Blade Runner 2049 - 9.5/10
Went to a matinee showing at the Alamo across the street.
The movie is almost perfect. The score was outstanding--one of the best I can recall. The cinematic artscapes reminded me of a Kurosawa or even a Miyazaki--this movie was the vision of a painter's mind who was told to incorporate actors and plot because apparently they expect you to tell a story. Gosling's performance as a conflicted non-human that might or might not have a soul was spot-on. There is a lot to like here.
I wasn't a big fan of the hand-to-hand and handgun fight scenes. Nothing wrong with them, exactly. In the Matrix, the fight scenes resonated with the thematic core of the film, but in this movie they seemed at odds with the overall vibe. Scratch that--the first fist-fight (five times fast) was great and tonally pleasing. The ones later in the movie not so much. The movie had become so ethereal by that point that such vanilla mechanics cheapened it. It wasn't that the violence itself broke the mood, for example
was great.
At times the movie left me with questions like 'why didn't...' that were distracting. I'd try to solve that riddle as the movie was still unfolding and commanding new attention.
Some heavy questions are posed by the writing. What is a soul? What qualifies as life? Do memories equal existence and meaning? Is the death of a human significant on the basis of complexity of thought, and if so, when does 'artificial' intelligence gain similar significance? What is the meaning of birth?
I like those types of questions. Like the movie Arrival. The movie asked interesting questions without actually asking them.
Great show, worth seeing at the theater.