Category: Blade Runner

Unpopular opinion: Blade Runner 2049 was ass.

Originally shared by Gregor Vuga

Unpopular opinion: Blade Runner 2049 was ass.

(spoiler space)

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•I felt it had approximately 0 fresh ideas, and it didn’t sell me on the ones that were there.

•It is beautifully shot and there are some really good scenes/environments (Villeneuve makes neat-looking movies and Roger Deakins is the god of DOPs).

•The casting of Ryan Gosling was… adequate and expected. It was a running joke since he was announced. Harrison Ford seemed to actually give half a shit, unlike some of his other reboot appearances. Leto is cartoonishly bad. Bautista is legitimately good. The rest were just eh.

•The whole (sub)plot between K/Joe and Joi had potential. Playing with themes of layers and degrees of artificiality and human-ness was not a terrible starting point but it wasn’t either new or well developed and the supposed emotional payoff fell completely flat for me. I found it humorous rather than tragic.

•Against my best intentions I started compiling a mental list of plotholes, illogical character motives and pacing misfires about 30 minutes in, but gave up about 2 hours in because there were too many.

•Speaking of which, the movie is almost an hour longer than the original BR and absolutely does not justify it. It manages to do less with more real estate. It feels bigger but also emptier.

•The script is thick on exposition and ham-fisted explanations. It lacks any kind of subtlety. It’s full of dialogue like “you must do x because of y”. I literally rolled my eyes at the screen at one point.

•The callbacks and reused footage/audio is kept mercifully sparse but it still felt kinda tacky and basically just reminded me how much more charming the old movie was.

•What should have been the main narrative thrust, the detective/investigation story (Blade Runner worked so well because among other things it was also an effective noir movie) proceeds with stops and starts with no feeling of urgency or genuine mystery. It misses several opportunities for tight plotting to veer off into scenes that undermine its pacing.

•There is a brief setup of some serious stakes that basically gets dropped so the final emotional payoff of the movie doesn’t have anything to do with those stakes but a relationship that the movie didn’t make me feel invested in.

tl;dr: Pretty, too long with awful pacing, hammy dialogue, it doesn’t sell its themes and ideas.

DATE: SAN FRANCISCO, 2017

DATE: SAN FRANCISCO, 2017

Last month, the robot approached Taylor while she walked her dog near the SPCA campus. Her dog started lunging and barking, she said, and Taylor yelled for the robot to stop. It finally came to a halt about 10 feet away, she said.

The encounter struck Taylor as an “unbelievable” coincidence since she had been working with pedestrian advocacy group Walk San Francisco in asking the city to limit sidewalk delivery robots…

Having humans replace the robot’s 24/7 shift would be “cost prohibitive,” though, Scarlett said. The robot costs about $6 per hour to rent, she said. The minimum wage in San Francisco is $14 per hour…

“In five years we will look back on this and think, ‘We used to take selfies with these because they were so new,’” Scarlett said.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/12/08/security-robot-homeless-spca-mission-san-francisco.html