Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Happy D — 08 Jan 2018

First, the good news: Blade Runner 2049 is gorgeous. Every second of it is an absolute feast of visuals. No movie released in 2017 could hold a candle to BR2049's atmospheric delights.

The bad news: It's uninteresting. Boring, even. Blade Runner The Elder worked so well because it was a cramped, personal meditation on the nature of being human, and/or just being. Very small people wrestled with very big questions in very tight spaces, surrounded by very large, very distant corporations, isolating the characters to stew in their own existence.

BR2049, by contrast, is a grandiose confection. It's pretty and sweet and empty. Many of the themes and devices in Blade Runner The Elder have been stripped of their potency by advanced technology or just lazy writing. No need to mess the the audience's head about who is or isn't human; just look up and to the left. No need to puzzle out dilemmas or meanings, the movie just tells you, its characters functioning as conduits, spelling out every theme without the need for thought. Yawn.

Perhaps that's why, despite ample screentime given over to humanizing Ryan Gosling's K, you just don't care about him or his problems. He's not a person, he's a device, and if that's the point, it's less an artistic achievement and more a meta commentary on lazy filmmaking. Yes, it's beautiful, and that took a lot of hard work, but it was obviously meant to be a spiritual successor to The Elder, and as such, is lazy. Unpacking The Elder was the work of much consideration. There is no need to unpack BR2049; it's already unpacked and then slapped across your face repeatedly.

The question I kept asking myself was, "Who is this movie for?" Fans of the original? Doesn't seem likely. New-to-the-franchise (a 3rd movie is already being discussed) viewers? This is hardly the place to begin. People who just want entertainment? Highly unlikely. No, the answer I kept coming back to was the filmmakers themselves. Not in a face-only-a-mother-could-love kind of way, but in a we-made-something-beautiful kind of way. In an awards show kind of way. Because if BR2049 doesn't sweep every technical award, I'll be pretty surprised.

It's just not a particularly good *film*.