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@"jswert123456" if you want to spoil the whole film for people who haven't seen it yet, go somewhere else please. This time I've added spoiler tags for you, next time your post will be deleted.
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BLADE RUNNER 2049
- Thread starter ImperialFighter
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I just saw the film and have mixed feelings. I think I'll eventually settle on: it's okay.
Disclaimer: I think Blade Runner might be the greatest movie ever made. It's definitely in my top-3 favorite films, and even if it isn't my favorite, I am in complete awe of the movie. I had very low expectations going in, and tried to avoid all spoilers.
What I liked:
Decent acting by everyone involved
Beautiful visuals (I'm glad I saw this on the big screen, even though I feel so-so about it)
Everything seemed to feel like it fit right into the world created by Phillip K. Dick in his original novel
I liked that they kept some of the original vision of the future the same (e.g., advertisements for companies that no longer exist)
What I didn't like:
The loss of ambiguity
The score worked, but just. It was not magical like the Vangelis score.
Very predictable / lack of poetry
This felt every bit of 2:44 minutes
The original had a strong noir feel. It was completely gone here.
Time will tell how this sits with me. Ultimately, I still prefer to not have a sequel to Blade Runner, but this wasn't a bad effort. I don't hate it, that's for sure.
Disclaimer: I think Blade Runner might be the greatest movie ever made. It's definitely in my top-3 favorite films, and even if it isn't my favorite, I am in complete awe of the movie. I had very low expectations going in, and tried to avoid all spoilers.
What I liked:
Decent acting by everyone involved
Beautiful visuals (I'm glad I saw this on the big screen, even though I feel so-so about it)
Everything seemed to feel like it fit right into the world created by Phillip K. Dick in his original novel
I liked that they kept some of the original vision of the future the same (e.g., advertisements for companies that no longer exist)
What I didn't like:
The loss of ambiguity
The score worked, but just. It was not magical like the Vangelis score.
Very predictable / lack of poetry
This felt every bit of 2:44 minutes
The original had a strong noir feel. It was completely gone here.
Time will tell how this sits with me. Ultimately, I still prefer to not have a sequel to Blade Runner, but this wasn't a bad effort. I don't hate it, that's for sure.
Moe_Syzlak
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I pretty much completely agree. But I've at least convinced myself that they didn't kill the ambiguity. I don't think I can discuss my reasoning without getting into spoilers though.ThrowgnCpr said:
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Moe_Syzlak said:
I get how one could convince themselves that the ambiguity was still there (no need for spoiler-filled explanations), but it was still pretty obvious to me.
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visuals were amazeballs. and i like that the philosophical questioning, though a bit thin, was an extension of what came before.
some of the dialogue could have been more poetic with less said, less on the nose.
the pacing. . . man, that needed tightening.
and even if some lines weren't eloquent, better delivery by gosling and a few other actors could have made the lines more interesting. the acting wasn't bad at all—it just failed to reach that superlative level.
some of the dialogue could have been more poetic with less said, less on the nose.
the pacing. . . man, that needed tightening.
and even if some lines weren't eloquent, better delivery by gosling and a few other actors could have made the lines more interesting. the acting wasn't bad at all—it just failed to reach that superlative level.
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‘Blade Runner 2049’ Editor Talks Deleted Scenes You’ll Probably Never See
Let's hope that probability percentage is low.
edit: the whole interview mentioned in that article is here
Let's hope that probability percentage is low.
edit: the whole interview mentioned in that article is here
Cactus
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"Michael Deeley, producer of the 1982 classic [...] [size=medium]is among those to point out that the film’s 164-minute run time potentially hindered its box office. ”The picture is very long. It must have been cut-able and should have been. They can’t do better [box office] because they can’t play it more than three times a day because it’s just too long, which is of course self-indulgent at the very least, arrogant probably. It’s criminal.”"[/size]
https://www.screendaily.com/news/or...049-running-time-is-criminal-/5123713.article
https://www.screendaily.com/news/or...049-running-time-is-criminal-/5123713.article
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Cactus said:
I hate this retroactive analysis that seems completely one-dimensional, focusing solely on the film's runtime. As Ebert once quipped, "No good movie is too long and no bad movie is too short." The biggest problem with 2049 is its lack of thematic focus. Maybe editing the film could fix that, but maybe not. But don't blame it on being too long. It's such a cop out, lazy excuse.
