Blade Runner 2049

[zaphod]

mind boggling, cortex-wobbling, cranio-facial splintering

[fumi]

Wired Magazine also seem to have got caught up in the heat of the moment. I wonder what normal folk will make of it? People who actually pay to see it.

 

https://www.wired.com/story/blade-runner-2049-review

[fumi]

Empire Magazine. 5 Stars too. They don't think much of Jared Leto though.

 

http://www.empireonline.com/movies/blade-runner-2049/review/

[fumi]

Have we reached peak Hans Zimmer?

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/sep/18/hans-zimmer-blade-runner-2049-film-composer

[olo]

It's got a 97% Rotten Tomatoes cum bath score. Perhaps...its...good.

[Joyrex]

i09's review is up - good movie, too long, Leto sucks (but plays a very minor role).

 

I've decided to go balls-out and see it in IMAX next Friday.

[olo]

  People will be talking about the three-way inter-dimensional sex scene. The sound mix is very detailed and very, very loud — the metallic groans make your eardrums quiver.

 

Now we're talking.

[WeAreOceans]

 

  People will be talking about the three-way inter-dimensional sex scene. The sound mix is very detailed and very, very loud — the metallic groans make your eardrums quiver.

 

Now we're talking.

 

 

*unzips*

[auxien]

 

 

Most of the secrets of this film haven’t even been hinted at in the trailers and ads thus far, and that’s how I’m going to keep this initial review. A movie should have the opportunity to reveal its secrets on its own terms — preferably in the theater — so I won’t be going into any plot details beyond what’s been mentioned in the trailers and the opening title card of the film. After the film comes out, we’ll dive in with more spoiler-heavy pieces, but if you want to read something that won’t impact your theatrical experience, this is the review for you.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16380562/blade-runner-2049-movie-review-harrison-ford-ryan-gosling-denis-villeneuve

[fumi]

I really don't know what to believe with all these gushing reviews. Time after time, I've seen this happen only for a week or so to pass, things calm down a bit and folks are like, "Yeah, it's good. But...."

[auxien]

Most I've read haven't been gushing. They've had moments of gushing, but they've all pointed out some serious flaws.

[o00o]

Have we reached peak Hans Zimmer?

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/sep/18/hans-zimmer-blade-runner-2049-film-composer

Did see him live which was really impressive. He recently became pretty repetitive and Dunkirk was the first movie where his soundtrack disturbed the experience of the movie itself.

 

Did anyone see Blade Runner yet? I really hope Zimmer did not hold on his trademark default sounds. That would really hurt the movie

[o00o]

 

He should really switch genres and make something completely different like comedy or something where he could develop new ideas without repeating the overdramatic style once again. It sounds like every director wants him to do a more extreme version of what he has already done.

[pyramidpanes]

Peter Bradshaw, Guardian Newspaper Review (5 Stars)

 

 

With this visually staggering film, director Denis Villeneuve brings us to a kind of Ozymandias moment. It just has to be experienced on the biggest screen possible. Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic.

 

This is the sequel to the 1982 sci-fi classic, directed by Ridley Scott and based on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, starring Harrison Ford as a “blade runner”, a futureworld cop whose job is to track down and kill disobedient almost-human androids known as replicants. The 2017 follow-up simply couldn’t be any more of a triumph: a stunning enlargement and improvement.

 

Its mind-boggling, cortex-wobbling, craniofacial-splintering images are there to trigger awe or even a kind of ecstatic despair at the idea of a post-human future, and what it means to imagine the wreck of our current form of homo sapiens. Evolution has not finished yet, any more than it was finished 100,000 years ago. As so often in literature and cinema, we are reminded that science fiction is there to tackle big ideas, and makes realist genres look flimsy and parochial. This film delivers pure hallucinatory craziness that leaves you hyperventilating.

 

Blade Runner 2049 is co-scripted by the original screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, and riffs on the first film. There are poignant theme-variations on memory and crying in the rain and a cityscape full of signs in different languages (Russian, Japanese, Hindi, Korean), ghostly VR advertising avatars and flashing corporate logos, playfully including the obsolete PanAm.

 

It alludes to films the first Blade Runner helped inspire, such as Cameron’s The Terminator, Spielberg’s AI Artificial Intelligence, Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E and Spike Jonze’s Her. The references reach further back also, to the Kubrickian hotel-bar and spaceship, and to the desolate final moments of Planet of the Apes. You could call that ancestor-worship, were it not that the franchise already deserves its own ancestor status. In fact, the sequel slightly de-emphasises the first film’s intimate, downbeat noir qualities in favour of something more gigantic and monolithic, preserving Ridley Scott’s massively controlled andante tempo. Yet there is something so sinuous and manoeuvrable about the drama, and its CGI rendering is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

 

The setting is Los Angeles, 30 years on from the first film’s 2019 setting. The corporation that once manufactured the replicants, whose spartacist uprising was the original theme, has been bought out by an agribusiness empire owned by one Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), a grotesque figure brooding on how to create replicant-workers on a scale sufficient for his imperial plans. Ryan Gosling plays LAPD officer K, a limited-lifespan replicant whose task is to track down and destroy those first-gen models who can live as long as humans, and are still illegally hiding out. K has a gorgeous virtual-reality live-in girlfriend, quibblingly named Joi (Ana De Armas), with whom he believes himself to be in love, though he understands that both she and he are constructed artefacts.

