I viewed
Blade Runner 2049 on Monday, I found it scarcely engrossing, and I would regard it as "lousy/decent." I can see why some people really admire the movie, but I can easily perceive why the film failed to live up to commercial expectations.
Visually, the movie is impressive—certainly among the better films of the year in terms of cinematography, specifically with regard to lighting, earthy or spooky color, and composition. Some of the early shots are especially memorable. But soon enough, I found the approach to be pretentious and self-indulgent. About that time, I remembered that the director was Denis Villeneuve (there were no opening credits), a fact that unfortunately made sense. Although he seems to be popular both with viewers and within the industry, I cannot count myself as an aficionado. I have now viewed his last three films in the theater. I found
Arrival, which I saw twice in the theater, to be terrible and the most overrated movie of 2016, and while I deemed
Sicario entertaining, it too strained for meaning and suffered from some pretentiousness (not to the extent of
Arrival or
Blade Runner 2049, though). But heading into the film, I had forgotten that Villeneuve was the director, so I was not prejudiced in my assessment.
I actually did not find the movie to be long—despite a running length of two hours and forty-four minutes, it did not feel overlong. Likewise, the pacing was not problematic in the abstract (if that statement makes any sense). Rather, the length and pacing did not actually fit the story, or vice versa. Either the filmmakers should have clarified and compressed the narrative, reducing the running length by about an hour, or they should have rendered the narrative more intensive and engaging. Instead, the story stretches too thinly over the running length, with Villeneuve apparently attempting to compensate through imagery. And again, that imagery is impressive in the abstract, but there is little energy or vitality to the film, sapping the imagery of intensity. More direct and less oblique dialogue would have also helped, and
Blade Runner 2049 is almost totally devoid of humor, aside from the ironic convergence of two icons: Harrison Ford and
Elvis Presley
.
As with Villeneuve's previous two films—especially
Arrival—rather banal or minimalist themes are given grandiose treatment. Villeneuve does not seem to understand that one cannot adequately develop theme simply through aural flourishes, spacious framing, and mystical images. As a director, he displays a penchant for atmosphere and visual imagination, but he is not much of a dramatist—in that sense, he is the anti-Oliver Stone. At least
Blade Runner 2049 is not maudlin like
Arrival—and thus it is not as pretentious and hackneyed. The score, meanwhile, proved appropriate yet derivative (or self-derivative, given Hans Zimmer's presence as a co-composer).
The movie has its moments, most notably the viscerally intense climactic scene where Ryan Gosling's character
drowns the female adversary
. (In this scene, Gosling delivers his best acting in a perhaps overly sedate performance.) Also, the earlier scene where Gosling's humanistic cyborg views a woman
nude for the first time—her topless torso
unseen by viewers in a nice moment of restraint and finesse—is slightly moving. But what proves curious is how many artistic renditions—sculptured, carved, digitized, whatever—of bare breasts one finds in a movie that features multiple female characters in powerful positions, including a police lieutenant (played by Robin Wright) who serves as Gosling's immediate boss. (Conversely, there is no exhibitionist male nudity.) Is this futuristic, dystopian society simultaneously patriarchal, libertine, and feminist? Or is any kind of intellectual interpretation and social evaluation beside the point, because there is no point other than the indulgence of imagery? As a heterosexual male, I am certainly 'down' with images of topless women, but like the overall film, the sensuous images are devoid of visceral and emotional resonance.
In short,
Blade Runner 2049 appears to constitute an attempt at answering a peculiar question: can one fuse a special-effects blockbuster budgeted at approximately $150M with an art-house movie? The answer seems to be, "You can try."