven progression. But whereas the Force Awakens knew exactly what it wanted to be, going unashamedly for a nostalgia-fuelled, international, mass market audience, B2049 falls between stools.

I feel a lot of people are going to disagree with my negativity on this one. There’s massive hype and hope around this movie, and it is mostly beautiful. Understandably, Blade Runner fans will want to like this movie. but going back to the Force Awakens comparison, after six months have passed, and people have moved through denial and anger stages, the sad reality of how average this film is will sink in.

I went in to this one with mixed expectations. I loved Arrival, the director’s previous foray into SF, but on the other hand I thought that a reboot of Blade Runner was an inherently bad idea. For me, this one failed hard, both as a sequel and as general entertainment.