Rent Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

If this was a class of college students, it wouldn't be the popular kid... - Blade Runner 2049 review by Schrödinger's Cake

A quick glance through the various “best movie ever” lists will show a cluster of films that started out as box office flops, but which grew in time to become cult classics. Funnily enough, numbered amongst these is none other than the original Blade Runner, which is for many cinema fans their favourite film of all time.

If you take a moment to consider the context and content, it’s actually no surprise that the original Blade Runner flatlined at the cinema, and likewise, in a similar fashion so did this one. If this was a class of college students, neither would be the popular kid: they are both simply too raw and unguarded for that.

Personally, I think I was actually a little disappointed with the film, but not because it was awful (in fact quite the opposite); more so because of the weight expectation set by it’s older sibling.

A piece of me is left thinking that it will be interesting to see whether (with time) Blade Runner 2049 evolves to be one of the current generation’s cult classics…

Dreadful - Blade Runner 2049 review by TY

Dreadful.

As a friend said:

'A particularly nasty aspect of the film was it's treatment of women, who were either prostitute playthings or psychopaths.'

A pale shadow of the original IMO.

A sci fi boy's wet dream - Blade Runner 2049 review by gs

Poor script, acting, plot with a portentous, philosophical, up its own arse, theme. Good visuals at least. Dreadful representation of women. Either passive, housewifely, will do anything for you, holograms or psychotic monsters. How this film got rave reviews in newspapers that I admire, such as the Guardian, and accurate, damning reviews in papers I despise, such as the Daily Mail, is a mystery quite beyond me at this present time!

Big Disappointment! - Blade Runner 2049 review by CS

How does one create a worthy sequel to such an original classic? The answer is probably not to, but instead to create something new in it's own right, which is why so often some sequels fail whilst others succeed. Sadly this sequel to my mind fails on a spectacular level! The CGI and Special Effects are impressive and really imaginative, but the film is trying so hard to be just like the original instead of being itself, that it fails miserably. It really does try hard to create the same bleak, soulless future, the same sparse ambience and downtrodden sense of humanity that the original captures so beautifully, but fails in every aspect. Then just as the storyline truly does get going and starts to make some sense, you think you've worked out what's going on and who's who, when suddenly right at the end a completely senseless and inappropriate twist is introduced, which to my mind completely spoilt the whole film. I felt that the final plot came across as pandering too much to feminist and pc propaganda, it was inappropriate to the film and had no place in the actual plot, almost as though halfway through making the film, the producers decided to change the ending to appease some political agenda and as a result ended up with a film that literally has the last ten minutes cut and pasted onto the end, so much so that they literally had to spell it out to you, because it really didn't make any sense, given what we had already seen! I actually had to watch this film in two halves, as it seemed so long and slow. Whilst the original is a true classic and was made for the love of crafting something original and beautiful, this just came across as having been made to cash in! Not sure that Ryan Gosling was the best actor for the part either, he didn't seem to quite fit the role and acme across as almost being disassociated from his character, as though going through the motions. Not one that I would purchase or watch again!

Blade Plodder - the lazy dudes snail edit... - Blade Runner 2049 review by Pork Chop Express

What can I say... Firstly I am a fan of the original - i.e. I actually had a poster of the original film in my student digs all through uni and have seen most of the different cuts and special features of the original. A film noir detective film in the future with robots, Vangelis, great acting and a thought provoking sci-fi element with of course ground breaking production design, FX and sets / costumes.

Contrast with the new 'improved' blade runner. The sparkly neon sets and lighting are gone. Replaced by bleak, unpopulated landscapes, lazily decorated casino interiors, big polystyrene naked women statues, rubbish heaps (yes - scrap yard rubbish heaps!), 80's warehouses and city scapes filled with smog and boring advertising hoardings with drole 80 ft high hologram projected brands and scantily clad women.

Forget Harrison, he's only in it about 20 mins or so. A quiet, pretty boy (Gosling) has taken over and he has to carry the first 2hrs (yes ... 2 hrs of slow scant plot). No humour. Very little acting. No style. No film noir. Not even that much detective story either. In fact very few older replicants to retire until a large mob turn up at the end but after I had fallen asleep and tried to re-watch the bit I had fallen asleep in it still wasn't clear what version of Nexus replicant they were anyway.

Gosling has an embarrassing love scene with a robot hologram. Harrison gets to look old. They shoot a cloned Rachel in the head. There is no real villain until the end really when we work out the main adversary is really a lady replicant who for 3 quarters of the film has been running a CEO's office.

Android has baby. ? What?!? Pantsy...

