Bladerunner 2049

I managed to see the new Bladerunner film in the cinema last night and I liked it.  Overall, it was more coherent than the first film, which has now been released in about 7 different versions.  The new film is a sequel and continues the story of the original in an interesting way.

Bladerunner was visually striking and the successor is too.  The colour scheme has changed but it still has the desolate feel of a failed future.  Technology appears to have developed consistently in the 30 years from the first film but everything is still grim.

Bladerunner left us asking if Dekkard (Harrison Ford) was a replicant?  A re-edited version of the film showed us Dekkard being presented with an origami horse, an animal from his dream, strongly suggesting that he was an android.  There is still some debate about this and the new film does nothing to give us a definitive answer.

The main character in this film is a replicant and much of the film is about the search for identity.  Ryan Gosling tries to find out who he is, while trying to solve a mystery or a miracle.  There is no Roy Batty style nemesis in this story.

The film takes it's time.  It stops to think and it plods.  Overall it lasts about 2 hours and 40 minutes but I think it needs that time to breathe, to capture the inhumanity of the replicants.  Some of the behaviour we see is very strange and some is very human.

A good film.