Blade Runner 2049 (2017) - WITH Spoilers

[Robert Zwilling]

First time I saw it was on DVD and the picture was small, dark, and the pace looked slow. Almost missed the water logged ending (too dark). After watching it again I saw that there was a lot to take in, different from the first one, no more Rutger Hauers to fill those shoes, and found most of the story very interesting. The orphanage scene was like a throwback to old times, unlike the rest of the movie, it seemed like a cross between Dickens and an old fashioned horror movie.

 

[JunkMonkey]

For what it's worth here's my thoughts on it from my movie diary when it came out:

Bladerunner 2049 - Just came back from watching this with my daughters at the cinema and, quite honestly, I was bored shitless.

Daughter Number One (aka 'D#1' who, like me, thought Arrival was brilliant) was equally bored, and Daughter Number Two just fell asleep. The highlight of the evening, apart from me nearly losing it to an attack of the giggles (hysteria would have followed) when the police chief - with not a hint of post-modern irony anywhere in sight - told our hero cop - that he had to turn in his gun and badge and he had...all together now...! "Forty-eight hours..." was when the call girl turned up at our hero's apt and the AI GF stepped into her and shared her experience making love to the hero. D#1 had a brief - "Didn't we already watch this scene?" moment before we identified that the identical situation had been played out in Spike Jonzes' Her which we'd watched a few weeks ago*.


And why was everything so ponderously SLOW? I'm in my late 50s. I'm irritated by modern ADHD rapid cutting styles that don't allow the audience time to savour the imagery or give the actors time to do any acting. I like Tarkovsky's films. I watch three hour French movies in which nothing much happens (though I will stick my hand up to being bored witless by La Belle Noiseuse). I am used to long slow film. I like long slow films. What I don't like is short scripted, routinely plotted action movies played out as if they were slow, philosophical inclined, art house character pieces. And it was all needless. Everyone took ages to get anywhere. Every room had to be walked across slowly. Every conversation had to have long ponderous pauses between ---------------- phrases. ---------------- And ---------------- sometimes.

between --------------- --------------- --------------- every

---------------- ---------------- word...

Apart from anything else it must be a bugger to act. I swear I could see panic in the actors' eyes from time to time as they desperately tried to remember whether the sentence they were half-way through was a question or not and whether they should be inflecting upwards - or was it already too late?

Every possible moment was stretched out as far as it could go and then a bit more just for luck. “OKay that was great, we'll do another this time remember, Don't play it for real until it becomes real... but either way you get there, could you slow it down so we can see it.” I really do suspect that every single foot of film that went through the camera ended up on the screen. The movie looked like a first assembly cut with all the Special Effects already in place. There was no reason for any of it. Long slow shots of actors doing 'thinking acting' while the rest of us wait for him to catch up with the only plot point within living memory got wearing after a couple of hours.

Daughter Number One (not a fan) is of the opinion (and is very convincing) that Jared Leto's character was made blind because Jared Leto (the actor) has "no idea where to put his face" and by shoving contacts in him, and letting him just wave his head about all over the place they saved weeks of rehearsal and shooting time.

"No, Jared.... Cut! Jared, Harrison's over there. Jared? Jared? See the man in the chair? Could you look at him when you're talking to him.... Please? Just once? Okay.... take seventeen.... and action! ... Oh Jesus! Where's he going NOW!?..."

We also at one point had a guessing game going as to which character was going to cry next. They all did. Apart from Jared Leto's character. But then he probably did, but was almost certainly facing the wrong way at the time so we didn't get to see.

[Next morning] Thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion I am am even more disappointed in it than I was. I love the original book which I first read back in the 1970s, And I adore the original film which I saw in the cinema back at the time of its release. (When it had a voiceover.)

The book was very funny - the opening chapter makes me laugh out loud with its absurdity. I think people forget how funny Dick can be.

There is an economy and society in the book - crumbling and decaying albeit - but there. The original film is a stylistic treat and has hustle and bustle. There is an underlying society. We might not know what all these people are doing, rushing around from here to there in the street, but it looks like some kind of reality underscores the action. People have jobs. People buy and sell things. People eat. People don't just stand around on stairwells, or stand about outside robordellos**, or stand about behind desks like they do in 2049.

