Not that good

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2017)

This film is not that sophisticated. It's pretty low on scifi film IQ scale. And yet there were people applauding the thing when it ended last night at the San Francisco Meteron.
Anyone who read comics in the 70s and 80s will recognize the plot points in this film, and will know just how cliché and predictable this film was and is.
A "cop" going after a rogue AI. Okay, fine, but wasn't the whole idea behind Replicants from the first film was that they were sociopathic, and that after a while they developed emotions they didn't know how to deal with? That's never really explored in this film, but it's kind of implied that you have some kind of loose knowledge of this in order to understand (so to speak) some of this film's story's basis.
Truly this film's basic tale comes out of the graphic novel boom of the late 1980s, when the audience who read superhero comic books were holding onto their childhood icons and continued to buy more of those publications. The producers of said material put out more comics with slightly more sophisticated or adult material (and no, I don't mean sexually explicit, just stuff that had romance with some sex hinted at). That's pretty much all this movie is, and with a villain who is pretty cliché and one-dimensional.
I could hit on this thing scene by scene, and break it down as to just how predictable and actually unintelligent this film is, but I'd probably violate the "don't tell" rule.
This film puts on the pretense of being high-minded, but is just fairly slow. And even the "big finale" wasn't much of a surprise, again as if Frank Miller or one of the other noted comic book authors had written this film. For anyone who's read his work (say the "Dark Knight" series from the late 80s), you'll know what I mean when I say that this new Blade Runner puts on a presentation of being about more than what it actually is.
Little of the important matters are resolved in the end, and all you get is this very female oriented payoff at the end of the film. Science Fiction is supposed to be about ideas, ideals, and the such challenged with radical changes in society and technology. That's what films like "Planet of the Apes" or "Outland" or any of the classic 1960's Star Trek episodes are all about. If you want to tell a soap opera, then go see one of the old standbys like "General Hospital" or "As the World Turns", but leave my genre alone.
I truly wish I could write and say more in this review, but again I'll get slapped by the powers that be for potentially ruining the film going experience for anyone inclined to go anyway after reading what I've written here.
Oh Roger Ebert, where are you when we need you...