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.
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