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Jared Leto in the previews going on about building an army and Ryan Gosling saying how they have to be stopped is making this look like a fairly traditional action film that's been dropped in to the Bladerunner IP. I hope I'm wrong.

Early word on the film is pretty positive:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2017/09/26/blade-runner-2049-first-reactions-hail-film-breathtaking-and-masterpiece/704987001/

Full reviews including spoilers aren't allowed until early next week though.

Some very, very positive stuff on Twitter going around from movie journos at the moment.

Dare I allow myself to start becoming hopeful?

It's a good sign it's getting good early buzz, but there's no way this movie is going to be universally praised. I'd expect more negative stuff to circulate when the real embargo lifts on friday and people do spoiler filled reviews.

I think that ford is a replicant - as was his BR compatriot with the cane.

Well reviews are out today and this is currently sitting at 97% on rotten tomatoes. Wasn't really expecting this enthusiastic of a release.

5 stars in the UK Guardian newspaper as well!

The first time this has ever been awarded to a film that wasn't French avant-garde, filmed in black and white and featuring a woman in stockings smoking.

Denofgeek gave it five stars too.

One star, five stars, whatever...I got IMAX tickets for Thursday night and I'm counting the minutes!

I'm seeing it in dolby 2d on friday, pre ordered the soundtrack too. Gonna be very tempting to listen to it before I see the movie but not sure if I should. It's gonna be a slow couple days ahead.

Hopefully seeing it tomorrow. Really excited at this stage.

Saw it, but now I need to re-watch the original to make sense of everything!

One plot spoiler question I had after seeing it:


Again major spoilers, only click that after you've seen the movie!

I liked it, and it certainly had a lot of good scenery porn to go with the rest of it.

I was pretty impressed with it, some solid performances by Gosling and pretty much everybody. I feel like some things may have been left out or the pacing was too fast during a couple moments. But overall this was leagues ahead of alien covenant. It should be making way more money than it is right now, which is a depressing thing.

fething awesome! Went Thursday night and loved it, now going again tomorrow evening.

 AegisFate wrote:
I liked it, and it certainly had a lot of good scenery porn to go with the rest of it.

Spoiler:

I think the reason that they don't track him at the end is because Love was the only one who knew what was going on. Wallace felt like more of a big picture guy and didn't micro manage, and with Love dead, he has no idea who she was actually using in her goals

Interesting theory! Thanks

I saw it opening night.

It's a good film. Gosling and Ana de Armas both turn in strong performances. The plot falls off for me in the third act and there are a few scenes that could have stood to be removed or altered.

However, it is being massively overrated right now IMO. The original is better. Much more atmospheric, ground breaking in terms of visuals, and the replicants were more diverse and interesting. The first film felt alive. Sure it was about robots, but it felt human. So much of 2049 feels robotic.

One symbolic thing I noticed was:

Another thing I noticed with the symbology there,


And the artwork was just magnificent, especially how they did the transparency of the holograms over other objects.

I loved it. Forget my concern above that it might be a generic action film shoved in to the Bladerunner IP, that was just another case of really misleading trailers.

I think the biggest achievement of the film is the way they managed to give us a new, standalone film that works without needing any knowledge of the first film, without rehashing the first film, but instead expanding and enhancing the original plots and themes. It is both a great standalone film, and a great sequel. That's a very rare thing.

The story has a couple of minor issues* but overall works wonderfully as a mystery and as a commentary on the movie's themes. The performances are all excellent. The visuals are wonderful, there are lot of really jaw dropping sequences - I could watch police cars just flying about LA 2049 for 2 hours and wouldn't complain. Perhaps the music is the only thing that I have any issue at all - it's good, but all its best bits are when it is directly copying the original, nothing they added really improved anything or made it its own great work.






Automatically Appended Next Post:

 RiTides wrote:

Spoiler:

Earlier in the movie, they track the main character's movements - in fact they do it twice! Once by the police chief when he's outside the building with the single girl inside, and once by the replicant from the police chief's office (after he destroyed the small antenna on his emanater, so presumably this was now the only way to track him).

But at the end of the movie, he brazenly goes back to the building with the single girl inside, bringing Harrison Ford. Is there any explanation at all on how he didn't just lead everyone to her? I guess mostly just that the replicant's master thinks he's dead?

I thought it was good but not great. Great acting, great directing, amazing visual design, interesting thematic hooks, all let down by the story and weak payoff. The tone, scene development and visual lexicon were better than the movie deserved. The movie felt important while watching it, but there were no "tears in the rain" moments for the audience to think about for weeks.


I have to add that Jared Leto's Wallace was by far the worst thing I've seen in theaters since Jessie Eisenberg's Lex Luther. Every scene with him sucked the air out of the room. The music veered into self-parody a few times, too,


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and I would not say it succeeds as a stand alone at all. My wife hasn't seen the first one recently, and she was lost through half the movie. It didn't help that some characters pronounce names so differently. Deckard was either "Decker" or "duh-Card" depending on who is speaking, for example.

Credit where it's due, the film delivered what the audience wanted most: people punching Ryan Gosling's smug face again and again.

