by Roger on Tue 1st May 2018 DVD proj @ Home

Review of "Blade Runner 2049"

Full review

Maybe its because I'm 35 years older (or 45 years since I was into Philip K Dick stories) but this is a trivial gratuitous fresh take on the classic. Perhaps if I was 35 years younger it would seem as cool as the original Blade Runner did - but I doubt it as it was still pretty cool when I last saw it about 5 years ago. This one replaces the depth of the original's mise-en-scene with a surface gloss that conveys nothing except its own cleverness. It replaces the characterisations with cardboard cyphers. It replaces the ambiguity with a teenage boy's fantasies of sex and power. If you want to see how modern techniques could be used to good effect in this type of future-present story then check out the New Seoul sequences in Cloud Atlas. If you happen to be a repressed teenage boy you might find this ok, otherwise avoid it.