What did you think of 2049? Full admission: I expected to dislike it. I may have even wanted to dislike it. But I guess ended up being one of the few people who found it, not equal to the first, but at least equal to the challenge of even attempting a sequel.
Wrath of Khan and
Road Warrior are better than their priors, but
WoK probably doesn’t count, because the franchise is inherently serial, and the first movie wasn’t really original. (Isn’t VGER really just NOMAD redux?) It
is possible to make a better sequel (just not in Hollywood).
I haven't watched
2049 since its initial release, so pardon a lack of supporting detail. I liked it. Almost not the same genre, or at least sub-genre.
Technologically, they’re not.
Bladerunner was shot entirely analog, including special effects. Utterly real. The last big-budget sci-fi film that will ever be done that way. (I know I’m borrowing from the “making of” bonus material.)
Stylistically and thematically, the influences of related post-1982 film franchises (
Terminator,
Matrix,
AI,
I,Robot, etc) and intervening changes to societal norms make a direct, un-self-conscious sequel pointless, if not impossible. I thought the handling of female exploitation was heavy-handed and possibly disingenuous, and the invisible, silent army of marginalized replicants a late and under-developed afterthought.
I think the hardest thing to deal with was the ambiguity at the end of the original: do the unicorn memories from
Legend mean Deckard is a replicant with memory implants? did Gaff know? did the road out of LA lead to the Overlook Hotel? did Rachel live? did Deckard? For some of us (for whom the original was a formative experience), the answers the sequel inevitably provided were a bit a ret-con let-down, and I suppose, an equal intrusion into a more natural
2049 plot. Impossible to sit through it without second-guessing the writers’ choices, which interferes with the willing suspension of disbelief. “Her eyes were green.“ Really?
That’s what Deckard recalls about Rachel? If they’d have gotten that right, would it change his position? Is it even true? Or does he just say it to rationalize his rejection of the deal?
Still, I liked it.
I liked
Chinatown and
The Two Jakes, too. (But
Chinatown is better.
) Or is it? Which is about oil and which is about water?
