Which makes the perfect “neutered” Replicant. I guess.
Here’s my take on the actors
Ryan Gosling - No complaints. Not accolades, either though.
Dave Bautista - Good casting. Between 2049 and the 2048 short. Good call.
Robin Wright - Gotta love Princess Buttercup.
Ana de Armas - One of my favorite bits. I was sad at her inevitable demise
Sylvia Hoeks - What? Do all Blade Runner villians need a Dutch actor? Meh.
Edward James Olmos - Stand Up performance. (While sitting down)
Jared Leto - He could be edited out and not change the story substantially.
Fine. Okay. I guess I like the Blade Runner ambiance. Just give me a series with nothing but Vangelis inspired sound track over long pans over the major cyber-punked cities of the future and I’ll probably come away happy.
But even with the “Hey Girl,” memes I’ve never gotten the appeal; he’s a basic, milquetoast White dude… (which makes the text all that much funnier, because it’s an ironically perfect description of him.)
That’s largely how I felt about the original. The ambience was fantastic but the acting was terrible - so poor that not even Rutger Hauer could save it.
Finally seeing the new one tonight. Dutifully avoiding all reviews and spoilers.
The original blew me away as a teen the same way Star Wars blew me away at age 5, and is still one of my all-time favorite films. I don’t expect the new one to live up to that. But if I can spend a few hours exploring that universe with beautiful photography and music then I’ll consider my money well spent.
saw Blade Runner over the weekend. love, love, LOVED IT. all of it. it’s gorgeous… i liked the story, the characters, all of it. 2hrs 44mins passed by easily for me. BUT, i’m so sick to death of hearing people (1) hating on Jared Leto just because they hate him… his character was a fine update/successor to the Tyrell character to me. he’s got the same god complex, and the same obsession; and (2) i don’t get why people hate Gosling so much. he was also really perfect to me… he’s easy on the eyes, he DEFINITELY acted the hell out of his role, and he and Ford played well off each other.
my ONLY quibble with the movie was that the umbrellas didn’t have light-up poles, haha – but maybe that was a fashion in the earlier movie that had since gone OUT of fashion by 2049.
I noticed a couple during one scene in rainy LA, just before K goes to the bar – a few people had umbrellas, some with light-up tops, one or two with illuminated poles. I was happy to see that little nod.
That was something that struck me – how this was very much treated as its own film, with some small references to the original, but was in no way a retread based just on nostalgia. It would’ve been very easy for a lesser director to make a checklist of things to make fans smile – Vangelis music, a big geisha eating a cherry, the off-world colony blimp-thing, “he say you Brade Runner”, a few Voight-Kampf tests, some Ink Spots jazz music, and cameos from Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer – but Denis Villeneuve really went his own direction, and I appreciate that.
I thought Jared Leto did a fine job and had no problem with Ryan Gosling, especially when teamed up with Harrison Ford.
yeah, good points. i really did love that it felt like the next part in a continuum, not a retread. i just thought it was amusing that the only thing i could find fault with was the light-up umbrellas. it could easily be explained away as a fashion that went out of style, but then again, clear raincoats seemed to have stayed around, so… shrug
If you’ve seen it now, what are your thoughts about the lack of people of color (Edward James Olmos’ cameo barely counts) and how all the nudity focuses only on women, with the brief exception of the replicant cadavers in the very beginning?
The lack of people of color definitely struck me as weird while I was watching it, especially after having seen the three short films leading up to it, all of which prominently cast people of various ethnicities. The only Black person I remember seeing was the child slaver, which wasn’t the best er, representation.. That was definitely a strange choice to have such a caucasian cast in what would be a hugely multi-ethnic city.
I wasn’t as bothered about the nudity, since (unless I’m forgetting) the only nudity I saw was of the various versions of Joi, the Wallace “pleasure model”, and it was so brief (and transparent, and virtual) that it wasn’t a big focus of the film. Although there was that strange mesa of huge crumbling naked lady statues.
there were plenty of people of color in the insurrection replicants, if i recall. none of the nudity really registered with me, either, since it was all either so clinical or in the form of advertising, so meh.
