Review

Stupendously good. Absolutely gorgeous. A better movie than Blade Runner, even if Blade Runner is a better film. One of my biggest problems with Blade Runner is that we're trying to cover a lot of ground. And even in the director's super special awesome edition, it feels like we're rushing like crazy to get to the end once we've tracked down the first replicant we're after. Blade Runner 2049 meanwhile had all the room to breathe it needed, and I'm so glad.

I was a little worried going into this movie. I had only seen the first Blade Runner recently so I wasn't nostalgic for it like others would have been. I was so worried we were going to have a cavalcade of mediocrity calling back to the original like so many other shitty Hollywood sequels. Movies seemingly crafted with the express purpose of pleasing original fans, and in so doing completely alienating them with a wholesale lack of understanding of what made the original good. That does not happen here. You could totally have done some minor rewrites and removed Deckard and Rachel from the film, if you really wanted. It wouldn't have affected things much.

One part I didn't totally jive with was the whole replicant resistance plot point. That felt underbaked to me. It felt a bit like it was either some holdover from an earlier draft or some sort of studio rewrite. (Some vain desire to create an easy path toward another sequel that's bigger and more explosive than ever? That thing Blade Runner is totally about...) It gets brought up without much fanfare and then quickly disappears. But at least the movie has the good sense to not be about the resistance thing. It's about K/Joe and to a lesser extent, the memory creator. And it's all the better for that.