Many of my favorite films have behemoth run times; JFK - Director's Cut (3.5 hours), Judgment at Nuremberg (3 hours), The Right Stuff (over 3 hours), Once Upon a Time in the West (3 hours) or hell, even Titanic (3 hours) didn't exactly suffer from its run time.
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Runtime alone is not a problem for any movie, but it was definitely a problem with 2049 (not the problem, but definitely a problem).
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beezo said:
With the exception of 'Titanic' (which everybody at the time fully expected to bomb. People were even suggesting the studios would go down with it, such was the over-spend), the Producers of those films didn't spend nearly $200 million on them and expect to somehow recoup. They would have been mega-bombs if they'd cost as much as BR:2049 and a couple of those were modest flops anyway.
It's true that length isn't a factor in why a film is good/bad, if it's the right film but Deeley is a Producer and a Producer's job is to try and make a film artistically good but at the same time make money for the studio. So Deeley seeing the Producers of BR:2049 spending that much money, with no thought to it being commercial (as evidenced by them not caring that the extremely slow pace and excessive run-time would damage the film's already meager chances of financial success) must seem like arrogance.
However, there is definitely a case for the pot-calling-the-kettle-black, since Deeley spent more on the original BR than Lucas was spending on any of his Star Wars films and surely he didn't expect to do those kind of numbers!
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The run time didn't scare people away from 2049. What scared people away was the lackluster and disappointing reviews. Nobody wrote a review that said, "Everything is great about this, but I'm not recommending it because it's 3 hours long." Granted, you might have gotten a few more eyeballs with, "Well, it's not very good, but for an hour and half, it's worth a gander." However, if the film really did capture something new with the robot/human paradigm that so many sci-fi films of this ilk have tackled before, and fully explore new ideas and present them well, then the reviews would have been, "It's 3 hours long and worth every minute."
The film had quantifiable missteps and, without a coherent focus, there was nothing to learn or gain from the experience. Movie goers are happy to invest the time, if the get their return. But in this case, there was no return.
The point is this, a great movie can lose money, and the producers can stand by their product saying they expect its reputation to outlive its opening weekend. That's not what's going on here. They're saying they made a flawed movie. They're blaming that flaw on the runtime. This is a mistake. There are flaws, yes, but the runtime isn't the problem. You might as well use the biggest lame response in criticism - "It committed the ultimate cinematic sin: It was boring."
And (because I'm on my soap box), we here on this site should know better. When we re-edit movies we're not just saying, "Oh hell, this would be better if it was 20 minutes shorter." Hell no. We deeply analyze every scene, line of dialog, plot point and music choice and ask ourselves, was this the optimal choice and, can it be improved? For example, there are real objective things that we can point to in The Phantom Menace and say, without equivocation, "These are mistakes and these are improvements to them." There's plenty of evidence for this. We don't just say, "Meh, Episode 1 is bad, so, cutting out 30 minutes must, by way of mathematics, make it less bad."
We address the 180 degree B-Plot of the Gungans that is forced and unearned. We talk about the antics of Anakin and how his childish performance seems a mar on the tone of the rest of the film/franchise. We address the film's mistake of tipping its hand to much in the closing lines as to who was the Master/Apprentice. The point is that if we could fix all of these problems and then some by adding scenes and increasing the run time, nobody would complain. Moreover, if such a thing was possible, there would be a universal push to say to Lucasarts/Disney, "Please make them longer if it means less nonsense."
Saying a movie is too long or too boring are lame, ineffective, useless and cop out forms of film criticism. Especially one that is as well made (if still very flawed) as 2049. It would have been more profitable if it was a better movie and cutting the runtime doesn't necessarily make it better.
The film had quantifiable missteps and, without a coherent focus, there was nothing to learn or gain from the experience. Movie goers are happy to invest the time, if the get their return. But in this case, there was no return.
The point is this, a great movie can lose money, and the producers can stand by their product saying they expect its reputation to outlive its opening weekend. That's not what's going on here. They're saying they made a flawed movie. They're blaming that flaw on the runtime. This is a mistake. There are flaws, yes, but the runtime isn't the problem. You might as well use the biggest lame response in criticism - "It committed the ultimate cinematic sin: It was boring."
