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[oldperson92-blog]

Blade Runner 2049: Listen, I really wanted it to be good.

It is unfortunate, but I had my doubts from the beginning. The introductory text didn’t have to do much, but it already showed the cracks of half-baked pseudo-intellectualism that was to come.* As a movie, Blade Runner 2049 is sodden and barely intriguing; as a follow up to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, it is a failure.

To say a sequel shouldn’t be judged by the standard of its forbearer is ridiculous, and in classic Hollywood style the sequel has thrown the lessons of Scott’s Blade Runner in the trash. Blade Runner didn’t try to do too much, but Blade Runner 2049 slogs through nearly three hours of trying very, very hard.

Bear with me as I both complain about pretentiousness and wax pretentious here for a second, but Hollywood science fiction treatments are bound to miss the mark because of their philosophical opposition to the tenets of great science fiction. It cannot be lukewarm or half-assed; either the world is built so thoroughly and meticulously it is totally convincing, or it spins on a simple conceit-our world, but with a slight change that ripples outward in disturbing and surprising ways.** But Hollywood-as-FX-mill cannot tolerate the latter, just as Hollywood-as-maximum-satisfaction-with-minimum-engagement cannot tolerate the former.

Blade Runner slipped in between the two, succeeding in part because it only hinted at its grand questions as it built up to the famous and lovely “tears in the rain” speech. Blade Runner 2049 has Jared Leto*** disemboweling women for no good reason and throwing around self-important and meaningless rhetoric like a wet fish. No lines in this will become classic.

The pages 2049 take from Blade Runner are more aesthetic than formal, and that’s a shame. By lolling back on a cyberpunk look that was cutting edge in the 80s, 2049 feels retro. Its innovations fail to stun, and are dated even by 2017 standards: Hologram Elvis? Please. Bring back Tupac.

In its quest to nail the noir-future aesthetic, 2049 takes few forward leaps while dialing up the misogyny and orientalism of the original. While the copped Tokyopocalypse set dressing is toned down, this iteration somehow has even fewer Asian characters than the first (strange we see the rulers of the new age only in rags, if at all), and kanji glints from the streetcorners to remind us this is the future-world without bothering to examine the lazy association.

In 2049 Los Angeles, very heteronormative sex is still selling; giant, nude holograms of idealized women sway gently over the city next to the Coke ads. If that strikes you as prudish, consider this: Ryan Gosling was never forced to remove his shirt in this movie. If that’s not a blow to equal-opportunity objectification, I don’t know what is.

Replicant cop Gosling’s virtual girlfriend Joi – no more than a hologram, designed to please him (think a 50s pinup look and homecooked dinner) - appears to develop a flicker of a personality, but gets killed off (hardly a spoiler, given the heavy foreshadowing) either too soon or not soon enough, depending on how you see it. How to care about a female character whose defining virtue is being supportive to a man? Avenues for genuinely interesting questions are squandered. Though the film picks up the essential question of humanity posed in the original, it appears to hardly probe the contrast between sentient and free-thinking hologram Joi and the genetically superior but enslaved K.

Even the prettiness which drew me to the movie was underwhelming and cut with unnecessary objectification; Gosling stumbles around the orange, irradiated desert of Las Vegas through the legs of giant, nude (again, female) behemoths. The filmmakers appear to have forgotten Ozymandias of Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair was a man.

With shattered visages in mind, you have to wonder how much they paid to resurrect Harrison Ford for this final bout, as he looks every inch a 75-year old man who just wants to go home. (As K battles a nimble Replicant assassin in the surf, Ford sits in the beached hovercraft while it floods, struggling with his seatbelt.) (Worth noting too is that home for him is Vegas, where he can drink Black Label and revive Marilyn Monroe in curmudgeonly peace.) Mercifully, his screentime is almost as short as it is weak, though he still summons his trademark tough-guy growl upon command.

2049 takes the spaciousness which was such a virtue of the original and abuses it, sacrificing the noir crackle of fringe spaces to a heavy ponderousness. The writing fails to reach any sort of pitch, though you can see the writers laboring at the heartstrings: Gosling’s K was christened with a name (Joe, eyeroll) to laughter in my theater. It wasn’t until later that it became evident that it wasn’t a joke – they tried to make it stick.

Listen, this is all kind of harsh: In some respects, the film makes a decent effort at extending the original Blade Runner narrative, with an original screenwriter onboard. Some of the sets are stunning. But it trembles under the weight of the original, underperforming and soon finding that its own addiction to thin philosophy is not quite enough. Some deft editing would have helped, and there’s too much that occurs without enough context or resolution.

Most horrifically, the door to another sequel is left wide open, should 2049 do well enough at the box office. But who wants Blade Runner 2050?

  *(I’m not paying to see it again and I didn’t take notes, so I can’t cite anything here.)

** A personal rule is that once I start losing track of different factions, I stop watching (eg: the last season of The X-Files). Energetic and performative obscurity is no match for the satisfaction of elegance.

*** An aside: Jared Leto, a noted creep with a God complex, has found another high-paying role as a noted creep with a God complex. Chew on that, Harvey Weinstein!