 

After making a sensational discovery, K embarks on a dangerous mission, and both his LAPD boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) and Wallace himself are very interested in what he might discover. Wallace despatches his deadpan assistant, named Luv and superbly played by Sylvia Hoeks, with an utterly unnerving habit of crying when her face appears to show no human emotion at all. It is all leading to a mysterious, Freudian encounter with Rick Deckard himself, the outsider cop from the first film, played with haggard misanthropy by Harrison Ford.

 

The sheer electric strangeness of everything that happens is what registers. Every time K finishes a mission, he is taken to an interrogation module to be … what? Debriefed? Decompressed? Deconstructed? He is subjected to a fierce kind of call-and-response dialogue in which he has to respond to key words such as “cells” to see if his humanoid/android identity balance is out of whack. It is utterly bizarre, and yet entirely compelling, and persuasively normal in this alienated universe. K’s aerial journeys in his battered, government-issue squadcar-miniplane are similarly enthralling, and a scene in which he is brought down over a gigantic rubbish dump in San Diego by a low-tech harpoon gun is one of the most exciting action-movie scenes imaginable.

 

The production design by Dennis Gasner and cinematography by Roger Deakins are both delectable, and the largely electronic musical score by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer provides a kind of aural neon: gaunt, harsh, angular, like the noise of machinery. It’s an incredible lucid dream. Weirdly, I had forgotten about one of the little-discussed pleasures of the big screen: the simple effect of dialogue, echoing in a movie theatre. This film’s scale is extraordinary. It places the acid tab of cinema-pleasure on your tongue.

 

 

 

Mmm. I'm highly suspicious of someone gushing over a film so completely. Lots of these early reviews are just press/PR paid for by film studios. In addition, this reviewer is usually quite balanced in his opinion so why he has gone so overboard with this is mystifying.

 

 

nah peter bradshaw is a good critic he hits the nail on the head a lot of the time. there used to be a weekly show called the guardian film show which sadly stopped but he was great on that he also quite readily tears films apart also  

[Auditor]

I'm just a little suspicious that most reviews are telling us that we "MUST SEE IT IN IMAX!"

 

Paid-for upselling?

[manmower]

That's about par for the course whenever any movie is being shown in IMAX, I don't think journos and cinephile types need much encouragement to recommend it.

Edited September 29, 2017 by manmower

[auxien]

I'm just a little suspicious that most reviews are telling us that we "MUST SEE IT IN IMAX!"

 

Paid-for upselling?

One of the most well-respected cinematographers currently working, and a director known for striking visuals, doing a sequel to a movie that is often a reference point for mood and atmosphere in film which the director and all know they're being compared to...I think if the reviewers are saying it looks fucking great (all the reviews I've seen have said this), it probably looks pretty fucking great.

[Soloman Tump]

Ticket purchased.

[Auditor]

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm excited as fuck and thrilled that the reviews are this positive. Not letting myself get too hyped though, ya know: "prepare for the worst"

 

an im damned sure seeing it in imax

Edited September 29, 2017 by Auditor

[fumi]

It's even on the front page of the Guardian tomorrow. 

 

Either this is a good film or after a very poor year for Hollywood (sales-wise), studios are paying for this to be a hit.

 

 

Peter Bradshaw, Guardian Newspaper Review (5 Stars)

 

 

With this visually staggering film, director Denis Villeneuve brings us to a kind of Ozymandias moment. It just has to be experienced on the biggest screen possible. Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic.

 

This is the sequel to the 1982 sci-fi classic, directed by Ridley Scott and based on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, starring Harrison Ford as a “blade runner”, a futureworld cop whose job is to track down and kill disobedient almost-human androids known as replicants. The 2017 follow-up simply couldn’t be any more of a triumph: a stunning enlargement and improvement.

 

Its mind-boggling, cortex-wobbling, craniofacial-splintering images are there to trigger awe or even a kind of ecstatic despair at the idea of a post-human future, and what it means to imagine the wreck of our current form of homo sapiens. Evolution has not finished yet, any more than it was finished 100,000 years ago. As so often in literature and cinema, we are reminded that science fiction is there to tackle big ideas, and makes realist genres look flimsy and parochial. This film delivers pure hallucinatory craziness that leaves you hyperventilating.

 

Blade Runner 2049 is co-scripted by the original screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, and riffs on the first film. There are poignant theme-variations on memory and crying in the rain and a cityscape full of signs in different languages (Russian, Japanese, Hindi, Korean), ghostly VR advertising avatars and flashing corporate logos, playfully including the obsolete PanAm.