And (because I'm on my soap box), we here on this site should know better. When we re-edit movies we're not just saying, "Oh hell, this would be better if it was 20 minutes shorter." Hell no. We deeply analyze every scene, line of dialog, plot point and music choice and ask ourselves, was this the optimal choice and, can it be improved? For example, there are real objective things that we can point to in The Phantom Menace and say, without equivocation, "These are mistakes and these are improvements to them." There's plenty of evidence for this. We don't just say, "Meh, Episode 1 is bad, so, cutting out 30 minutes must, by way of mathematics, make it less bad."
We address the 180 degree B-Plot of the Gungans that is forced and unearned. We talk about the antics of Anakin and how his childish performance seems a mar on the tone of the rest of the film/franchise. We address the film's mistake of tipping its hand to much in the closing lines as to who was the Master/Apprentice. The point is that if we could fix all of these problems and then some by adding scenes and increasing the run time, nobody would complain. Moreover, if such a thing was possible, there would be a universal push to say to Lucasarts/Disney, "Please make them longer if it means less nonsense."
Saying a movie is too long or too boring are lame, ineffective, useless and cop out forms of film criticism. Especially one that is as well made (if still very flawed) as 2049. It would have been more profitable if it was a better movie and cutting the runtime doesn't necessarily make it better.
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beezo said:
Except when a film is too long and/or boring... then it's valid criticism
.As is mentioned a few posts back, BR:2049 had a nearly 4-hour assembly cut but the filmmakers themselves cut it down from that because the movie was "too long and/or boring" at that length. Cutting, tightening, condensing etc is part of making a movie work, or not. I personally don't think they did enough of that, resulting in a movie that was "too long and/or boring" for my tastes. If excessive length isn't a valid criticism of a film, then why bother editing movies at all? Just do an assembly cut of everything you shot and release that.
Of course there could be a radically different version of a BR sequel that includes different scenes and a different story that might have justified that length... but for those characters and that story it was too slow IMO. Since we can't remake the thing, I think it's valid to point out the length and pacing as part of the problem.
If I was going to fanedit BR:2049, getting the length down and the pace of the editing up, would be pretty much my only goal.
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TM2YC said:
That's disappointing. I could be that, by this process, you could back into to solving some of the film's problems inadvertently, but it's the wrong way to go about it from an analytical standpoint.
I'll have to use spoilers to expound on this point.
Take, for example, the first sequence we have with Jared Leto. Perhaps by virtue of asking yourself, "Do we need this scene, can we kill it for run time?", you'd discover that it is superfluous. However, that's not explicitly the reason to edit it out. The reason for cutting it is that K is our detective protagonist that we're following in the story (later co-opted by Deckard), and he is not present in that scene to learn what we're learning. From a script standpoint, this robs us from the experience of discovering these characters like K would. That scene if full of unnecessary exposition (which could be given in the film's opening text) and tries to hide it with blood and eccentricities.
What about the plot supposition that the discovery of a pregnant robot could lead to the end of civilization as they know it? The characters act as if this is a logical conclusion, but how could it be so? The plot tells us (Jared Leto again) that Rachel was a one-off, unable to be duplicated. By virtue of that, we could conclude that no other robot is capable of procreation. Moreover, even if they could, Rachel did so with another human, thus further robbing the robots of their pure, class-fueled revolution. Re-editing the movie to resolve this will take more creativity than simply "getting the length down and the pacing up." Unless, of course, the goal is to speed past this inconsistency so that it's not particularly noticeable. Again, one would "back into" the solution.
What about the initial confrontation between K and Deckard? Narratively, it makes no sense. Each would be curious to the other's intention and, should it really come to blows, Deckard doesn't stand a chance. Moreover, the film knows this and ends with them having barely had a fight anyway. Also, if Deckard was as smart and isolated as he was, wouldn't it make more sense that his first line of questioning would be around whether or not K was alone? Or brought people with him? Or would signal others to him? Intentionally or not? The fight scene is, like Jared Leto's first scene, superfluous, but for different reasons. Here, the film is just an elaborate display of saying Harrison Ford's still got it. But here's the rub. If the purpose of the edit is to cull the run time, but keep the pacing up, maybe you'd think that this confrontation is a needed jolt in the film's pacing. I think it would be much wiser to assert the opposite.
