Drowned in the subtext

Rating: 2/10 (25 January 2018)

Interesting as the set design and the cinematography of BR2049 were, the current generation will eventually learn that what makes a movie great is not loud and glossy special effects, "surprises", clever romantic play, endless laughs, nor hours of fist fighting, sex, nor truly ghastly horror, nor ghastly car wrecks, but whether or not the story honestly moves you, how deeply, and why. This last quintessential must be achieved on screen in the final minute, or few seconds, of the film. The final frame is the ultimate twist which ties the theme (claim, premise, argument), the plot, the lessons the characters and ourselves had to learn, and their fate into a perfect, eternal, square knot. Voila!
If this moment, the ending, is, in any way, blown, the word 'masterpiece' cannot be applied. Few films indeed deserve such an accolade, since this moment, the always elusive, satisfying, tear-worthy ending, is ever more difficult to achieve in the increasingly jaded, cynical, narrow, desperate, inhumane view of the contemporary audience. Few there are who cry in movie theaters these days, a throw-back to a simpler time, as the feature film, as the movie is now referenced, has ceded to the long running T.V. series, Breaking Bad, et al, the primary platform for the narrative constructs which really move our society.
When cornered by one of the characters in Adaptation, on one level, undoubtedly Charlie Kaufman's brilliant polemic on screenwriting, no less stern a critic than Robert McKee is asked to give his criteria for a great film in less than thirty seconds. His response: 1) a great ending; 2) the characters must change.
The ending of BR2049 is a mess, vague to the point of incoherence, and dependent on a line of subtext that none but the most devout Blade Runner fan could follow. I was neither moved nor edified. The subtext throughout the film was so complex, obscure, and overbearing, that whatever attempt to develop character is drowned along with most of the bad guys. Ryan Gosling's figure, named "Joe" late in the story, is I think supposed to evolve in what early on becomes a existential (lol) - I mean he's a replicant, right? Or not? Boy that brings on some heavy meditating on what it 'means' to be human - search for the self embedded in a good old cops and robbers, good guy chases down the bad guys - maybe... By the final frame I still couldn't figure out who was human - who was replicant - and why this highly speculative, trite picture of an unfortunately imagined future - where liquor seems to be the only substance binding humanity together - had any significance for me the viewer. That's what I mean by coherence.
Please forgive the unpolished musings of a "toe tapping" dolt as one reviewer puts it - but I still do not see why I should contemplate this particular picture rather than another to answer the question of what it "means to be human"? What about a movie poses the same question but against a backdrop simple reality such as Kurosawa's humbling masterpiece Ikiru "To Live"? What greater final frame could ever be shot?
The problem with most sci-fi dystopian futuristic narratives is that every imagined detail must be accounted for and rarely are. Who says that we'll be living on a diet of holographically disguised maggots living on excrement, as is suggested by BR2049, and why? Reviewers rightly complain of multiple script "holes", even "craters" in BR2049, but it is the glaring subjectivity of their presumptions about what the future will be, common to most all of these narratives that gives one the feeling that they are wasting our time. We and 1984 seem to be the only specimens of the genre which escape this fatal flaw because in every instance the creators have found credible, cogent, and coherent ways to link the possible details of the imagined future to our current reality.
And what does the reviewer with the temerity to parade as a professional critic call a "smart script"? Hundreds of pages long without meeting one widely agreed upon criteria for greatness or even basic structure or character development, a script which if anonymously entered into a screenwriting contest would hit the circular file in the first round, an insult to the very idea of craft.
The script actually did have a rather healthy gut full of humor even when unaware of it, I suspect - anyway a relief from the ongoing din of the army of tympanis. But the only time I heard the audience laugh was when Deckard dumped out a little booze which his dog preceded to lap off the floor. I kept trying to figure out how Deckard and the dog ate for all those years after the nuclear holocaust - they both looked sort of chubby - but unlike another reviewer, I'm not going to rush back for another viewing because I'm tortured by it all. I'm not.