Music replaced with other electronic music. Which for the most part isn't too bad at least it fits the film. But is in no way beautiful like Vangelis hauntingly beautiful score. And every 5 mins or so a truly awful electronic horn-burp is blarred into your speakers for some reason whilst in the LA scenes...

Ending: Gosling dies on some steps (after saving Deckard) lying in the snow. The scene could have been shot outside my local museum not on top of a high rise surrounded by futuristic neon hoardings etc in the rain as per the orig.

It is pants..!. Captain underpants!

Ridley Scott even admitted he could have shaved off 30mins fairly easily. Give it to me and I could have turned it into a 30min special feature to tag onto the back of the vastly superior original. In fact, me and the missus started to comment on how much we could have cut out of some of the scenes as we watched it. The side story with K's hologram girlfriend is unnecessary and cringy for e.g. It comes in at 2hr53mins I think I read. Way too long.

It is just bad. Soooo bad. I could cry but then... my tears would be lost in time... like tears in the rain.

For SHAME!!!

All dressed up and nowhere to go - Blade Runner 2049 review by Count Otto Black

There was a time when "Psycho II" was considered to be the ultimate unnecessary sequel, since the original film so obviously didn't need one that it was 23 years before we unexpectedly got one anyway. Well, now we've got another Blade Runner movie a mere 35 years after the first! Was it worth the wait? Frankly, no. The way the critics hailed it as a masterpiece while lacklustre word of mouth among ordinary customers resulted in a very poor performance at the box office tells you most of what you need to know. This is a massive sci-fi epic about a future cop who hunts superpowered killer androids, and yet somehow it manages to be boring. Even Ridley Scott said he would have cut half an hour, and he was the executive producer! Though since Sir Ridley got the same credit on "Mindhorn", that doesn't necessarily mean he had anything to do with the actual making of the movie.

The hopelessly muddled plot is more concerned with mechanically ticking nod-to-the-previous-film boxes in trivial ways (the most ironic of which is a pointless cameo by a character from "Blade Runner" who is now in a retirement home) than either making any kind of sense or capturing the spirit of the first movie, which despite appearances wasn't really an effects-driven blockbuster at all. Like the original "Star Wars", one of its greatest strengths was the way the characters allowed the fascinatingly bizarre world they inhabited to unfold around them without constantly stopping to look at it because to them it was all quite ordinary. The true heart of the film was its hero's gradual realisation that the monsters he mercilessly "retired" had far more humanity than he'd been led to believe, while maybe he himself had less.

You'll see very little of that here. Ryan Gosling's nameless cliché knows all along he's a replicant, though it appears that, as in the Alien franchise, the over-emotional earlier models have been replaced by much more reliable and therefore much less interesting androids who behave themselves like good little toy soldiers should. Rutger Hauer's demonic yet ultimately sympathetic Roy Batty, the true heart and soul of the first movie, has no worthy successor. The dull protagonist mostly expresses what few emotions he has through a time-wasting relationship with his holographic AI "girlfriend", who is blatantly included purely because the tyranny of political correctness has made Strong Wimmin compulsory, so they can only get away with having a Girly Girl in the film by making her even less real than everybody else in a movie about androids. The ultra-violent female Roy Batty substitute makes even less impression than the boring hero. As for Harrison Ford, during his few scenes he looks like someone who didn't want to do it but was beaten into submission with a huge cheque. And Jared Leto's barking mad baddie is on screen for about five minutes, during which he does dreadful things for no reason at all in case we hadn't caught on that the guy who owns The Big Corporation is evil like he always is.

And so on. With characters this uninteresting, nearly every scene ends up being stolen by the scenery. Which it has to be said is magnificent, and that's why I gave the film more than one star. But without larger-than-life characters like Batty and Pris to inhabit this twisted wonderland, it never comes to life the way it should. This is a beautifully gift-wrapped box of nothing that doesn't feel as though it takes place in the same world as "Blade Runner", and doesn't make us care one tenth as much about its protagonists. Even the handful of questions we were left with way back in 1982 aren't fully answered. Instead, we get a whole new raft of unresolved plot-threads to be explored in an ongoing franchise which, since this movie lost $80m, presumably won't happen. Oh well, maybe "Blade Runner III" will get it right. If they stick to their current schedule, we'll find out in 2052.

A masterpiece - Blade Runner 2049 review by JD

The original Blade Runner is in my top 5 movies of all time, and so I was a little worried about watching the new one.

No need, it is superb.

The atmosphere and settings are as good if not better than the original, and the story picks up on the original, 30 years later.

Not sure about Ryan Gosling, but as soon as Harrison Ford arrives he steels the movie.

I look forward to watching it again, and again.