Dickensian

Rating: 9/10 (19 March 2020)

One of the things that made BLADE RUNNER (1982) so interesting to me was it was an era when tv and movie sf seemed to be devouring all the genres, and this looked to be a fine melding of sf with film noir's sour, dour paranoia. There were other reasons to love it. If you were one of the fifty thousand people in the world who knew who Philip K. Dick actually was, then you probably knew he was as crazy as -- well, take whatever your saying for as crazy as you can get and double it. We knew he was poor and could use the money. We didn't know he was dying after decades of living in poverty, to top off the irony.
Anyway, here we are, thirty-five years later and sf, like Flash Gordon, has conquered the universe, Ridley Scott has re-edited and re-issued the movie several thousand times, none of which I have ever bothered to look at. I did look at Blade Runner 2049 this afternoon and pronounce it visually stunning, and so what?
If I want to stun myself visually, I can stare into a 300-watt bulb set to strobe. You want to stun me visually with a movie in a good way, show me some new stuff in a way that tells a story in a novel manner. That's a little tougher here, what with decades of MAD MAX and RED DWARF. There is one sequence that blew me away, the Dickensian sequence set around San Diego, with dust heaps out of BLEAK HOUSE, and tormented orphans hard at work and such. After that, it was musing on the fact that even Tinkerbelle wants Pinocchio to be a real boy and can something be done about Jared Leto? Will some one give him a chocolate chip cookie at least?
In the end, BLADE RUNNER 2049 is a good movie not because it tells exactly same story with newer and more obnoxious special effects, but because it tells another story that arises out of the first, and not just one in which the good guys win because the good guy leaks marginally less blood and lives, while the bad guy dies, thus proving that..... good guys have better clotting? Yay for the good guys! No, Ryan Gosling actually learns a moral lesson and does a good deed as a result, for no benefit. Because in the end, if we want to be human, we must behave as humans.