Blade Runner 2049

I always have slight reservations with the original "Blade Runner". I've still never seen the original cut, just Ridley Scott's Directors Cut and Final Cut, but still, it feels a little chilly, a film that's more production design than plot and with a protagonist at the centre who was, to that point, Harrison Ford's least compelling performance (he has, of course, got significantly duller since). But I've increasingly grown attached to Rutger Hauer's flamboyant performance and have softened towards the film enough to recognise what other people see in it.

The follow up, some thirty-odd years later, is a bit of an odd duck - very reliant on the original for the aesthetic while, of course, using everything that 30 years of cinema developments has applied since - including references to companies which have gone bust in the last 30 years, simply because they were featured prominently in the original. Also while it's set up with a McGuffin from the original film, the main person carried over from the original (Harrison Ford) is deliberately offscreen for most of the film. The story goes a bit deeper into the questions of artificial life raised by the first - about what they may want, how they go about their existence, and about how that may shape society. Gosling is a more central presence than Ford was in the first one, and while the plot ends up being slightly a red-herring that doesn't relate to him as much as he thinks it might, he's far more clearly the set of eyes we're following the narrative through. His relationship with an artificial intelligence is particularly intense and heartbreaking (including an emotional and erotic love-scene that combines complex visuals with complex emotional subtexts). There are gorgeous setpieces, particularly a shoot-out in Las Vegas.

Still, this isn't quite a winner for me either - in trying to tell a story that is both personal and about the wider futuristic world, this trips over its feet a little too much. The wider stakes are never really particularly well conveyed, and their inclusion distracts. There is also a languid pace which is going to be unappealing to people who aren't willing to look at a lot of lovely visuals for two and a half hours.

So this is a "liked but did not love" film for me.