Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

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Director: Denis Villeneuve. Language: English. Review on: First Watch (Home).

Review:

Man I love me some Robin Wright, I get happier every time I see her, and I was also genuinely delighted to see Dave Bautista. Like obviously Ryan Gosling is a genuinely incredible character actor who is the beating emotional heart of the film, but this film is just so full of fantastic actors doing a great job. I think this is the first time I’ve seen Jared Leto in something and really liked him, and I didn’t realize it was him at ALL? He was so unsettling, in a great way! Ana de Armas was really heartbreaking–are any of Joi’s emotions real? What could she have become if she’d gotten to continue to strive towards being “real”? Like the original, too, this is a good example of Harrison Ford really, sincerely Acting. There’s just something different about how he’s performing older Deckard here that feels very different from Grumpy Old Indiana Jones and Grumpy Old Han Solo; he’s giving a lot of deep, genuine pain, grief, and love. Absolutely enchanting to see him in a film that he clearly loves doing so wholeheartedly.

Is it good?
Is it good? Okay I’ll stop yelling about the actors to say that yes, this film was very good… when I could see it. Like, it was a couple scenes after the fact where I retroactively figured out that K had found the wooden horse in the orphanage, because I could not fucking see the scene where it actually happened. It was also really hard to see what was going on in the starting fight between K and Sapper, which is a damn shame when two talents as striking as Ryan Gosling and Dave Bautista are at work, and plenty of the other night scenes were damn hard to see what was going on. I feel like this really struck me hard because I watched this right after the original, much of which takes place at night, in the rain, in dingy, dirty places. The final fight is in an abandoned building, in the dark, at night, in the rain, then moves to the poorly-lit rooftop, still at night, still in the rain, and it’s very clear that it’s dark for the characters but you, the audience, can see. It’s dark in that there are properly dark, black shadows, which provides necessary visual contrast both to see everything else in the scene and to capture the noir feel. You need deep shadows, and there’s none in 2049, which is why some scenes are hard to see even when they aren’t that dark. It’s just such a damn waste of a film that’s expanding on the striking visuals of the original in gorgeous ways–the sex scene with Joi synching with the sex worker stands out to me as genuinely beautiful and eerie. Like it’s still a good movie with MUCH better sexual ethics between the primary love interests and some really good twists in the plot, but damn a film from 2017 shouldn’t be this much harder to look at than one from 1982.
Is it fun?
I might actually nudge this one over to yes–it’s grim noir, like the original, but a lot of the scenes with K and Joi are genuinely sweet, there’s a lot of really good wee jokes and banter between characters, and the fight scenes are really cool thanks to advances in how we film those. Nothing as iconic as Roy Batty’s dying speech, but Luv is still a pretty fun villain in an awful way.
Is it queer?
No, though when the revelation came that Deckard and Rachel’s child was a girl, I thought for a split-second that one of the things making the child hard to track down was that K had transed his gender and all records had been lost in the blackout. Man, that’d have been a REALLY interesting version of the film. I don’t think the film has her a lesbian but I sure am a lesbian about Robin Wright in charge. Madam? Madam? Madam. Madam. I’m gay