Thirty Years On

Rating: 8/10 (6 October 2017)

When I first discovered that this film was going to hit the screens it literally jumped to the top of my must see list, however after watching the original a week before hand, and seeing a couple of previews, I simply shook my head and basically prepared for the worst. As it turned out the teaser trailers were just that – teasers. From watching the trailers I was half expecting a butchering of the original and simply an over enthusiastic film maker turning it into a travesty of an action movie. Well, since Ridley Scott did have his hands in the making of the film, after I left the cinema I realised that this was something that the creator of the original film was never going to allow. In fact, it turned out that the film was really, really good.
Honestly, it was always going to be a feat to create a sequel to a masterpiece, and the danger of it flopping harder than the worst film ever made (though ironically they end up becoming cult classics) was always going to be a possibility. The thing is that the original film had a life of its own, to the point where one could almost write a PhD thesis on the production (and Wikipedia even has an entire page devoted to the themes and motifs of Blade Runner). Sure, the original book was okay, but the film took it to a new level.
So, what about the sequel. Well, it is difficult to compare, and it certainly wasn't the original. Yet it does retain a lot of the feeling of what when on at first. Both films are detective stories in the classic film noir tradition, however where the first film is basically a story of a bounty hunt, the second film has a lot more mystery to it. The creators do a really good job of slowly releasing information to you, and then teasing you with one idea only to suddenly twist everything around and reveal that what we thought was the truth wasn't actually the truth at all. Even what happened between the two movies is left vague, and only bits and pieces are revealed throughout the film – we know that there was a replicant revolt, but the consequences of this revolt is only drip fed to us throughout the film.
I really don't want to give too much away, and even though IMDb does drop some hints about what goes on in the film, I'm not really all that comfortable to even go that far. Honestly, it would probably be best for most people to go into the film knowing as little about it as possible, and probably even having a completely different idea as to what it is actually going to be about. The film does pay tribute to the original film, and does give us an idea of what happened at the end of the original – the final cut does have Deckard and Rachel leaving, with the suggestion that she was also a replicant that needed to be hunted down. There are also a few references back to the original as well, but the original was never actually setting up this film. Oh, and any questions that you are expecting to be answered from the first film, particularly about Deckard, are fortunately not answered in this film either.