[oldperson92-blog]

Blade Runner 2049: Listen, I really wanted it to be good.

It is unfortunate, but I had my doubts from the beginning. The introductory text didn’t have to do much, but it already showed the cracks of half-baked pseudo-intellectualism that was to come.* As a movie, Blade Runner 2049 is sodden and barely intriguing; as a follow up to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, it is a failure.

To say a sequel shouldn’t be judged by the standard of its forbearer is ridiculous, and in classic Hollywood style the sequel has thrown the lessons of Scott’s Blade Runner in the trash. Blade Runner didn’t try to do too much, but Blade Runner 2049 slogs through nearly three hours of trying very, very hard.

Bear with me as I both complain about pretentiousness and wax pretentious here for a second, but Hollywood science fiction treatments are bound to miss the mark because of their philosophical opposition to the tenets of great science fiction. It cannot be lukewarm or half-assed; either the world is built so thoroughly and meticulously it is totally convincing, or it spins on a simple conceit-our world, but with a slight change that ripples outward in disturbing and surprising ways.** But Hollywood-as-FX-mill cannot tolerate the latter, just as Hollywood-as-maximum-satisfaction-with-minimum-engagement cannot tolerate the former.

Blade Runner slipped in between the two, succeeding in part because it only hinted at its grand questions as it built up to the famous and lovely “tears in the rain” speech. Blade Runner 2049 has Jared Leto*** disemboweling women for no good reason and throwing around self-important and meaningless rhetoric like a wet fish. No lines in this will become classic.

The pages 2049 take from Blade Runner are more aesthetic than formal, and that’s a shame. By lolling back on a cyberpunk look that was cutting edge in the 80s, 2049 feels retro. Its innovations fail to stun, and are dated even by 2017 standards: Hologram Elvis? Please. Bring back Tupac.

In its quest to nail the noir-future aesthetic, 2049 takes few forward leaps while dialing up the misogyny and orientalism of the original. While the copped Tokyopocalypse set dressing is toned down, this iteration somehow has even fewer Asian characters than the first (strange we see the rulers of the new age only in rags, if at all), and kanji glints from the streetcorners to remind us this is the future-world without bothering to examine the lazy association.

In 2049 Los Angeles, very heteronormative sex is still selling; giant, nude holograms of idealized women sway gently over the city next to the Coke ads. If that strikes you as prudish, consider this: Ryan Gosling was never forced to remove his shirt in this movie. If that’s not a blow to equal-opportunity objectification, I don’t know what is.

Replicant cop Gosling’s virtual girlfriend Joi – no more than a hologram, designed to please him (think a 50s pinup look and homecooked dinner) - appears to develop a flicker of a personality, but gets killed off (hardly a spoiler, given the heavy foreshadowing) either too soon or not soon enough, depending on how you see it. How to care about a female character whose defining virtue is being supportive to a man? Avenues for genuinely interesting questions are squandered. Though the film picks up the essential question of humanity posed in the original, it appears to hardly probe the contrast between sentient and free-thinking hologram Joi and the genetically superior but enslaved K.

Even the prettiness which drew me to the movie was underwhelming and cut with unnecessary objectification; Gosling stumbles around the orange, irradiated desert of Las Vegas through the legs of giant, nude (again, female) behemoths. The filmmakers appear to have forgotten Ozymandias of Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair was a man.

With shattered visages in mind, you have to wonder how much they paid to resurrect Harrison Ford for this final bout, as he looks every inch a 75-year old man who just wants to go home. (As K battles a nimble Replicant assassin in the surf, Ford sits in the beached hovercraft while it floods, struggling with his seatbelt.) (Worth noting too is that home for him is Vegas, where he can drink Black Label and revive Marilyn Monroe in curmudgeonly peace.) Mercifully, his screentime is almost as short as it is weak, though he still summons his trademark tough-guy growl upon command.

2049 takes the spaciousness which was such a virtue of the original and abuses it, sacrificing the noir crackle of fringe spaces to a heavy ponderousness. The writing fails to reach any sort of pitch, though you can see the writers laboring at the heartstrings: Gosling’s K was christened with a name (Joe, eyeroll) to laughter in my theater. It wasn’t until later that it became evident that it wasn’t a joke – they tried to make it stick.

Listen, this is all kind of harsh: In some respects, the film makes a decent effort at extending the original Blade Runner narrative, with an original screenwriter onboard. Some of the sets are stunning. But it trembles under the weight of the original, underperforming and soon finding that its own addiction to thin philosophy is not quite enough. Some deft editing would have helped, and there’s too much that occurs without enough context or resolution.

Most horrifically, the door to another sequel is left wide open, should 2049 do well enough at the box office. But who wants Blade Runner 2050?

  *(I’m not paying to see it again and I didn’t take notes, so I can’t cite anything here.)

** A personal rule is that once I start losing track of different factions, I stop watching (eg: the last season of The X-Files). Energetic and performative obscurity is no match for the satisfaction of elegance.

*** An aside: Jared Leto, a noted creep with a God complex, has found another high-paying role as a noted creep with a God complex. Chew on that, Harvey Weinstein!