Slogging Our Way Through a Dystopian Future

Rating: 4/10 (6 December 2017)

I felt the same way about "Blade Runner 2049" as I did Ridley Scott's 1982 original: it's slow, ponderous, and portentous.
The dystopia has been ratcheted up a notch in this sequel set just around the corner. My office can't even figure out how to get video conferencing to work consistently, but we're supposed to have flying cars by 2049? We'd better hustle.
Denis Villeneuve directs at a funereal pace to give us one long, sustained note of sci-fi gloominess. This is the kind of film in which characters don't speak lines, they recite maxims. Where scenes begin with some mad genius monologuing in an attempt to imbue what really should just be a pulpy noir with philosophical import. Every single frame of this film is calculated to make its audience feel like there's more significance than there actually is, and it's too self- consciously aware of its own effects, as if you can hear someone off-camera saying, "ooohhh, look what our visual effects team has done here." All of the actors have been asked to make their faces as blank as possible and speak in emotionless monotones, as if Villeneuve is daring them to have fun. All of these things were wrong with the original film as well, but instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, Villeneuve has set out to reproduce them. He's done too good a job.
Grade: C-