craner

Beast of Burden
Saw it. Looked amazing, mostly flawless visuals.

All about memory and nostalgia, though, not just thematically or visually, but in the multiple and overlapping and slightly tedious references and reliance on the original.

So it wasn't a remake, a reboot, but it wasn't quite a sequel either. Reminded me a lot of The Force Awakens: got the original tone perfect, but was ultimately hollow. Because the originals started with a story, ideas, and characters. The new films start with history, a template, a feel, a visual language. The whole thing is tied up with recreating that.

Retromania.

Shit story, shit script, hasty ideas, etc. yet in a way this film was redeemed by the overlap of themes of memory and nostalgia explored on top of the metatextaul references to the original film and its reception.

Plus the dystopia future looks far closer to real life now than it did in the 80s.

It looked fantastic, that is to say uncanny, gorgeous, horrific and not so much sci-fi now, closer to reality. 30 years between the original and it's projected future seems less for us, almost quaint. The idea of San Diego being a rubbish dump for a Greater LA and Las Vegas being a radioactive Wasteland seem like silly ideas compared to the visions of mass eco-farming and synthetic girlfriends.

On the whole it was a dead, empty, silly film stuffed with amazing ideas that kept me awake last night.

But it was about the past: a sad elegy for a more healthy world with humans who have real memories of a world with trees and physical relationships and farmers and child birth and Elvis and films like the original 'Blade Runner'
 
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firefinga

Well-known member
Bladerunner was pretty much THE 1980s movie regarding it's aesthetics/music/style. It was far more a 1982 time capsule than a sci fi movie - like many sci fi flicks tell way more bout the time the movie was done than the actual - usually future - setting.

I'll watch the new one on monday now instead.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Reminded me a lot of The Force Awakens: got the original tone perfect, but was ultimately hollow. Because the originals started with a story, ideas, and characters. The new films start with history, a template, a feel, a visual language. The whole thing is tied up with recreating that.

i remember my heart sinking as i was watching it, realising it was just a tacky redo with ham fisted references to the original. i'd disagree that it managed to capture the tone, as i remember it (i only saw it that one time) it was devoid of any kind of mood or aesthetic or emotion; it was like reading the synopsis of episode 4 on wikipedia.

rogue one was wicked though.
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
hated BR2049. gosling is barely acting, ford looked bored and like he would rather be anywhere else. amazing sets, music, ambience, and cool retro vehicles and hot hologram women, but just another lazy, safe AF retro nostalgia exercise like the force awakens. it even does that 'get an original character and summon them with CGI' thing as they did with carrie lucas in the last star wars film (also crap btw). if this is what gets critics and audiences excited for being an 'intelligent blockbuster' in 2019, then something is wrong. what a con.

no new ideas, and no new concepts, so fails as sci fi as it has absolutely nothing to say about anything. basically a film to please BR fan boys and cinema snobs who seem to believe 'arthouse blockbusters' are a good thing, rather than a dull way to spend an evening. then again, i never liked the first BR film either, as i felt it was dramatically inert and IIRC reviewers at the time had the same feeling about that film, so i guess this is the perfect sequel. but at least that one was of its time. this one seems like it just wants to pretend it is still 1982. in 2049 are we really to believe that technology has in fact gone BACKWARDS? ridiculous

On the whole it was a dead, empty, silly film stuffed with amazing ideas that kept me awake last night.

genuine q: what amazing ideas?
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
rubberdingyrapids;340624in 2049 are we really to believe that technology has in fact gone BACKWARDS? ridiculous[/QUOTE said:
Well we're at the point here that this movie, this universe (and if we're being cynical, this franchise) has its own history, timeline, progression. You can't ask a world that has its own time to burrow and develop (which it cannot judging from its climate, in the way people say our own world is failing to further develop in the constipation of capitalism) in a way akin to ours when its stagnation had already been defined. Hell, we do not look like Blade Runner in our Dystopia (if you want to argue we're in one) so why should its dystopia reflect our trajectory?

