Movie Review : "Blade Runner 2049 "

The fact this sequel came decades after the fact is weird. They are large shoes to fill. The first film is one of the best Sci-fi films ever made. That's an impossibly high bar for a film to live up to.It drags, ins some place so this film is far from flawless. It is Beautifully filmed. This time around there is a stark more post-apocalyptic feel, than the dark sleek landscape that was bleeding neon on the screen in the first film. There is a little of that urban landscape, but they wander much further from in this movie and it begins to feel more like an installment of Mad Max. What I liked the most about the first film is how it feels like a Phillip K Dick book reads. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was the first Dick novel I read so that factors into the nostalgia.

The acting was hit or miss. Harrison lived up to his legacy and steals the show. Ryan Gosling makes more sense as a robot. His action is just as stiff , but here it works. Jared Leto feels like he wants to be Robert De Niro from Angel Heart, and though I nodded off a few times his motives in regards to what he was going to do once he got this child, were unclear. It was a better performance than ‘Suicide Squad” , but he seems to have been on auto pilot since “Dallas Buyers Club”. The relationships with the a.i’s is strained at best. The synching of the two girls was a great spectacle that I wish I had been high for , but didn’t carry much emotionally. Perhaps that was the point, for cyborg relations to be detached.

This is not an action movie or space opera. The violence that does occur works best when it is on a smaller scale, like the murder in the police office. The larger scale the violence is the more hollywood it feels. The deliberate fake outs work into the overall story they are trying to tell and doesn’t feel contrived in it’s ah-ha reveal. It ends with hope rather than bleakness, which might not be what I prefer from my dystopias , but it works for the movie. Scott has said that the world of Alien ties into Blade Runner. He also said of the next Alien installment that will tie Covenant into the first film, that he wanted to focus more on the a.i’s so this is the perfect chance for him to blend those two worlds. But as far as how this movie stand on it’s own. Perhaps it is not worth the sting of 16 dollar tickets, but is certainly worth seeing for the cost of a matinee as it lends itself to a big screen, there are some scenes that would be worthy of IMAX. Not the best movie ever made, and the jury is still out on how it will fare against other movies 2017 still holds. If you are a fan of the first film then it is highly recommended, even if you are suffering from re-boot, re-make fatigue.