It's long been an annoyance to me that in any Hollywood historical film (especially those featuring a castle) you never see any fields. You might see the odd chicken running around - no, forget that. You ALWAYS see the odd chicken running around - but you never see any fields. Never see (even in the background) that there is any husbandry going on. That the people in the world we are being shown actually DO anything other than be dramatic, or serve as cannon fodder. I often just watch movies and wonder what do these people DO all day when there's not a war on, or a plot to be foiled? What do they eat?

BR2049 was totally lacking in humour. Nada. Nothing. Not an intentional smile in the whole thing. [EDIT: Apart from the bit with the dog.] And there was no underlying reality. How, for instance, did the vast Dickensian orphanage work? I mean how? How did 'customers' get there when the place was surrounded by scavenger types capable of, and happy to, harpoon and bring down police cruisers? (Notice how our hero suddenly has no compunction about killing to death anyone who threatens him - despite his 'I have never killed anything that was born' moment a while before.) What did all those kids EAT? There weren't even any chickens - even synthetic ones - running around.

If 'real wood' was so rare and expensive that a small wooden horse made our hero 'a rich man' why was the dead tree at the farm - surely worth several gazziliion times more - just ignored. "Holy crap!" says slicked back hair police chief. "A whole tree! well that's my department's budget problems solved for the next twenty years."

It looked pretty in places though. A bit like flipping through a big coffee table book. Ohhh Ahhhh - but it echoed. It was hollow.




* I can recommend Her . It has smarts. Much more than this turd.
* * 'Robordello n. A knocking shop staffed by androids. A word I have (as far as I know) just made up and am extremely chuffed with.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

I watched BR2049 in a posh cinema in Cheltenham on the day it came out. Extra wide seats, waiter service - they even sold booze. Great screen and sound system. Sadly that cinema's gone now, but, in retrospect, I think the experience coloured my opinion of the film.

I thought it was OK. Not a patch on the first one, but there was enough in it to like that my overall opinion was positive, even if I disagreed with the whole "robot uprising" and boring "chosen one" direction they were going in.

Bladerunner has always been style over substance (bar Hauer's incredible "Tears in Rain" speech). Like the first one, the visuals were pretty much everything - the grand vistas, the night time shots, the rain, the huge cyclopean buildings. Even the soujourn to Las Vegas brought with it some great visuals. I thought the cheesy cop dialogue was in keeping with the first film. The baseline tests were interesting.

Sapper Morton and the bug farms was a great visual.

Wasn't keen on the holograms - a bugbear of mine in sci-fi. It feels cheap.

The weakest section was everything to do with Jared Leto whose portrayal as a moustache twirling villain was so far away from the intelligent, believable architect Tyrell that it took me right out of the movie anytime he was onscreen. A terrible character played by an actor chewing so much scenery I'm surprised there was any LA left for K to walk around mournfully.

The worst aspect was the loss of Vangelis' score for Zimmer. Zimmer is talented but I find him a one note composer (almost literally in some tracks). For me BR is visuals, score first and foremost, with Ford's charisma and Hauer's intellect in second place. Zimmer's score misses the lush VP330 string chords and the CS80 synth melodies. When the CS80 is used it's too atonal, not melodic enough. There's nothing memorable about it. It only comes to life when it quotes the original. Having said that, it would hard enough for anyone to step into Vangelis' shoes, even Vangelis nowadays. The score works, it's just inferior by comparison.

I disagree that the Joi relationship was that much like her. In Her, the emphasis was on the relationship being manipulation to further the AI's interests, with this serving as a commentary on how our relationship with technology atomises us from each other. Her is asking questions about the nature of relationships.

In BR2049, Joi is just a machine running through a routine. She's there to provide a comparison with K. K realises that Joi's love talk is just a pre-programmed set of instructions, this is echoed with K who throughout has felt special as he develops emotions, but discovers at the end of the movie he, too, has been guided by a set of pre-programmed instructions through his false memories. Villeneuve is picking up on the themes from BR1 and asking us to reflect on agency and humanity. In that sense I think BR2049 had some of the spirit of the original.

