Fine use of spectacle to tell a moving, powerful tale

Rating: 8/10 (21 October 2017)

Blown away on the level of spectacle and archetype..for perspective, at the previews featured the Last Jedi, Pacific Rim, Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League, and Only The Brave....this is different. Dennis Villenueve understands panorama, and is willing to use it for grim realism and urban-blight engulfment rather than just flash and overwhelm--he has that too...he is very often slow where others are fast--and he still understands wonder. Yet there is more--he has wedded spectacle to narrative and theme as no-one has in decades. I have always counted Lucas something of a failure in that regard. The story and dialogue? he knows how to use pauses, replies that only partly nine up, scraps of information as opposed to extensive speeches by the villain/boss/key witness---he works with fragments and they add up as gears could not have done--and that is critical in this story. He has preserved the sense of shell-shock that Ridley Scott brought to the original Blade-Runner with such effect. He doesn't just bring you along as the story advances: he brings you deeper-in. Then, the ending is a perfect result, a sudden integration of what has been put together from the pieces of a broken world. Also, see if you can catch the few but useful literary references-- just enough, applied like table-salt, not a main ingredient...