Let me tell you about my mother ------------------------------- Yesterday I went to see the movie Bladerunner 2049, and promised some folk on Mastodon that I'd post my thoughts here to help them decide whether or not they should do the same. This review is coming from the perspective of a massive fan of the 1982 original. I am going to keep the review free of any major spoilers for the new film, but obviously won't do the same for the original. So if you haven't seen the original, stop reading now. Actually, stop reading now, and put down whatever else you had planned for the day and go watch the original, then spend some time questioning the life choices you made which resulted in you getting this far without already having seen it. I went into the film highly skeptical, expecting it to be the latest in a long line of well-loved 80s film franchises needlessly ressurected in 201x to squeeze money out of nostalgic fans. At the same time, I tried to keep an open mind and not fall into the stereotypical role of the grumpy old fan with impossibly high expectations. As a result, I was ultimately disappointed, but also not outraged. I won't defend the new movie from accusations of being unecessary or of failing to fill the very large boots left by its predecessory, but if somebody said they thought it was a genuinely terrible film with no thoughtful content at all, I think I would probably feel obliged to disagree. A lot of things made the original Bladerunner movie incredible. One of these was the visual asthetic. BR's dark and gritty dystopian Los Angeles, where a dramatically multi-cultural (but strongly Japanese influenced) society scrapes by in a dilapidated and increasingly abandoned city dominated by giant neon advertising, while low-flying blimps blare down the promise of a better life in the off-world colonies that few who are still left on Earth can ever hope to reach, is nothing short of iconic. It literally defined the visual cyberpunk asthetic that decades of subsequent films have relied on. Another was the fantastic synth-heavy soundtrack by Vangelis, which complemented the visuals perfectly. If these are the most important parts of BR to you, then you will probably not be too disappointed in Bladerunner 2049. The parts of the film which are set in LA do a great job of recapturing the same look and feel of the original setting without recycling all of precisely the same imagery. There are obvious nods to the original, but they are not overdone. The soundtrack has plenty of brooding synth pads that feel contiguous with the original. But the 1982 film had a lot more going for it than just look and feel. The main story was infused with a fantastic moral ambiguity. Was Roy Batty really the main villain, or was that in fact Eldon Tyrell? Even if you believe the latter, Tyrell is not a cartooney evil supervillain, and when he talks to Batty in his final scene it's easy to believe that he really does feel a kind of fatherly pride in and affection for Roy and genuinely wishes he could help. Beyond this, the film raises a whole host of fascinating philosophical questions about the nature of being human and the relative importance of memory and objective reality in what we believe. Not only this, but it raises these things *subtly* and is rarely in your face about them. If you're not too philosophically inclined, or you're not paying too close attention, it's easy to parse Bladerunner as a futuristic noir detective film and miss a lot of the depth, especially if you happened to watch one of the far too many different versions which is lighter on hints. The film doesn't beat you around the head with any of this, and it rewards rewatching, and thinking, and reading and discussion with other fans. Finally, the most popular cuts are nicely open ended. Is Deckard a replicant or isn't he? Do he and Rachael escape LA and live happily ever after, or are they hunted down by Gaff or another Bladerunner? Does Rachael have the standard limited lifespan of a Nexus 6, or is she special as Tyrell tells Deckard she is in one cut? We get pretty much zero strong evidence one way or the other on any of these questions, and far from being disastisfying a lot of people really treasure the ability to consider and debate these options. If *these* are the most important parts of BR to you, then you *will* be disappointed. Bladerunner 2049 is not a film of moral ambiguity or beautiful and subtle subtext. The main villain is a cartooney super villain who is obviously evil. He is a successor to Eldon Tyrell in some sense, CEO of a company manufacturing the latest generation of replicants (Nexus 8), but he views his replicants as disposable slaves, places precisely zero value on their lives and is only interested in making them more human to further his business goals and feed his own ego, not out of anything resembling compassion. If one of his own creations drove their thumbs right through his orbital sockets, frankly I'd cheer them on. The quintessential Bladerunner themes of humanity and memory are still there, unavoidably, but rather than hinting at them, the film drives a rusty nail through the middle of your hand and you can't miss them. It is made quite clear from early on in the film that Ryan Gosling's character has doubts that his memories originate from where he's been told they do, and it is obvious that him finding out the truth about these memories is going to be a major part of the story. I feel like these things make the film a bad sequel to the original Bladerunner. I have read reviews online where people claim Bladerunner 2049 surpases the original. Make no mistake, those people are wrong. But a bad sequel to Bladerunner is not necessarily the same thing as a bad film in and of itself. If you were to watch