There are a LOT of opinions about Blade Runner, both the original and the sequel that came decades later, and it’s easy to see that Honest Trailers kind of nails them both to the wall for further inspection and a good chance to take a couple of well-deserved digs no matter that both movies were loved by a lot of people and heavily criticized by others. It’s kind of hard not to criticize really since both movies tend to leave a lot of openings in their story lines that people are bound to jump on in different ways. Some folks want to know what really happens to various characters and why and others just want to make fun of what’s happening since to be fair, there are a lot of prolonged moments in each movie that could have been kept shorter and meant just as much to the audience. It’s not a matter of having a short attention span really, it’s wanting to get to the action and to find some sort of meaning that a long and protracted silence can’t always give. Keeping a few of these moments in the movie would have made sense considering that moments of introspection are great for building up tension and for storytelling purposes, but used too often these elements can really dig into the story in a negative manner.
Perhaps one of the biggest problems with Blade Runner 2049 is that it really felt as though it was a reboot instead of a sequel despite the fact that the characters were different, the story was different, and the settings were a bit more impressive thanks to the advance in special effects. Apart from that however the whole thing was kind of a prolonged trip through a dystopian world that hadn’t changed much and was more or less just as messed up as it was during the first movie. In other words, things really didn’t change as much as a lot of people were hoping they might. In the pat two decades it’s been made perfectly clear that some stories just won’t be allowed to rest until the studios have pulled every last cent they can get from them, which is a bit saddening since it tends to mean that the movie ideas are going to be used up in a way that will leave them as little more than dried, withered husks by the time all is said and done. That might sound kind of melodramatic but the fact is that a lot of stories have been used up throughout the years as they’ve been turned into sequels, reboots, remakes, and have eventually become so watered down that they’re no longer as effective as they once were when they first came out. That’s a fate that’s worse than tanking at the box office, since low ticket sales don’t mean much to a movie that eventually becomes a cult classic, whereas being diluted to the point where fans don’t care any longer is much harder to come back from.
There are those that liked this movie and think that it did a great job in pushing the story forward and incorporating enough elements from the first movie in order to make it recognizable and enjoyable, but there are plenty of others that think it dropped the ball in a big way and didn’t really live up to the hype. It’s hard to say one way or another since there were elements that worked and a story line that felt lucid at some moments and kind of out there and uncertain of itself at others. To be frank it almost feels as though the story drifted at times, as though the director was distracted and allowed the story to go off in another direction before pulling it back to center again in order to keep people on board with the idea he was trying to push and made to think that it was all one cohesive attempt rather than a continually-expanding tale that didn’t make quite as much sense as it should have. Chris Snellgrove of Screenrant had a few burning questions about the sequel. In updating this story and pushing it forward so many years it was expected that it would take the same world and create an even deeper and more layered presentation that would entice the audience to continue to delve deeper into the story and the world it occupied so as to fully understand and comprehend what was going on.
Some stories withstand the test of time and can be revisited with very little effort and can be brought back in a very convincing way. This movie unfortunately wasn’t one of them according to quite a few people, even if others thought that it was. Between the first movie and this one however there are just too many ideas that somehow got muddied throughout the years and the process, and in doing so the quality of the movie was heavily affected.
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