There seems to be some commentary on gender politics within the film that's not fully developed. I wasn't sure if this was a self-conscious attempt to rectify the perceived deficiencies in the original (particularly the uncomfortable, sexless, sex scene) or just part of a continuing trend in hollywood of making films that comment on male self-involvement and women solely occupying positions of power (outside evil corporations).

Bearing in mind usual studio pressures to deliver a box office hit, I was pleased that Villenueve could secure a big enough budget to deliver something as meditative and anti-blockbuster as BR2049 and resist the temptation to action it up or play to the cheap seats.

 

[Bick]

For what it's worth here's my thoughts on it from my movie diary when it came out:

Bladerunner 2049 - Just came back from watching this with my daughters at the cinema and, quite honestly, I was bored shitless.

Daughter Number One (aka 'D#1' who, like me, thought Arrival was brilliant) was equally bored, and Daughter Number Two just fell asleep. The highlight of the evening, apart from me nearly losing it to an attack of the giggles (hysteria would have followed) when the police chief - with not a hint of post-modern irony anywhere in sight - told our hero cop - that he had to turn in his gun and badge and he had...all together now...! "Forty-eight hours..." was when the call girl turned up at our hero's apt and the AI GF stepped into her and shared her experience making love to the hero. D#1 had a brief - "Didn't we already watch this scene?" moment before we identified that the identical situation had been played out in Spike Jonzes' Her which we'd watched a few weeks ago*.


And why was everything so ponderously SLOW? I'm in my late 50s. I'm irritated by modern ADHD rapid cutting styles that don't allow the audience time to savour the imagery or give the actors time to do any acting. I like Tarkovsky's films. I watch three hour French movies in which nothing much happens (though I will stick my hand up to being bored witless by La Belle Noiseuse). I am used to long slow film. I like long slow films. What I don't like is short scripted, routinely plotted action movies played out as if they were slow, philosophical inclined, art house character pieces. And it was all needless. Everyone took ages to get anywhere. Every room had to be walked across slowly. Every conversation had to have long ponderous pauses between ---------------- phrases. ---------------- And ---------------- sometimes.

between --------------- --------------- --------------- every

---------------- ---------------- word...

Apart from anything else it must be a bugger to act. I swear I could see panic in the actors' eyes from time to time as they desperately tried to remember whether the sentence they were half-way through was a question or not and whether they should be inflecting upwards - or was it already too late?

Every possible moment was stretched out as far as it could go and then a bit more just for luck. “OKay that was great, we'll do another this time remember, Don't play it for real until it becomes real... but either way you get there, could you slow it down so we can see it.” I really do suspect that every single foot of film that went through the camera ended up on the screen. The movie looked like a first assembly cut with all the Special Effects already in place. There was no reason for any of it. Long slow shots of actors doing 'thinking acting' while the rest of us wait for him to catch up with the only plot point within living memory got wearing after a couple of hours.

Daughter Number One (not a fan) is of the opinion (and is very convincing) that Jared Leto's character was made blind because Jared Leto (the actor) has "no idea where to put his face" and by shoving contacts in him, and letting him just wave his head about all over the place they saved weeks of rehearsal and shooting time.

"No, Jared.... Cut! Jared, Harrison's over there. Jared? Jared? See the man in the chair? Could you look at him when you're talking to him.... Please? Just once? Okay.... take seventeen.... and action! ... Oh Jesus! Where's he going NOW!?..."

We also at one point had a guessing game going as to which character was going to cry next. They all did. Apart from Jared Leto's character. But then he probably did, but was almost certainly facing the wrong way at the time so we didn't get to see.

[Next morning] Thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion I am am even more disappointed in it than I was. I love the original book which I first read back in the 1970s, And I adore the original film which I saw in the cinema back at the time of its release. (When it had a voiceover.)

The book was very funny - the opening chapter makes me laugh out loud with its absurdity. I think people forget how funny Dick can be.

