Creative Differences Episode 207 | Blonde, Entergalactic, Hocus Pocus 2, and Reservation Dogs

FOUR reviews in this one. And the best thing we reviewed is Entergalactic. Go watch that.

Creative Differences Episode 156: West Side Story, Across the Spider-Verse, and Our New Slang Term

I didn’t watch West Side Story, but we talk about the Across the Spider-Verse trailer in this episode, so that was cool.

Movie Review: Blade Runner 2049

I wasn’t particularly excited for this movie, as I wasn’t a fan of the first one. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t do much for me. And of course, I heard that this one was almost three hours so that didn’t make me want to see it very much. But hey, I love movies, and I had friends that wanted to see it. So boom, I saw it. I gotta say, though, I actually liked this one.

So y’all know the general story of Blade Runner, I’m guessing. Blade Runners are inexplicably titled cops who hunt down androids called “replicants” and “retire” them. The replicants were used for slavery and then they became rebellious (as you do) and people had to get the Blade Runners to hunt them down. They call it “retirement” instead of execution, because for some reason they’re fine with designing slaves that look exactly like humans, but they aren’t fine with saying they’re killing them. So yeah, that’s the premise of the first one. 30 years later, there are new replicants who are “programmed to obey” and these ones don’t need to be hunted down. I don’t know why the original slave bots weren’t programmed to obey, but hey, storytelling.

So Ryan Gosling plays K, aka Joe, a replicant Blade Runner. Which probably means he’s looked at like all those self hating black cops from movies that take place in 90s Los Angeles. K isn’t the most interesting character out there, but he’s supposed to be that way. Gosling plays him well, though. He’s nice and stoic when he needs to be, and on the rare occasion that he flies off the handle, he pulls it off nicely.

Ana De Armas plays Joi, K’s delightful hologram girlfriend (or wife?). She’s sweet, beautiful, and super supportive. Everything you need. Except tangible. And that leads to what is one of the weirdest/funniest sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie. I’m not gonna try to explain it, but it wasn’t supposed to be funny I’m pretty sure. Ana is a treasure, though, and I want to see her in more movies.

Jared Leto was being a weirdo as always. And to be honest his character didn’t seem all that necessary. He didn’t do much, which made me wonder if Leto did his whole method acting thing just for a few scenes of weirdness. He also has an assistant named Luv who played a larger role in the movie, and I didn’t like her either. It felt like halfway through the movie, they decided to just make her character a whole new one.

Robin Wright is in the movie, giving a very convincing performance as the generic police lieutenant who is hard on the protagonist when the situation calls for it, but is generally nice to them. Blade Runner 2049 has its fair share of tropes and her character is one of them.

Oh yeah, Harrison Ford is in it, too. I almost forgot to mention him because by the time he showed up in the movie I had almost forgotten he was in it. He reprises his role as Deckard, who has become a crotchety old man who is still good at what he does, just like Harrison Ford.

This one, like the original, is pretty slow. Not painfully slow, though. So there’s an improvement. At a runtime of two hours and all the minutes, it does often feel like it’s being drawn out for no reason, but there’s at least enough that it made me want to stay awake. But yeah, at times it feels like it’s just patting the original on the back because if they cut out a lot of the interchangeable establishing shots it might be shorter.

That’s not to say it wasn’t good looking, though. The movie is very good visually. I wasn’t blown away like everyone else seems to be, but I did appreciate the visuals. They’re on point. But like I said, there’s only so many shots I can take of statues, outdated product placement, and a desolate Los Angeles.

Also, I want to talk about those annoying sounds. I wouldn’t call it a score, because it’s often just loud noises and synth sounds. I know they want to call back to the original because it was very groundbreaking three decades ago. But now it’s 2017, and I don’t need a loud Inception noise whenever Ryan Gosling stares off into the distance. By the end of the movie those sounds were just making me mad.

All in all I’d say this movie is better than the first for me. It’s not as slow, it looks better, and the characters are more interesting. The Blade Runners still don’t use blades, which bothers me, but oh well. Guns are more efficient. But yeah, the movie is too long and Hans Zimmer was working my nerves.

tl;dr: This movie is too long and a bit slow, but it’s visually great and interesting enough that I didn’t tune out after two and half hours.

Rating: 7 out of 10