Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)
If nothing else, a truly beautiful film. Villeneuve's direction and Roger Deakins's cinenomnomgraphy create a dazzling picture of varied sights and sounds; where bright colors are juxtaposed with washed-out grays and vivid surrealism gives way to harsh grittiness. Every location is distinctive and memorable, every atmospheric effect adds to the tension. This movie could have starred Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen engaged in a frank discussion about their experiences with sexually-transmitted diseases, and I'd still recommend it just based on how gorgeous the whole thing looks.
Needless to say, the rest of the film falls a little short of the visuals. I like the story in broad strokes, and appreciate the slow, deliberate pace that feels similar to the original Blade Runner. But speaking of this movie's similarities with the first one, I felt that tying their stories so closely together was a mistake. I usually appreciate a good sense of continuity and attention to detail, and I'd most likely be very excited if I saw this kind of thing in a video game. But movies are obviously quite different to video games, and as they offer drastically less "content," so to speak, they can less afford to throw in Easter eggs and continuity nods and details that not everybody will "get." It feels like all these things were included not because they made the film itself better, but because they felt obligated to show that they "respected" the original. I could very easily be wrong, but I strongly suspect that this movie would have a been lot more successful if they had focused on crafting the best standalone story that they could rather than the most reverent love letter to the first film that they could.
The dialogue has issues, too. There are so many lines that are just such obvious pleas to one day be famous quotes, complete with dramatic pauses after they're delivered. "I know what's real." "Sometimes to love someone, you got to be a stranger." "We’re all just looking out for something real." Pretty much every line that comes out of Jared Leto's mouth. The harder the movie tries to have this dialogue be deep and profound and "quotable," the more silly it all seems. As Aalewis so infamously learned, you can't manufacture quotes like this. That's not how it works. Other people decide what's meaningful and deserves to be repeated, and it takes time.
As I just mentioned Jared Leto, I'd also like to say that he's easily the worst part of the movie. I don't know what the hell he was doing here. Some avant garde form of theater? Anti-acting, so to speak? The decisions that he (or Villeneuve, to be fair, but I'm inclined to suspect Leto) made are baffling. Why does he stare randomly into the distance? (I know he's blind. Blind people don't do that.) Why does he put on that silly voice? Why does he talk with that bizarre cadence that suggests he's an alien who's new to the concept of human speech? Why is everything, literally everything, he says such obtuse, pretentious bullshit that seems to be an idiot's conception of how a smart person talks? Did Leto demand to write his own lines or something? At this point, that is seriously the most likely explanation I can think of.
And yeah, BR2049 is pretty sexist. This got a lot of fanboys REEEing when some feminists dissented from the film's otherwise universal acclaim by raising this point, but it's true. And yes, I've heard the defense that this is simply a portrayal of a misogynistic dystopia, not an endorsement of it, and there are some movies and TV shows that have tackled that sort of thing with a feminist perspective, like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Handmaid's Tale, but BR2049 does not do that. The camera openly participates with the misogyny on display, with male-gazey, lingering shots of the lurid advertisements, a remarkably uncritical examination of the fact that the main character's girlfriend is a virtual reality waifu, and most oddly of all, a determination to show female characters being injured and killed in agonizing, dehumanizing detail. It's not that way with the male characters. The men have straightforward, dignified deaths, but for the women, the camera zooms in so we can see their final dying struggle, the blood spewing out of their naked bodies, their corpses flopping about pathetically, etc. I'm not saying it makes the movie terrible, but it's definitely there.