w/r/t Gosling I liked how little he acted; its a big thing to not ham here and the fact is, he's supposed to be someone who's disconnected from his humanity, not allowed to feel, permanently disassociated. His performance is solid imo because he does so very little at first and slowly the ice thaws under the continuous pressure he places on himself and the frustration allows itself to manifest. I'd take it over the say, the ALWAYS READY TO EXPLODE style that's developed in a lot of actors in his age or older in the wake to try and convey drama.
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
Well we're at the point here that this movie, this universe (and if we're being cynical, this franchise) has its own history, timeline, progression. You can't ask a world that has its own time to burrow and develop (which it cannot judging from its climate, in the way people say our own world is failing to further develop in the constipation of capitalism) in a way akin to ours when its stagnation had already been defined. Hell, we do not look like Blade Runner in our Dystopia (if you want to argue we're in one) so why should its dystopia reflect our trajectory?

maybe i am not invested enough in the BR 'world'. i get ppl these days are all into 'world building' etc etc (which basically just means 'creating a believable, well ordered, fully formed setting'), but this world is more or less meaningless to anything or anyone outside it. i know some people think this is asking questions about humanity, and what makes us human, but a) its not a new question b) it does not try to answer this in an esp novel fashion c) those who think the film is doing this are likely a little less human than the rest of us.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
maybe i am not invested enough in the BR 'world'. i get ppl these days are all into 'world building' etc etc (which basically just means 'creating a believable, well ordered, fully formed setting'), but this world is more or less meaningless to anything or anyone outside it.

Well like I said if we're being more cynical its a franchise and you have to appeal to the 'fandom' and if anybody redesigned it from the original 'feel' so many would be up in arms. Its like getting the rights to the name Star Wars, and all of the little iconographic trinkets are gone. (Merchandizing Gods Wept)

But its also reflecting on the idea of an alternate history, which is another obsession of the modern world that I'm not overly infatuated with but the modern audience thinks is deep; "what if we had to evolve as a species/society if we never invented the phone, or it came late" and what have you. There's a ton of bad work made in this field but when one hits you have to sort of be beholden to keeping this order up, you can't simply WIPE a fantasy world and restart, you have to behold yourself to its trajectory if you're obligating yourself to working in someone else's

*Meant to post this yesterday but the site crashed on me, also didn't realize we have a 'drafts' function on this board now. Bless this board*
 

you

Well-known member
Well like I said if we're being more cynical its a franchise and you have to appeal to the 'fandom' and if anybody redesigned it from the original 'feel' so many would be up in arms. Its like getting the rights to the name Star Wars, and all of the little iconographic trinkets are gone. (Merchandizing Gods Wept)

But its also reflecting on the idea of an alternate history, which is another obsession of the modern world that I'm not overly infatuated with but the modern audience thinks is deep; "what if we had to evolve as a species/society if we never invented the phone, or it came late" and what have you. There's a ton of bad work made in this field but when one hits you have to sort of be beholden to keeping this order up, you can't simply WIPE a fantasy world and restart, you have to behold yourself to its trajectory if you're obligating yourself to working in someone else's

*Meant to post this yesterday but the site crashed on me, also didn't realize we have a 'drafts' function on this board now. Bless this board*

I don't think it felt all that much like the original. The scenes were too quiet, brutalist and empty to feel like the original cramped setting. So it fell short on that point.

But I despise this excusing tone that people often employ to defend TV and film - 'oh, but it HAS to' for the fans/because it's american/because of funding etc. This inbuilt defence of film and TV must stop, excusing it for an inherent handicap. Mad Max: Fury Road totally broke from the original films (that were never that good) and it was wonderful. Perhaps the best action film of the year. BR 2049 should've quit navel gazing and just focused on being a good film in its own right.
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
villeneuve is a really good craftsman as a director but his hollywood stuff doesnt really ever have anything to say for itself (i should see his earlier stuff to see if its the same).
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Mad Max: Fury Road totally broke from the original films (that were never that good) and it was wonderful.

lol no it didn't. Just because it was good and 2049 is more overtly flawed doesn't mean it didn't holistically break from the concept, its a Mad Max after all. The idea that somehow 2049 wasn't going to be saddlebagged with someone dealing with the fact there was already a Blade Runner with all its gravitas (deserved or no) and that a huge amount of people come in with that expectation isn't an EXCUSE, its a fact of undermining in making a damned Blade Runner sequel. Ultimately the moment you revisit something thematically in Hollywood, you stop making it a standalone and you inevitably treat it as a series, something to build off on and expound; fan-fiction, the sequel, the 'missing chapters', etc. And because in the modern age you merchandise this (as opposed to say, a literary universe allowing multiple takes on a 'thematic world' independently and just having them as communications among each other) you have to cash in not on the themes and ideas of Blade Runner, but the THING THAT IS Blade Runner. Its why nobody acknowledges say, PWSA's Soldier who has one of the screenwriters for the original Blade Runner on its team.

