BladeRunner Wannabee 2017

Rating: 5/10 (5 October 2017)

After watching from start to end of the credits, I wonder what "secret sauce" I had missed that had the press and all the fans' see the sequel as "better than the original," "Best movie of the year!" and being able to compare this film and Villenueve to the work of Stanley Kubrick.
BLADERUNNER2049 employs the latest CG techniques and effects and brought a few new ideas for the genre that I expect to see subsequent attempts to further improve. But aside from a few nice touches and obviously having spent a good chunk of the budget on the digital effects to create impressive visuals for the film, none of it points to innovation that betters the original.
Of all the scenes in BLADERUNNER2049 that try to work off-of and improve upon what we liked in BLADERUNNER(1982), the original still does a much better job convincing us of the future where countries and nationality have less meaning than the category/class of existence to which we are assigned to - either to serve, lead, or follow.
With the top-billing cast, you'd expect the audience to be challenged to decide which actor successfully steals which scene(s) over the others... in my opinion, other than some of the moments with Ana De Armas (playing a VR romantic companion) and Sylvia Hoecks (basically a Terminator-type character that reminds us of Famke Janssen from 10-15 years back), the lines and story just didn't seem allow the actors and scenes to work effectively enough to convince us this was any more than actors playing characters from their previous, more acclaimed, work - we see Ryan Gosling playing "Driver" from DRIVE (2011) in the year 2049. We see Harrison Ford playing Deckard with a heavy touch of Richard Kimble (The FUGITIVE, 1993). We see Jared Leto in one of his worst performances to date - it is as if he was trying to mimic Christopher Walken reading out lines from TRUE ROMANCE (1993), but with a delivery that comes across as if he's reading the material for the first time. Robin Wright starts off strong and finishes strong, but somehow in between manages to be put into a surprisingly bad scene - with some of the worst lines that seem to be aiming as either a conflict resolve, plot-twist, or a L.A. CONFIDENTIAL "Rolo Tomasi" moment - seriously, this was one of the worst scenes in the movie that rivaled all the scenes with Jared Leto where he was asked to speak.
What made BLADERUNNER(1982) a sleeper that took years to grow into a cult hit and a milestone in cinema, is its ability to make the audience ask questions that isn't forced upon us - we see young Deckard being asked to do a job that he wasn't given the ability to question, but in the end he, along with the audience are led to ask ourselves not only the question, "What makes us Human?" but "What makes one Human more deserving of life and freedom than another?" In BLADERUNNER2049, we no longer question our existence, our purpose, or our rights to freedom... maybe those ideas are already cliche's in cinema at this point. In BLADERUNNER2049, the audience is instead constantly being asked to focus on asking "Wow, Replicants can now do that?"
BLADERUNNER(1982) allowed us to takeaway with questions that apply to our time and world, but it does not attempt to cram these concepts and existentialist questions onto the audience in place of entertainment value - existentialism and intellectual appeals aside, it's a great adaptation of Film Noir into Science Fiction, and is above all a great movie.
In the first film, the enemy was time and the hunted - in turn, no one was safe. In BLADERUNNER2049, the enemy is a character packaged like a GQ fall/winter fashion spread, along with a battalion of Agent Smith's(MATRIX) led by agent Luv (a combination of TERMINATOR/AgentSmith/X-Men). As to the ambition of the Dr. Evil character (played by Leto)? That is never addressed beyond a cliché claim of world-domination - simple layman-deduction would point to the fact that if you can own the ability to create life, then what higher-level achievements are you looking to attain - If it's an upgrade for a "replicant" to be able to pro-create, don't humans already have that ability without the need of higher-technology?
BLADERUNNER2049 is a mash-up of ideas and devices employed by critically acclaimed and/or hit films made in the past 20 years (i.e. MATRIX, HER, SOLARIS, & Mamoru Ishii's AVALON, etc). While it utilizes the most updated audio and visual technology to align with what is the best in class, it falls short in having a story that can drive the film for audience to not start looking at their watches (or cellphones) after the 2nd Jared Leto monologue.
last but not least, the duration of the film could have been cut by at least 30' and it would have been the same story, but I guess fans of seeing Ryan Gosling posing pensively may disagree. Now that BLADERUNNER has a sequel, as a die-hard fan of the original 1982 cinema version, I just hope someone else will make another attempt to do the story and its characters right. We need a CG Rachel as much as we needed a CG Princess Leia in Starwars: Rogue1.