Movie Review: Blade Runner 2049

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: Acting, effects

Cons: Slow with a plot that leaves too many things open

The Bottom Line:

Blade Runner returns

Story leaves too much dangling

Pacing is slow, too

Potential to be an Interesting Story Wasted

I’ve never seen the original Blade Runner.  Seeing the sequel wasn’t really on my radar, but the friends I’m watching movies with these days wanted to watch it, so I went along with them.  (I owe them plenty of turns to pick what we watch.)  It was okay, but it could have been better.

Set in the year 2049, the story follows K (Ryan Gosling), a LAPD Blade Runner who hunts down Replicants (aka sentient robots).  He is on what he thinks is a routine mission.  However, after he completes his assignment, he makes a shocking discovery.  Since the implications could impact life as he knows it, he is asked to help destroy any evidence of it.  Instead, he goes searching for answers.  Those answers send him searching for Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who has been missing for 30 years.  What will K learn?

Yes, I was a little lost going into this movie, not having seen the original.  It does assume you know the basics of this particular universe.  Fortunately, my friends were familiar enough with the original to help me get up to speed quickly, although none of us had seen the original recently.  Still, it wasn’t too long before I had everything figured out and was ready to get lost in the story.

Unfortunately, that never quite happened.  The plot sets up an interesting mystery, but it never goes anywhere.  Well, part of it goes somewhere, but there are plenty of plot points that are introduced only to be dropped later.  As we watched, we came up with several theories on what was going on.  Those theories we had actually made more sense than what we got and answered the questions the movie left us with.  Obviously, they should have consulted us since the ending was so poor.

To top it off, the pacing was slow.  They could have easily cut out a good thirty minutes without us missing anything.  Or maybe added a few action scenes.  The ones we got were good, but they were few and far between.

The performances were good.  Everyone worked hard to bring their characters to life.  Likewise, the special effects were strong and made it easy to get lost in the world.

I wasn’t the only one to feel this way.  This was pretty much the consensus as the three of us talked about the film when we were finished.

After seeing Blade Runner 2049, I’m not interested in going back and watching the original.  For me, this was a movie that needed help from the script up to be a movie worth watching.