Fury Road is a Mad Max and that's all it can be, and 2049 was a Blade Runner and that's all it can be. There are no BREAKS without willingly disheveling the name and actively trying to feel in between similarity and difference and sorry, Fury Road is not that by any stretch just because it's much better.

Anyway the idea that it didn't feel much like the original as a film is agreeable but so many people have shit ideas as to what Blade Runner feels like, their memories create this alternate film that doesn't actually exist. It was bound to happen.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I saw it yesterday. It's... quiiiite good?

First off, it looks and sounds amazing, but then of course it does. It couldn't possible fail to, with that much expectation and cash behind it. Aside from the SFX, though, I thought that aesthetically it was a step forward and a step back at the same time. Whereas the first film did the 1980s-does-the-1920s thing so well, the look of the sets in the new one reminded me of nothing so much as 2001, or at least, a very 1960s idea of The Future. Then again, the abandoned industrial areas really reminded me of the proletarian underworld in Metropolis, from the actual 1920s. On the soundtrack side, Hans Zimmer does a great job in setting the mood and following Vangelis's lead without actually ripping him off, I think, and the heavy farty dubstep sub-bass is great. Punchiest gunshots I've ever heard (and felt), too.

But I broadly have to agree with craner. It has nothing like the intimacy and emotional content of the original. The bit near the end where K/Joe is considering doing himself in made me think I wouldn't really care whether he did or not, which is surely not a good sign in a film. It's got none of the mythopoeic potency of the original, all the Promethean-Faustian-Nietzschean God-and-Adam stuff - the nearest it came to references of that sort was the line about K being a "real boy" after all, wasn't it? Another great thing about the older film is the way it avoids the simplistic moral binary and doesn't even really have a villain as such; Deckard is simply doing his job, while the rogue replicants just want to survive and answer questions about their origins, and failing that to get some revenge on the men who created them as disposable slaves and the man who's trying to rob them of the even the meagre bit of life they've been allotted. Even Tyrell isn't actually malicious, he's just an amoral technocapitalist Frankenstein enthralled to his own brilliance. Contrast that with the new feature, with the ludicrous Wallace who is so obviously a Villain-with-a-capital-V that we have to see him gratuitously stab a newly hatched replicant to death while giving a self-aggrandizing monologue just to rub in that this is One Really Bad Dude.

So, I dunno really. Not a bad effort but it can't help but pale next to the original. Good cast for the most part, including the excellent Robin Wright, a.k.a. 'Cate Blanchett's lesbian evil twin' from House of Cards. I also think the hologram girlfriend should have had a shiny letter 'H' on her forehead.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Anyway the idea that it didn't feel much like the original as a film is agreeable but so many people have shit ideas as to what Blade Runner feels like, their memories create this alternate film that doesn't actually exist. It was bound to happen.

Well the new one was never going to top the scene where Deckard steals the gold idol and then uses it to blow up the Death Star, that's for sure.

But there are actually seven versions of the original, which may go some way to explain it.
 

droid

Well-known member
Im an Adam Nevill fan, so no surprise that I was interested in seeing the Ritual.

All in all a pretty good adaptation. Very similar to the descent in a lot of ways, but creepier. Did the psychological shock of meeting unnamable terror quite well, but perhaps the best thing about the book; the convincing interactions between middle aged men is well portrayed. If you've ever gone hiking with your mates you'll recognise a lot of the dialogue and dynamics. Falls a bit in the last third, and the monster will divide viewers I think, but all in all a very plausible old school horror with some subtle notes hinting at much darker themes.
 

droid

Well-known member
Dunno if I mentioned it here at the time... did anyone ever watch 'Son of Saul'?


Im thinking about watching it again.
 
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