Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Boring, missing the point of the original

In the ongoing tradition of Harrison Ford’s Action heroes of the 1980’s turning out to be really terrible dads, we have Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to 1982’s Blade Runner.

We meet a replicant cop named K who is of a new variety that doesn’t rebel unlike those bad ones in the movies. So he tracks down a Runaway Nexus 8, even though in the original movie, we were assured that Nexus 8’s only had 4 year lifespans. During the course of this, they discover the bones of Sean Young’s character from the original movie, along with the realization she had given birth.

Our hero also has a relationship with a Hologram Girl for some reason. I guess so he is sad when she gets deleted later in the movie.

If you are watching this movie to see Harrison Ford reprise his role as Deckard, you don’t get to see him walking around like someone’s confused grandpa until 2 hours into an interminably long movie. (Seriously, I feel bad for Ford. Why does he do this to himself?)

So they want to find the child of Deckard and Rachel because this is a replicant that can reproduce, which is supposedly more efficient than just growing them, for some reason. They say they need more replicants to colonize the outer colonies, but of course, there are plenty of people living in squalor, including a child labor sweatshop.

I can’t emphasize enough how long, boring, uninteresting this movie was. It’s like they watched the original and still had no idea what made it a good movie.

Do tears freeze in the snow?

BR2049 has more plot holes than emmental cheese and one big “plot twist” that I won’t mention, not because it would spoil much, but because if you decide to watch this movie, you deserve to be disappointed by its stupidity.

The big “twist” is mentioned as the “miracle”, but it is absolutely idiotic and illogical from the point of view of a manufacturer of replicants. How did “that” might have ever be considered a good idea? One would assume that after the disaster of the Nexus 6 series, Tyrell Co. and his successors would have invented some more reliable security system – such as a lower level of self-consciousness, way safer than the questionable “obedience” of the Nexus 8. Or even something like all the androids looking the same, so that they can be easily detected and you would not need blade runners to locate and eliminate them.

Anything that would provide humanity with useful, free labor without ethical problems… But no, in this movie ethical problems just got exponentially bigger. And so much for a science so advanced as to reproduce perfect bodies and minds…

Besides, since it is established that humankind sucks, I failed to understand how replicants are in any way better, since they just want to be more “like humans”….

On the visual side, BR2049 sucks, too. Looks like they used random leftovers scenery from other Sci-Fi/disaster movies, from the overused industrial background of Terminator to the desertic blurred landscape of MadMax and the inevitable nightmarish city-scape, which looks like Blade Runner, but on cheap side. Costumes looks like the contemporary drab clothing promoted by Nordic high street chains: lots of dark, cheap-looking leggings and stretchy tops, a far cry from the decadent, elaborate futuristic/retro suits of BR.

In one scene, Deckard meets Tyrell’s successor in a closed room filled with water, except a square island in the middle. A room that has no other reason to exist except bringing back memories of the “original” Tyrell building.

The dialog is unbelievable bad and scenes drag on forever. When the Goslin character finds Deckart, the two spend over ten minutes fighting and chasing each other, when a couple of lines of dialogue would have avoided that.

The ending is both manipulative and plagiarist: it wants to move the audience, recreating the amazing poetic moment of Roy Batty’s death, but using snow instead of rain. If nothing else, the ending would have been enough to put me off this piece of commercial garbage.