You see, these are the types of specific critiques that really address where the film went wrong and, by extension, where it went right. If these kinds of problems were resolved, then the run time wouldn't matter. You could keep the Jared Leto entrance, if, for example, we could see K see it too, learn from it, and make decisions based off of it. You could use the same amount of time one took for the fight scene between K and Deckard and replace it with a cat-n-mouse game of interrogation of one another. The filmmakers could have done a various and sundry changes to the movie to improve it. Merely culling its run time to 2 hours would not be a barometer on whether or not any of those decisions were good or bad.
Run time is the last on a long list of critiques a film should be charged with.
What about the plot supposition that the discovery of a pregnant robot could lead to the end of civilization as they know it? The characters act as if this is a logical conclusion, but how could it be so? The plot tells us (Jared Leto again) that Rachel was a one-off, unable to be duplicated. By virtue of that, we could conclude that no other robot is capable of procreation. Moreover, even if they could, Rachel did so with another human, thus further robbing the robots of their pure, class-fueled revolution. Re-editing the movie to resolve this will take more creativity than simply "getting the length down and the pacing up." Unless, of course, the goal is to speed past this inconsistency so that it's not particularly noticeable. Again, one would "back into" the solution.
What about the initial confrontation between K and Deckard? Narratively, it makes no sense. Each would be curious to the other's intention and, should it really come to blows, Deckard doesn't stand a chance. Moreover, the film knows this and ends with them having barely had a fight anyway. Also, if Deckard was as smart and isolated as he was, wouldn't it make more sense that his first line of questioning would be around whether or not K was alone? Or brought people with him? Or would signal others to him? Intentionally or not? The fight scene is, like Jared Leto's first scene, superfluous, but for different reasons. Here, the film is just an elaborate display of saying Harrison Ford's still got it. But here's the rub. If the purpose of the edit is to cull the run time, but keep the pacing up, maybe you'd think that this confrontation is a needed jolt in the film's pacing. I think it would be much wiser to assert the opposite.
You see, these are the types of specific critiques that really address where the film went wrong and, by extension, where it went right. If these kinds of problems were resolved, then the run time wouldn't matter. You could keep the Jared Leto entrance, if, for example, we could see K see it too, learn from it, and make decisions based off of it. You could use the same amount of time one took for the fight scene between K and Deckard and replace it with a cat-n-mouse game of interrogation of one another. The filmmakers could have done a various and sundry changes to the movie to improve it. Merely culling its run time to 2 hours would not be a barometer on whether or not any of those decisions were good or bad.
Run time is the last on a long list of critiques a film should be charged with.
Moe_Syzlak
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I'll say that I did not mind the run time. I didn't even realize I was in for that long of a movie when I saw it. But I did come away feeling it could be tightened up without losing that trademark Blade Runner slow burn pacing. As I've detailed in the past, my biggest issues with the film were with the antagonists. I felt the filmmakers badly missed the spirit of the original by making the bad guys over the top villians.
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beezo said:
It would matter for me. Removing scenes/lines I didn't like, or agree with, would still leave a very slow paced film because it's edited slowly, expanding the run-time beyond what it needed to be. For me, removing lines I don't like is secondary to removing the minute long pauses where nothing happens between those lines
. It's my main problem with the film, that's not to say there aren't others I'd tweak along the way (Grade, music etc). As for specific lines/scenes, I'd need to see it again to analyse it more closely and decide what things I'd cut but logical problems with the plot (of the kind you point out) are usually of less importance to me in a movie (or fanedit) than emotion, tone and pacing.I think this discussion is veering away from reviewing and into fanedit ideas. There is a thread for that already, so let's move further talk on this subject there.
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Kal-El
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Am I the only one who feels Niander Wallace could have gotten a bit more screentime? I was hoping for a character a bit more akin to this prologue video.
Wallace's character felt more of a threat to me here than he did in the entire film. Also, I'd have to see it again, but I'm at odds on his motives? Finding Rachael's child could have severe implications to society but, if so, why would Wallace try and find it? I constantly had the feeling he was going to dissect the child and try to duplicate Tyrell's success, but why? Everyone was so afraid of a revolution, why would he of all people try to start one? The replicant freedom movement was basically trying to do the same thing (start a revolution) but in an entirely different manner (hide the child rather than hand it over to Wallace).
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The special features have been announced for the home media release of BR 2049, and unfortunately there will be no deleted scenes.
So much for my extended cut :-(
So much for my extended cut :-(
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This movie did not need to be longer...