it without expecting something as brilliant as the first, and especially if you were to judge it by the standards of modern day Hollywood films. The acting is solid, and some of the roles were very well cast. It's not a boring movie, and even if it's not on the same plane as the original, it's also certainly not mindless or unintelligent. There are some minor but well-executed plot twists in there, and there's also a tense fight scene between Gosling and Ford that takes place in an abandoned Las Vegas theatre that was visually stunning and really well done and captured some of the same feeling as Deckard and Batty hunting each other in the Bradley building. There were only two points in the flim where I groaned to myself a little. One was a cheesy line by Ford, delivered at the end of the above-mentioned fight scene, which just felt really out of place and unecessary. The other I'll say a bit more about later. There was a little too much gratuitious action for my tastes. One review I read online spoke about the movie's "sparse action scenes", which shocked me a bit. Perhaps by modern day Hollywood scifi standards they were sparse, but for a Bladerunner film it was too action driven for myself. Not that the original film was devoid of action - Zhora desperately running in slow motion through pane after pane of plate glass window while being shot at by Deckard is a cinematographic highlight of the first film. But the action in Bladerunner happens when it needs to happen for the sake of the story, and if I'm not mistaken it's a film with exactly zero explosions and it's also a film which has flying cars but zero flying car crashes or shoot downs. BR 2049 has no shortage of these things, and they feel out of place to me in the Bladerunner world. If it sounds like I'm going easy on the movie, well, I am a bit. While using YouTube to listen to the original soundtrack back at home after leaving the cinema, I found the following comment: "When I first watched this movie 5 years back I had no idea what was really going on in the entire movie. I was so deeply bored and thought it was way too arty stuff for me. After two years I thought to give this movie an another chance but before watching it for the second time I read some articles about the explanation of this movie. I absorbed the basic storyline in my head and when I started watching it for the second time I was completely speechless when it ended because the realization of how EPIC this movie was extremely strong with me." I don't think this is likely to be an uncommon experience with the first Bladerunner film, which *is* slow moving and at times hard to follow. This probably discourages a lot of people from giving the film the consideration it deserves. I am trying not to fall into the trap of not giving BR 2049 the consideration it deserves simply because, rather than being slow and confusing, it is sometimes a little too fast moving and heavy on explosions that don't need to be there. There is probably thoughtful stuff in there that I didn't catch the first time around, and I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of commentary, if any, might appear around the flim in the future. I think the most likely place for interesting discussion to coallesce is around Ana de Armas' character. She and Gosling share what is the closest thing in the film to a romantic relationship, the twist being that she is an artificial intelligence who manifests via some kind of holographic projection. She is thus even more synthetic than the replicants, who at least have corporeal bodies. Furthermore, she is actually a product produced by the same company that makes the Nexus 8s, presumably marketed for the purpose of being an ideal emotional companion. None of this is made explicit in the film, but I assume that anybody can buy a copy of her "off the shelf" and she is programmed to convincingly fall in love with that person. This, of course, makes us at first think that the love isn't genuine, but one has to ask how much that matters, or if it is even true, from the perspective of the artificially intelligent being, who presumably feels the love to be as real as it can be. It seemed to me that the AI companion actually genuinely cared a lot more for Gosling's character than he reciprocated, which is an interesting subversion of the old "robot girlfriend" trope, and, I think, a little sad. If I were to watch the film again, I'd pay more attention to her. So, in short, a disappointing sequel which we didn't need, and which diehard fans certainly need not feel like they have to see, but at the same time not a terrible movie and perhaps the best we realistically could have hoped for. Certainly not as disappointing as anything that has happened to the Star Wars franchise. It may reward a careful second viewing if you have the stomach for it. However, I am worried that the reappearance of Bladerunner in cinemas is not going to end here. Aside from Ford's one cheesy line, the other scene in the film which made me groan was an overly dramatic declaration of a big event brewing below the surface of this film. No further mention was made of it, but I worry that a third movie is planned and I worry that it is going to be even less cerebral and even more action-driven than BR 2049. I'm trying really hard not to give anything away, but I have the feeling they want to take the franchise beyond stories that focus on a solitary Bladerunner hunting a small group of targets, to some kind of large-scale Terminatoresque "replicant uprising vs all of humanity" story. I hope I'm wrong, because if that happens, I'm out. I just don't see how that could be done without devolving into a straightforward action film without enough nuance to be worthy of carrying the Bladerunner name.