A sleek, expensive and obedient skin-job

Rating: 5/10 (8 October 2017)

Blade Runner (1982) was a happy (yet gloomy) accident, involving: a) a young and ambitious director who fought ferociously with studio executives in order for them to let him fulfill his vision; b) a rising blockbuster star who wanted to prove he can also act in a serious movie; c) a crazy Dutch actor who decided to change the script and improvise one of the most memorable monologues in film history; d) a bunch of talented artists who wanted to make a movie that would look and sound different from anything else we had seen before. And most of all, e) a post-Vietnam turbulent era when Hollywood rebels like Coppola, Scorsese and Cimino were audaciously attempting to reinvent the language of cinema, telling stories that mattered and not caring at all about target audiences and marketing trends. As a result, Blade Runner was a box office failure that slowly became a legend, breaking stereotypes like "good guy kills bad guy at the end" and dealing with existential agony on an almost metaphysical level; always within the context of a gritty corporate dystopia in the near future.
Blade Runner 2049 is none of these things. On the contrary, it's the flawed triumph of a next generation of studio executives, who control the creative process by paying millions to the industry's best of the best, providing they will make something that will take advantage of a successful brand name in order to bring profits to shareholders. If there is one word to describe this movie, it's "replicant". Not the kind of replicant who realizes that "all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain" as he dies, but a sleek, expensive and obedient skin-job that will try to entertain you and if it succeeds will return as a sequel that will eventually become yet another franchise. I spent 160 minutes of my life watching a pleasant and perfectly constructed piece of nothing, and I didn't care for a moment about any of the characters or a storyline that was designed without the intention to question and redefine a single thing. All its moments have already been lost in my memory, while the original Blade Runner remains vivid in my mind, as if I only saw it yesterday.