You can't talk about Blade Runner 2049 without spoiling it. Thus:
Spoiler Waring!
I don't know what to think about BR2049. There are things to like about it, and things not to like about it.
Is it a good looking film? Yes. Is it well acted? The acting is OK. Is the story good? I don't know. Is the sound and music good? No. Plot? Meh. Themes? Interesting, but it's clearly pushing certain narratives/agendas over others.
The cinematography is great. Everything is shot well, and everything looks good. It doesn't have the same feeling as the original though. This is far lighter, where the original is far darker. Los Angeles has also been updated in the past 30 years and there are no longer fire belching towers or giant pyramids. We also get more of the world outside of LA - it's all pretty dismal, this being a dystopian sci-fi and all.
The actors are all fine. No one is especially outstanding. Gosling plays K, a replicant blade runner. The way Gosling portrays K is very similar to his character from Drive, the only difference is that K has more dialogue and emotions. This wasn't Leto's best performance, it was serviceable. Ford is old and out of place in this film. That's weird to say, but he really does stand out from the rest of the cast and characters. De Armas is cute, and her performance was OK. I don't know if I liked her acting or if I just find her attractive. The rest of the cast were fine.
The story focuses around K. K is a blade runner. He's a replicant. He hunts other replicants for LAPD. Everyone knows he's a replicant, and many humans resent him for it. This answers the BIGGEST question from the first movie: was Deckard a replicant? Yes. Yes he was, and it appears that since Deckard, all blade runners have been and are now replicants. For whatever reason, this doesn't feel like the great revelation it should've felt like, probably because it's answered too casually and out of hand.
K kills Sapper Morton (Bautista), an old replicant, which leads to him finding a skeleton. The skeleton was Rachel from the original movie. The bones indicate that Rachel had a baby - which should be impossible for replicants. This is considered a "miracle" and is an allusion to the immaculate conception - more on themes later.
K hunts the child, and ends up believing he was the child he's hunting - exploring the idea of false vs real memories from the previous movie. The big bad Wallace Corporation wants the kid, or Deckard, or both, in order to create more sexually reproductive capable replicants - Wallace (Leto), for all of his supposed intelligence can't figure it out. K ends up running away, and finds Deckard in Las Vegas. They fight, then make up, then the Wallace Corporation finds them and kidnaps Deckard.
K is kidnapped by replicant revolutionaries, told he's not the child he's been looking for, and sent to go kill Deckard. K finds Deckard, helps him fake his death, and then takes him to his daughter. Deckard meets his daughter. K dies. The end.
The film takes 3 hours to tell this story, and it's boring, about as boring as I wrote it. There are numerous, long, establishing shots to remind you how well the movie looks and help build the world, but it doesn't help. As much as I enjoyed the movie while I watched it, I wish it had hurried up and got to where it wanted to go. At least one couple walked out of the movie.
I stated this in my Valerian review, science fiction is an excellent place to explore ideas. Some of the ideas present in BR2049 are interesting, but none of them particularly thought provoking. One interesting ideas is K and his relationship to Joi (de Armas). Joi is a hologram and K's wife. She is stuck in his apartment until he gets some sort of transmitter stick. It's both sad, and endearing seeing these two artificial beings together. It also hits terribly close to home now that sex bots are real.
Sex is a theme in this film. There are hints of BDSM in the relationship between K and his boss, whom he calls Madam. There are prostitutes, openly prostituting themselves on the streets - of course they're replicants. There's a whore-house with glass walls in which an orgy is happening (visible to the public and right on the street), and it's just obscured enough not to be considered porn. There is a nude advertisement for Joi, and it turns and offers the world a clear view of her genitalia. There are several naked replicants on display in Wallace Corporation - although these are presented more like cadavers for scientific study then as porn.
The hedonism and decadence on display hits close to home and reminds me of the open air orgies that are gay pride parades and BDSM parades. It's gross, but then again, the humans in BR2049 are doomed, so what's the point of maintaining human decency?
Unsurprisingly, the ideas of Cultural Marxism's class warfare and feminism sneak their ways into the film. Cultural Marxism is presented through the replicant revolutionaries who want to start a war between them and humans and between the replicans and Wallace Corporation. Feminism is there in the form of a woman leading the LAPD, a "bad-ass" replicant secretary that knows kung-fu, and a replicant woman that was born to two replicants (an allusion to the immaculate conception, changing the Jesus archetype to a female).
There's also the trope of the evil robot creator that sees himself as a god because he makes robots. I'm sick and tired of this blasphemous trope. I get it, it's a quick and easy short cut to show how arrogant someone is, but it's old. It's funny, Hollywood hates Christianity, yet can't stop alluding to it.
Unfortunately, none of these ideas, or the story really seem to matter - the humans are all going to die anyway - that's what the movie leads us to believe. Earth is fucked (allusion to climate change/nuclear war throughout the film), and humans are being replaced by replicants (which is analogous to Europe, Europeans and the immigration crisis). Since replicants can have babies now, it's only a matter of time before humanity goes extinct.
I think this is why I don't like the movie. Humanity is fucked, the earth is fucked. Replicants are the future. There is no hope for humanity in the Blade Runner world.
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