The first was correct, the danger's to forget

Rating: 6/10 (13 October 2017)

I use IMDb and am genuinely troubled by the high rating of this movie, which is the impetus for writing this.
I was born 8 years before Blade Runner came out, and may have seen it in one of its forms 20 times, or maybe twice that many. It has by now become a part of the luminous, cyclical geometry of my spirit, or as close to sacred as I can define.
The three golden threads of the original- identity, memory and mortality, have either inspired the themes of my introspective path, or the latter is the reason I keep coming back to the work of art.
Before watching the sequel I watched the original last night on my wall, and like always, it opened like a fractal. Revealing a new dimension in a familiar scape.
So it turns out that Blade Runner was, besides anything else, a prophecy. At the dawn of the digital it saw the failure of memory to sustain our human flame. It proposed that machine or flesh are besides the point. It is remembering, in the face of our end, that saves us. We are real to the degree that our memory moves us (enter Vangelis). But memory itself was a delicate thing (enter Vangelis), and must be guarded. In other words, finding real emotion within, the artificial has found itself. This was done so subtly (enter Vangelis), and the film's magic was connecting the viewer with her own nostalgia as if it were Deckard's. When he finds the origami unicorn his reaction is, in so few words, "so what".
Well into the digital now, propelled this way and that by cloud based identities, the new film makes a different proposition. That machine or flesh are besides the point. Emotions, when they arise, are deviations whether you are android or man. Were there any humans in the movie? I can confidently say barely. This is art in the age of digital identity, not memory. Certainly not Memories of Green. If identity exists at all, it is by selection. When K thinks the horse is his, he breaks down not cathartically but in seeming vexation. When he realizes it isn't his reaction is, in so few words, "what now".
Less abstractly, and in the vein of several other grounded reviews, the film is boring. It really starts when Deckard beautifully says "Rachel" and ends with her actual image from the original a few moments later. A few moments after that in proper Transformer fashion a drone departs a flying car.. A good two hours or more into the film. It is 2017, so add a healthy pinch of martial arts and guns, and guns. There is a story, I think. K is searching for... Wallace is attempting to... Deckard is hiding from...
Nothing really. They've mostly forgotten.
The music is painfully bad. Sorry Hans. You are one of the greats, but there are no electric sheep without Vangelis.
There is some beautiful art direction and cinematography, but towards the end it is absurdly overdone in an apocalyptic design that throws everything into the hat, looking like the Vegas Luxor on mushrooms.
The acting is a mixed bag, with a lot of potential brought low by mediocre writing. He failed, but I still think Gosling was a perfect choice. His psychopath nemesis, whatever her appearance signifies about how we see us and technology, was an interesting performance.
I've exceeded my allotted portion of attention. I was afraid, I think, of loving the new one as much as these reviews suggest I should. I can now forget it and go back to loving 1982. To remembering. Has this film jumped to the 51st best within less than a week because of an army of bots? Or because we have forgotten something? Either would be appropriately cyberpunk.