Blade Runner 2049 - Danny's Review

Last night I watched the original Blade Runner. It's very atmospheric, there's no cheap special effects, and you feel for the characters. So I was a bit worried about the new version. If it was too ponderous then without the weight of history making it a classic it might just seem a bit slow and pretentious, and if it was too fast with too much CGI I would certainly dismiss it too.

The basic plot [SPOLIER ALERT] is that thirty years ago Deckard and his android wife Rachel gave birth to a child, the very first replicant baby. That baby has now grown up and everyone wants him. The Replicant underground want to rally round him as proof that replicants are More human than human and start a revolution. The Wallace Corporation (the new Tyrell Corporation) want him so they can figure out how it happened and make loads more replicant as slaves. And the police want him destroyed to prevent unrest. This all takes a long time to play out, with lots of large nearly empty orange rooms and spooky music.

The slowness is at times slightly irritating, but is mostly OK if you don't know what's going to happen so there's some tension. There's a big sag is in the middle where the hero (Ryan Gosling) goes to meet a woman who makes the artificial memories the replicants are given. There is some irrelevant and annoying CGI here with a birthday cake, only rescued by the thought that Harrison Ford's face was pretty big on the poster, and since he still hasn't turned up yet he must be arriving pretty soon.

When Ford does lumber onto screen there's some more CGI rubbish then him and Gosling finally team up, to reach a reasonably satisfying conclusion. There's a lot more plot than in the original film, which doesn't all seem to add up, but has plenty of depth and some interesting ideas on what it means to be human. I particularly like the deep affection Gosling has for his Virtual Reality girlfriend, only to realise that she's just programmed that way.

If the replicant army hasn't enslaved me I'll watch it again in 2049.

Valerian - Danny's Review

Given the young age of the protagonists, and the fact that it's a comic book adaptation, I expected this to be a child's film. And it was.

But it started well, with the International Space Station getting bigger and bigger into the future. All of a sudden it's 2130 and there's aliens. Then more aliens, tall thin blue ones looking happy on a beach. More than happy, overjoyed. You can tell they're happy because they constantly spin round with their arms aloft, grinning beatifically.

Unfortunately, things get worse, as we are introduced to super-agents Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne, flirting clumsily on a hologram beach. Their banter is poor, and continues throughout the film. "Everyone knows you're a ladykiller" purrs Cara. Each time things heat up, then one of them coyly mentions getting back to the mission.

The mission is pretty flimsy, and involves overturning obviously evil General Clive Owen. It's no spoiler to say he's evil, you'll work that out as soon as you see him, and his mysterious private guard of big black robots that he personally programmed.

However, the joy of a film like this is the individual scenes, a few of which work really well. My favourite is when Cara is captured and dressed up to present a big lemon to an alien king. But he licks his lips, squeezes the lemon on her, and prepares to eat her head. It's a good visual surprise. At the other end of the scale are numerous CGI journeys through space, which don't do much for me. And Rihanna's cameo was super-weak.

I might partly be grumpy because it was an 845pm showing and I was tired. Having said that, it was quite enjoyable. Big-budget fast-paced Sci Fi can't go too wrong.

Dunkirk - Danny's Review

First time I've been to the cinema since last October. This one was worth a trip; the sort of film that's better on the big screen. The most impressive big vistas were the beach, with loads and loads of soldiers on them.

It's a fairly short war epic, and it's not over the top with drama. There were only two staged moments, one where a pilot runs out of fuel (which you can spot a mile off as there are numerous warnings in advance about keeping an eye on the fuel level) and one where an eager boy on a civilian vessel gets accidentally hit by a shell-shocked Cilian Murphy. Apart from this silliness, it felt like a fairly honest slice of history, with the drama building up slowly throughout.

There's very little dialogue, and a fairly sparse pulsing soundtrack. The plot explanation is minimal (I struggled as I didn't know what a mole was), and like all war films it's hard to tell who's who.

It takes place on land, air and sea. On land the British soldiers stand around doing nothing, while the French heod the line. In the air the RAF pilots are suitably calm and chipper, "Afternoon!"" says one cheerfully after being rescued from near-death. At sea it's no fun at all, as every rescue leads you to another boat which is shortly sunk.

This being a historical film I was expecting lots of writing on the screen at the end about what happened, but instead I had to read all the Wikipedia pages. The main historical point seems to be that the Germans missed a trick in not finishing off the British when they had the chance. It's believed Hitler thought that once the British returned home they wouldn't come back to mainland Europe. The film could also do more to show that Dunkirk was in fact a stonking German victory (which is how it was described in Nazi Germany), as the British had to leave so much behind, for example 20,000 motorcycles.