Phone Notes: Blade Runner 2049

After many months of being sidetracked by other things I've finally gone through my notes on my phone which are a collection of thoughts on the films I've seen. Most of them were written months ago and since a few thoughts have changed and for the purposes of sharing them, I've formatted them into "reviews". The first is:

BLADE RUNNER 2049

Ana de Armas and Ryan Gosling got distracted by three large billboards outside of  Ebbing, Missouri, in 2049!

Blade Runner 2049 was a film that was unavoidable and necessary to see in cinemas, the original films status as a cult staple of sci-fi filmography precedes it. The visuals, the production design (thanks Weta) and the acting are all incredibly detailed, well realized and utilized to convey a stylish film much in the same vein as Tron Legacy, which to some might seem like a strange and blasphemous connection. The old term 'style over substance' is applicable here, because 90% of what makes the film for me are the visuals and settings which seem to elevate the plot and characters beyond very simple foundations. It’s crazy to think audiences were swept away by James Cameron’s Avatar, specifically the paradise planet of Pandora, which was essentially just a huge jungle, and yet not have the same response to the vast, detailed cityscapes here which hit harder and closer to home with how real and depressing they are.

Agent K can't find MIB Headquarters in this fog.

Sidetracked by presumably more important things is Jared Leto's revolution of androids which never comes to fruition in this film. The slower, more methodical pace of the film might be to blame for that, because the 'ticking clock' element that takes us to the end of the film amounts to a short showdown in a sinking car which leaves Leto's involvement to sink into the depths with the car. Where's the revolution, where's the grand overarching subplot?

Jared Leto is Future Jesus.

I guess I was in a bit of an apathetic mood by the end of the film because 'K's (Ryan Gosling) character goes through an arc that isn’t satisfying at the conclusion. The revelations he (and we as an audience) are presented with I felt were underwhelming because not enough time had been devoted to his character to feel like anything was worth a damn, except for perhaps his relationship with the holgram A.I. (Ana de Armas) another riff on the original film and of Tron Legacy's Quorra. Perhaps it might be Harrison Ford’s character 'Deckard' whose character definitely had more resonance and purpose.

The next generation of advertisements, no more pop-ups, just giant holograms that have motion awareness...

The score is wallpaper, nice sounds for the dreary cityscapes, but it doesn’t have any emotional core to latch onto, the characters aren’t afforded musical identities that grow and change as they do. Although the music, like wallpaper, remains serviceable and perhaps not intended to be as important as the visuals alone, which should be praised and admired like a long episode of Planet Earth and narrated of course by Sir David Attenborough.

Buy it on Blu-ray and watch it on a large enough screen to soak in all the visuals, then watch something else that isn't so bleak and depressing.