Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Movie R — 15 Jan 2018

The hype is undeserved. Multiple critics said that the sequel was better than the original. That is simply a crazy thing to say. The entire movie is a callback. The look, the music, the characters, and the plot all would not exist without the first one. The sequel adds very little to the mythos. We still never leave Earth and rarely leave Los Angeles. The writing was fairly weak and has major plot holes.

Jared Leto is the new Tyrell. He is blind, a callback to Joe Turkel's version who also had bad vision and got his eyes ripped out. They really don't even try in Hollywood anymore do they? He wants a child that the first pregnant replicant gave birth to. That is the plot. Apparently if one wants a slave army it would be faster to impregnate female replicants rather than make them in the lab because it takes too long. Um... does this corporation realize that it takes 20 years to grow a baby into an adult? Really it takes 20 years to make a replicant? The original never mentioned this... because it's fucking ridiculous.

Right off the bat we know Gosling is a replicant, so we don't really care much about him. Then we find out that his girlfriend is an interactive piece of software, a basement dwelling nerd's wet dream cum true. This makes us like him even less and of course we don't give a shit about a character who's made out of code. I thought that Leto's performance was very good actually. He should have had more screen time. Gosling was fine, but he plays it deadpan. Ford was tremendous as always, but he also is barely in the film.

I was wishing that they had gotten Rutger Hauer for this because maybe he could have saved it. The main baddie is a two-dimensional female terminator, not exactly the poetic psychopath Roy Batty. It starts off strong with a good performance by Batista, but he's quickly out of the movie. They have a great fight scene but that's the last action you will be seeing for hours. Did I mention that this movie is 2049 hours long? It felt like it anyways. And for no reason really. It's a fairly simple detective story that leads to an unsatisfying ending where plenty of loose ends are left hanging. They must have planned a sequel but that's not going to happen now as this bombed at the box office badly. I can see why people didn't turn out. It's boring. There is a little more action at the end but it was not nearly enough. The story loses momentum by Act 3.

I would say that this was a missed opportunity but really that occurred in 1993 when the Ridley Scott Director's Cut came out on video. It sparked a new interest in the film and that would have been the time to bring it back.

The whole "is Deckard a replicant" theory is weakly not dealt with. At least take a stand on it one way or the other. There are vague hints about it from Olmos but nothing certain. The music also was a big letdown. They didn't even try. For the ending they just straight up replayed Vangelis.

I also did not like the way the movie fucked with the original story. They really just couldn't come up with their own, they had to add a ridiculous swerve to the 1982 film for no reason. I am saddened by the knowledge that this director is going to remake Dune.