There is an economy and society in the book - crumbling and decaying albeit - but there. The original film is a stylistic treat and has hustle and bustle. There is an underlying society. We might not know what all these people are doing, rushing around from here to there in the street, but it looks like some kind of reality underscores the action. People have jobs. People buy and sell things. People eat. People don't just stand around on stairwells, or stand about outside robordellos**, or stand about behind desks like they do in 2049.

It's long been an annoyance to me that in any Hollywood historical film (especially those featuring a castle) you never see any fields. You might see the odd chicken running around - no, forget that. You ALWAYS see the odd chicken running around - but you never see any fields. Never see (even in the background) that there is any husbandry going on. That the people in the world we are being shown actually DO anything other than be dramatic, or serve as cannon fodder. I often just watch movies and wonder what do these people DO all day when there's not a war on, or a plot to be foiled? What do they eat?

BR2049 was totally lacking in humour. Nada. Nothing. Not an intentional smile in the whole thing. [EDIT: Apart from the bit with the dog.] And there was no underlying reality. How, for instance, did the vast Dickensian orphanage work? I mean how? How did 'customers' get there when the place was surrounded by scavenger types capable of, and happy to, harpoon and bring down police cruisers? (Notice how our hero suddenly has no compunction about killing to death anyone who threatens him - despite his 'I have never killed anything that was born' moment a while before.) What did all those kids EAT? There weren't even any chickens - even synthetic ones - running around.

If 'real wood' was so rare and expensive that a small wooden horse made our hero 'a rich man' why was the dead tree at the farm - surely worth several gazziliion times more - just ignored. "Holy crap!" says slicked back hair police chief. "A whole tree! well that's my department's budget problems solved for the next twenty years."

It looked pretty in places though. A bit like flipping through a big coffee table book. Ohhh Ahhhh - but it echoed. It was hollow.




* I can recommend Her . It has smarts. Much more than this turd.
* * 'Robordello n. A knocking shop staffed by androids. A word I have (as far as I know) just made up and am extremely chuffed with.

I disagree with almost everything you wrote here, to be honest.

 

[Rodders]

I loved it, but it isn't without its faults. I think JunkMonkey's comments about people standing around, doing nothing was a fair comment well made, as was the thoughts on underlying reality.

I think one of the things that made the Las Vegas scene so unreal was that it was so desolately abandoned, despite there being no trace of radiation. I would've thought that people would flock to the city in their thousands. I also didn't get the mist/fog look of the scenes. It's in the desert so no moisture, it's abandoned so no smog, It's not windy so no sandstorm.

 

[Toby Frost]

I hate to say it, but despite the amount of skill and craft involved in making it, BR2049 just feels like a rather pointless film to me. It does make me worry that the Dune film is going to involve an awful lot of looking at sand.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

I loved it, but it isn't without its faults. I think JunkMonkey's comments about people standing around, doing nothing was a fair comment well made, as was the thoughts on underlying reality.

I think one of the things that made the Las Vegas scene so unreal was that it was so desolately abandoned, despite there being no trace of radiation. I would've thought that people would flock to the city in their thousands. I also didn't get the mist/fog look of the scenes. It's in the desert so no moisture, it's abandoned so no smog, It's not windy so no sandstorm.

It's a few years - but I'm pretty sure there was radiation, or at least people believed there was, which is how Deckard was able to live there undisturbed. IIRC the dust in Electric Sheep / Bladerunner was from Nuclear Fallout / Climate change and is a holdover from PKD story. It's not mist - it's pollution / sandstorms, like in the Beijing picture below (sand from the gobi desert over Beijing).

 

[Robert Zwilling]

BR2049 just feels like a rather pointless film to me. It does make me worry that the Dune film is going to involve an awful lot of looking at sand.

BR2049 has its ups and downs. At times it felt like looking through a telescope the wrong way, but over all I liked it. The slowness was very pronounced at times, didn't always work. The comment about the sand is beautiful.

 

[Judderman]

The slowness can help to consider what character's motivations are, if they are really thinking themselves (as humans) etc. But if you find some aspects you don't like I think it can really give you time to get more wound up and see more parts you don't like..