My very strong impression is, this is a better film than the original. The only aspect of the original film that is unquestionably better is the soundtrack. And 2049 unquestionably has a better plot. Everything else - characters, dialog, performances, visual effects, even world building - is debatable but I think 2049 has a solid claim to do this stuff even better than Sir Ridley's movie.

As to scenes I could think about for weeks - holy gak yes the movie has scenes I could think about for weeks and I reckon I will be thinking about them for years. Luv is at least as complicated and nuanced as Roy, without ever getting dreamily philosophical. What about the idea that the Nexus 9s are obedient? (a.k.a, the "reverse BioShock" moment) The "reality" of Joii's love for K will be a constant question for me. My God, this was the most romantic movie I have seen in years. There is not a shred of noir in 2049; it's a romance film and it is agonizingly beautiful.

Be warned - there is a price to pay for seeing 2049. Everything else you're watching will look like gak by comparison.

Went again last night...yep, still fantastic and worth the re-viewing.

^^ What Manchu said.

The original's my favourite film of all time and this was easily a worthy successor. Gosling and Ford gave (to me, anyway) surprisingly nuanced performances and the whole thing looked amazing. Beautifully languidly paced. Will see it again ASAP.

I don't own the original on dvd/Blu-ray, so I cannot wait until they release a double feature with both. This movie is definitely worth owning

 Chiashi_Zane wrote:
Another thing I noticed with the symbology there,

Spoiler:

Joe was starting to treat his Joi like a real person, down to getting her an anniversary gift. The whole movie was robotic and kind of focused on him and Joi, until she 'died' and he ran into the Advertising daemonette, at which point everything went more fluid all of a sudden, like the loss of his technological crutch brought him back into the Real world. At that point, he toughened up and became more heroic himself, in his single-minded pursuit to give Decker what he never could have, rather than being a robot for the police force to use as they needed.

And the artwork was just magnificent, especially how they did the transparency of the holograms over other objects.

But...

While the music was thematically appropriate and the ambience connected to the original film, there were problems. Unlike the original, nothing on the soundtrack stood out. Everyone remembers the love theme and the end music from the original. There was nothing in this movie that stood out like that, at least it seemed that way to me. Overuse of booming bass foghorns got irritating, too.

The other thing I didn't like was the move toward anime style visuals. The large buildings were way too tall and too massive to be buildable in the real world. The seawall was comically huge compared to the sprawl of 30-story buildings that made up the carpet of the cityscape. The police station was too clean, too. Remember the original where everything was retro-old fashioned styling with ceiling fans and stuff? None of that here. Most of the 30s art deco stuff is gone in favor of a style found in the original Ghost in the Shell.

But those are actually minor nit-picks. I loved the movie and can't wait to see an expanded cut on blu-ray. Too bad it isn't doing better at the box office, it really deserves better numbers.

Regarding the station house, keep in mind that the setting of 2049 is recovering. Wallace saved the world. By contrast, the worst was yet to come in 2019. That world was on a steep downward slope. This world laboring up a modest incline. This is also apparent in Lt Joshi's idealism; pretty stark contrast to Cpt Bryant's attitude in 2019.

As to Art Deco - I think the issue there is, BR2049 isn't film noir. It's a sci fi romance. Villeneuve did a genre shift, which is a big reason why the movie works despite 1982 BR hanging over it. In fact, Villeneuve has to kind of step up the Deckard/Rachel romance for the sake of his film. In the original, I'm not sure that they were in love so much as just two people caught up in bigger things. That's classic film noir. Here, love is real - or, in the spirit of the film, as real as anything can be. When Deckard is crying about Rachel in BR2049, in my head I was like - nah, you didn't love her, really, nor did she love you - not like that, at least.

 Manchu wrote:
In fact, Villeneuve has to kind of step up the Deckard/Rachel romance for the sake of his film. In the original, I'm not sure that they were in love so much as just two people caught up in bigger things. That's classic film noir. Here, love is real - or, in the spirit of the film, as real as anything can be. When Deckard is crying about Rachel in BR2049, in my head I was like - nah, you didn't love her, really, nor did she love you - not like that, at least.

While I agree with your assessment of how the original portrayed their relationship, I can't help think that they would have eventually developed a romance that warranted his reaction in 2049.
The leap of logic is too easy, thus doesn't need any screen time to be believable...for me anyway

-

this film is gonna be a sleeper hit, just wait, it may not break the box office yet but when word gets around how good it is, it will break the bank.

It's an interesting point. There are thirty years yawning between BR and BR2049. But Rachel died in 2021. And, according to Deckard, he was "long gone" by the time his child was given up to the orphanage. It isn't clear whether Deckard was present during his child's birth; it seems unlikely. Deckard and Rachel therefore probably only spent about a year together after the events of the first movie. And that would have been the sum total of their relationship.

Perhaps Deckard just remembers it as something more. TBF both movies ask us to think critically about memory and emotion.

Hey and so what about Rachel's eyes? Two things ... Sean Young has brown eyes. When Deckard said she had green eyes, I was like ... uh nope. Then I remembered the Voight-Kampff reading from earlier in the film, which shows Rachel's eye being green. So how did Luv feth that up so badly? Or was it a test? A trap?