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Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
I didn't much 'Blade Runner 2049'. For me it failed on almost every level to recapture what I liked about the 82' original. It trotted out some superficial similarities, like "he's got a spinner but not the same spinner!", "he's got a raincoat but not the same raincoat!", "he's got a gun but not the same gun!" and "the new Tyrell also lives in a vast building but this time it's biggerer!" but that's not what 'Blade Runner' was about. It was the Neo-Noir atmosphere, the romance, the sound, the music, the beautiful visuals and the enigmatic quality of it all. 2049 is included on Amazon Prime in 4K at the moment, so I decided to give it another chance. This time I could see more of the positives, the overall drive of the mystery story is good (even if it has some dumb plot holes), the relationship between Joy and K is beautifully played and fascinating on an intellectual level, that Elvis fist fight looks/sounds cool and in the added detail of 4K, some of the visuals actually look half decent. However, the CGI still looks poor compared to the FX from 3-decades earlier, the film-making is still visually bland, the editing is ludicrously slow, Harrison Ford is phoning it in and Hans Zimmer's score has none of the soul of Vangelis. The dialogue sounded even worse than I remembered it. I thought it was just Jared Leto's character that talked in cod-philosophical tones but it's everyone in the film reading from books of teenage poetry. Roy Batty got poetic because he knew he was dying, it was for a narrative and emotional reason. Again it's recreating something from the original, without actually understanding it. This time I also noticed the way the camera moved, it's very static in the dialogue scenes but endlessly moving in the FX shots. This is the opposite of the way Ridley Scott shot 'Blade Runner', which to me seems like Denis Villeneuve didn't think further than "It's got rain and neon. Job done". So in conclusion, I'm still the only person in the world that doesn't like 'Blade Runner 2049' but I'll concede my first 1.5 out of 5 review score was a bit harsh.
I didn't much 'Blade Runner 2049'. For me it failed on almost every level to recapture what I liked about the 82' original. It trotted out some superficial similarities, like "he's got a spinner but not the same spinner!", "he's got a raincoat but not the same raincoat!", "he's got a gun but not the same gun!" and "the new Tyrell also lives in a vast building but this time it's biggerer!" but that's not what 'Blade Runner' was about. It was the Neo-Noir atmosphere, the romance, the sound, the music, the beautiful visuals and the enigmatic quality of it all. 2049 is included on Amazon Prime in 4K at the moment, so I decided to give it another chance. This time I could see more of the positives, the overall drive of the mystery story is good (even if it has some dumb plot holes), the relationship between Joy and K is beautifully played and fascinating on an intellectual level, that Elvis fist fight looks/sounds cool and in the added detail of 4K, some of the visuals actually look half decent. However, the CGI still looks poor compared to the FX from 3-decades earlier, the film-making is still visually bland, the editing is ludicrously slow, Harrison Ford is phoning it in and Hans Zimmer's score has none of the soul of Vangelis. The dialogue sounded even worse than I remembered it. I thought it was just Jared Leto's character that talked in cod-philosophical tones but it's everyone in the film reading from books of teenage poetry. Roy Batty got poetic because he knew he was dying, it was for a narrative and emotional reason. Again it's recreating something from the original, without actually understanding it. This time I also noticed the way the camera moved, it's very static in the dialogue scenes but endlessly moving in the FX shots. This is the opposite of the way Ridley Scott shot 'Blade Runner', which to me seems like Denis Villeneuve didn't think further than "It's got rain and neon. Job done". So in conclusion, I'm still the only person in the world that doesn't like 'Blade Runner 2049' but I'll concede my first 1.5 out of 5 review score was a bit harsh.