BLADE RUNNER 2049 REVIEW MOVIE
BLADE RUNNER 2049 REVIEW ANDROID

In that sense the film is remarkably similar to ' Drive,' another movie that sees Gosling driving around a sterile city in a cool jacket and that alternates between troubled stillness and brutal violence. In the slower moments, your enjoyment may depend on your capacity for gazing at Gosling frowning under neon light. The slow-burning pace never exactly drags, but it does meander at times. Still, the first film was dazzling but austere, and the sequel is at least consistent with its source. There are moments when you realize you're watching a robot, his drone sidekick and his hologram girlfriend and wondering why you should care. That freedom - give or take a bit of racist abuse from snarling humans - undermines the emotional stakes, especially as stars including Jared Leto and Sylvia Hoeks play their roles with dead-eyed humorlessness.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 REVIEW ANDROID

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In the world of the sequel, replicants freely wander the Earth with no worries about aging or death. In the first film you couldn't help but sympathize just a little with the replicants even though they were killers, because they were raging against the limitations cruelly imposed on them by their capricious creators. By contrast the sequel makes clear from the start which of the major characters are replicants, and the experience suffers for that. The original began with a human whom we began to slowly doubt, giving rise to the age-old debate about whether Deckard was an android. Like the original 'Blade Runner,' the sequel has its flaws. Hans Zimmer composed the score with Benjamin Wallfisch, and as with Zimmer's pulse-racing abstract score for ' Dunkirk,' sound draws you into the moment. Extrapolating from Vangelis' hugely influential sweeping synth dreamscapes heard in the first film, the sequel's score is a pulsing, pummeling, discordant assault, filled with the deafening noise of steel and silicon grinding against the future. The austere, jaw-dropping visuals mesh with a similar score.

'Blade Runner 2049' conjures a hallucinatory miasma of striking imagery, matched with an intense machinelike score. The story explodes gumshoe noir tropes and plunges into allegory. It harks back to the original film in its esthetic and concerns, while adding modern preoccupations like genetically modified food, climate change and the human cost of the technology we carry in our pockets. It asks questions about humanity, souls, memories, birth and death, offering only hallucinatory hints, literary allusions and tantalizing enigmas in response. Like the first film, 'Blade Runner 2049' is a visual marvel, a succession of meticulously composed signs and symbols and dazzling trompe l'oeil imagery. The stage is set for K, played by Ryan Gosling, to hunt Deckard, played with weary authority by Harrison Ford. Investigating his latest case, K uncovers a potentially world-changing conspiracy that points in the direction of his predecessor: the Blade Runner called Rick Deckard.

Blade runner 2049 review