 

It alludes to films the first Blade Runner helped inspire, such as Cameron’s The Terminator, Spielberg’s AI Artificial Intelligence, Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E and Spike Jonze’s Her. The references reach further back also, to the Kubrickian hotel-bar and spaceship, and to the desolate final moments of Planet of the Apes. You could call that ancestor-worship, were it not that the franchise already deserves its own ancestor status. In fact, the sequel slightly de-emphasises the first film’s intimate, downbeat noir qualities in favour of something more gigantic and monolithic, preserving Ridley Scott’s massively controlled andante tempo. Yet there is something so sinuous and manoeuvrable about the drama, and its CGI rendering is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

 

The setting is Los Angeles, 30 years on from the first film’s 2019 setting. The corporation that once manufactured the replicants, whose spartacist uprising was the original theme, has been bought out by an agribusiness empire owned by one Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), a grotesque figure brooding on how to create replicant-workers on a scale sufficient for his imperial plans. Ryan Gosling plays LAPD officer K, a limited-lifespan replicant whose task is to track down and destroy those first-gen models who can live as long as humans, and are still illegally hiding out. K has a gorgeous virtual-reality live-in girlfriend, quibblingly named Joi (Ana De Armas), with whom he believes himself to be in love, though he understands that both she and he are constructed artefacts.

 

After making a sensational discovery, K embarks on a dangerous mission, and both his LAPD boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) and Wallace himself are very interested in what he might discover. Wallace despatches his deadpan assistant, named Luv and superbly played by Sylvia Hoeks, with an utterly unnerving habit of crying when her face appears to show no human emotion at all. It is all leading to a mysterious, Freudian encounter with Rick Deckard himself, the outsider cop from the first film, played with haggard misanthropy by Harrison Ford.

 

The sheer electric strangeness of everything that happens is what registers. Every time K finishes a mission, he is taken to an interrogation module to be … what? Debriefed? Decompressed? Deconstructed? He is subjected to a fierce kind of call-and-response dialogue in which he has to respond to key words such as “cells” to see if his humanoid/android identity balance is out of whack. It is utterly bizarre, and yet entirely compelling, and persuasively normal in this alienated universe. K’s aerial journeys in his battered, government-issue squadcar-miniplane are similarly enthralling, and a scene in which he is brought down over a gigantic rubbish dump in San Diego by a low-tech harpoon gun is one of the most exciting action-movie scenes imaginable.

 

The production design by Dennis Gasner and cinematography by Roger Deakins are both delectable, and the largely electronic musical score by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer provides a kind of aural neon: gaunt, harsh, angular, like the noise of machinery. It’s an incredible lucid dream. Weirdly, I had forgotten about one of the little-discussed pleasures of the big screen: the simple effect of dialogue, echoing in a movie theatre. This film’s scale is extraordinary. It places the acid tab of cinema-pleasure on your tongue.

 

 

 

Mmm. I'm highly suspicious of someone gushing over a film so completely. Lots of these early reviews are just press/PR paid for by film studios. In addition, this reviewer is usually quite balanced in his opinion so why he has gone so overboard with this is mystifying.

 

 

nah peter bradshaw is a good critic he hits the nail on the head a lot of the time. there used to be a weekly show called the guardian film show which sadly stopped but he was great on that he also quite readily tears films apart also  

 

 

 

I'm waiting for mark Kermode to weigh in. I'm sure he's already seen it. If it gets the thumbs-up from him then I'll probably go see it.

[Lada Laika]

B+ from A.A. Dowd, who I trust more than most. Maybe I will see this after all.

 

2 hour 44 minute running time though. Woof.

[Schlitze]

Alien Covenant thread had a guy who posted 3 times per page that he had a ticket to see it but still hadn't seen it yet

He just wanted to let people know he was still relevant to the thread that had become part of him

Then when he saw it when it came out on DVD he agreed with the generic opinions of the hipster douches he wanted to bond with. He even namedropped some critics, colour grading technicians and composers. The result was an embarrassment. But he felt part of something and he felt warm and gooey wooey. Then reality grabbed him by the fucking bollocks and realised he was less than nothing.

[fumi]

But I have hopes to be entertained more than Alien:Cov

I think you can be confident in that.

[goDel]

Autism hour!? What?!

[Echolalia]

Alien Covenant thread had a guy who posted 3 times per page that he had a ticket to see it but still hadn't seen it yet

He just wanted to let people know he was still relevant to the thread that had become part of him

Then when he saw it when it came out on DVD he agreed with the generic opinions of the hipster douches he wanted to bond with. He even namedropped some critics, colour grading technicians and composers. The result was an embarrassment. But he felt part of something and he felt warm and gooey wooey. Then reality grabbed him by the fucking bollocks and realised he was less than nothing.

Zizek?