Blade Runner 2049: Great Expectations … Unconvincingly Results …

4th February, 2018.

Hmmm … 

You know, I get a certain amount of evenings off.

You’ve probably worked that out, already, haven’t you?

This coming working week?

I’ve Wednesday and next Sunday off.

That’s in addition to this evening, of course.

And, to be frank?

To be frank I wanted to see a film.

One that’s only just become available: but raved about for quite some time.

I’ve seen Blade Runner 2049.

I THINK I’m getting a habit of picking movies I don’t like, just recently.

mother! didn’t grab, particularly.

As you’ve possibly worked out, I’ve seen Blade Runner 2049 … 

Unconvinced is putting it mildly.

~≈§≈~

Set some thirty years after the original, Blade Runner 2049 introduces us to K (Ryan Gosling).

K is a blade runner: a law officer whose job it is to hunt down replicants, artificial life forms made to resemble humans, that have gone rogue.

Hunt them down … and retire them.

At the start of the film?   He’s in the process of retiring a replicant called Sapper (Dave Bautista), and investigating the home where Sapper lived.

And finding that’s there’s a body buried in the garden.

The body of a replicant … that died doing — for a replicant — the impossible.

Dying giving birth …

You can tell that’s going to cause trouble, don’t you … ?

~≈§≈~

Now … 

Unconvinced … ?



I have to admit, I thought I’d not take to Blade Runner 2049, from the start: when I realised it had no voice-over narration.

Now, I know that Ridley Scott — director of the original Bladerunner — didn’t feel that narration was needed: and, indeed, removed it in later director’s cuts of the film.

Which is fair enough.

Having seen Bladerunner both with and without?   I like both.

But (slightly) prefer it with.

So noticed the lack in the sequel.

There’s something else, as well, I think.

Frankly?

I hate to simplify the original down to a straight fight of good version evil.

It’s not.

But it does have a sympathetic villain, in the shape of Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty, and a sypathetic — and cynically flawed — hero in Ford’s Deckard.

The simple fact that one has to kill the other, despite his doubts about the job?

Is what drives that plot.

Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand?

Blade Runner 2049 seems to have a lot less of a driving plot: beyond ‘Find The Baby*.’

Oh, it’s here.

Noooo, it’s over there!

Ohhhh, it’s ME … !

Oh, no, it’s her …

Frankly, taking two hours and forty-five to do so?

Turned Blade Runner 2049 not into a film I enjoyed … 

But a film I felt could have been a lot shorter.

Frankly?

Blade Runner 2049 dragged.

That’s one thing I am convinced of.

Blade Runner 2049

★☆☆☆

*        Blade Runner 2049 central McGuffin: a robot got pregnant.   The idea irritated me in Asimov’s First Law, it irritated me in Battlestar Galactica, and it certainly irritated me in this!