Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Stylistically very strong. There's a dismal scale to this dystopia—vast and inescapable in a way the original rarely achieves—but I think in turn it feels too clean. It trades in the original's lived-in clutter of small details for these big artisanal monuments. On the other hand, shots like the dead-elephant-skin cityscape or the giant AI hologram or the chopped-up spaceship have an awful apocalyptic energy… Hell is a real place and it's built layer by layer on the bones of earlier, more primitive Hells.

Now, they do a lot with the idea of disposability and of people reduced to functions, all the different ways people (human and replicant) interact with one another. The pre- and post-sex scenes, replicants priding themselves on obedience and functionality, a society that's grappling with physicalist ideas of body and mind (“replicants don't have souls” but also “replicants are worthy targets of personalised bigotry”). I was actually just a little disappointed that Mariette, the sex worker, turned out to be a replicant for sure because it flattens that little part of the narrative. How do humans and replicants co-exist in sex work? Is she a human pretending to be a replicant because there's a market, among humans, for replicant sex workers, because a replicant sex worker is seen as more disposable than a human one? Are experiences with human sex workers seen as more valuable, more real? But in the end, she's just get another rebel replicant and these questions slip away uninvestigated.

The key thing that's missing, to me, is a sense of solidarity. There's no real feeling of cameraderie or understanding among virtually anyone, replicant or otherwise. The replicant group at the end don't have any beautiful oratory or worthy philosophy—even some random combat model (Roy Batty) out-talks them by miles. They come across more like a cult of robots than family or friends or comrades. It just feels kinda cynical and mean to turn a story about (even small) collective resistance to intolerable oppression into an atomised Chosen One template. Rebellion as hollow, pseudo-religious obligation. Ultimately I get that the story's about Ryan Gosling physically and emotionally getting turned into paste but it's still a bit of a letdown, you know?