Thursday 5 October 2017

Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 is beautiful, chilly and kind of long. Director Denis Villeneuve’s previous film Arrival may be a better barometer of expectations than the original Blade Runner.

The stakes and scale are higher - instead of a Blade Runner hunting down a group of replicants in what is essentially a worse-than-average case, we have a society-threatening secret that everybody wants to own or contain. Similarly, we have a much clearer (as in Bond-level) villain.

A CGI recreation of a character from the original doesn’t work. This never does if the character has to emote, so thus far it’s only worked with young Arnold Schwarzenegger in recent Terminator films. A flashback to the real thing a minute or two earlier didn’t help, and neither does a major character being CGI in-character but played by a real person with transparency effects added.

There’s nothing in the dialogue like tears in rain, which is perhaps the biggest disappointment for me.

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