Review of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Lau H — 22 Nov 2017

Wait as you might for greatness, this charmless, low-brow piece is strictly cashing in, with the special effects the main item and which keep you watching, and absorbing the generous degrees of product placement.

In a semblance of doing something meaningful, it is laced with hooks and triggers - religious pointers such as the God figure, represented by Ford whose Heaven is Las Vegas with an endless supply of label whisky; the infantile Son figure of Gosling; and a remotely wafting Spirit figure.

Female roles consist of stereotypes: the severe, older career woman; the pure woman; the "fallen women" - what they all have in common is that the women are only happy when self-sacrificing.

Picking up on the trend exemplified by the misogynistic Ex Machina, of showing the sadistic abuse of, by and between women with the excuse that they are robots, this film also appeals to the lower sexist fantasies.

In an unsavoury scene, Gosling's character and the camera relish for too long on the killing of a female enemy. The film is advertising for gambling, booze, exploitation and a certain electronics brand, and for robotics.

In particular, the idea represented by the tenderised Gosling role, that is in our interest for humans to merge with the robots. The bad guy is a boring type who lives in an architect-designed cave that is apparently cleaned by other people after he messes it with the blood of violence.

Like in Ex Machina, he is the below-average guy who lives the worst of his dreams. A poorly dressed, inarticulate, deeply unattractive type, he yet commands armies of designer women, whom he can create, maim, kill and dispose of at will.

Our saviours will be the pure white people; those who comply with them and merge with the machines will survive; the rest will live on a vast garbage dump. Still, this film takes itself really seriously.

The screenplay and editing keep drumming things in, to the point of becoming comical: the "woman" strokes the back of Gosling's head with four hands; then that wretched pony keeps turning up just in time; or when Ford stares disbelievingly at his anachronistically styled - and much younger - past flame (didn't he meet her in 2029 not 1940?), as if he is about to take a piece out of the producers for putting him in that situation.

Her role and styling, if they were intended to pull emotional strings about the 1940s, would be doubly facile wrong for that. Don't worry about dozing off: the film's story overall is a well-trodden path that you can join at any point.

At one brief moment, Gosling can contain his acting no more and lets fly. Otherwise, for all its deeper faults, the show's biggest failure is to be humourless and monotone. It lets down the work of the effects team.

Still, if you stick the film out, you may start laughing at it. One star - for the nice old dog, whose fate we never learned.