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You can't help but think Hollywood should leave some films alone.
Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel we didn't need, a film that mimics the original's style, but falls short of capturing its danger and romance.
Set 30 years after the events in its predecessor, it stars Ryan Gosling as LAPD officer K (no doubt a nod to Kafka's The Trial), a blade runner whose job is to hunt down rogue androids, known as replicants.
It's worth comparing Gosling's manicured tough guy to Harrison Ford's battered and bruised sleuth in the first movie.
Plucked from the pages of Philip K Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ford's character Deckard was a jaded, futuristic noir detective who wanted out, a man as much driven by instinct as he was averse to introspection.
The relationship between him and a beautiful replicant named Rachael was all the more powerful for the way it ambushed him emotionally.
In contrast, Gosling's protagonist is a cop who still believes. He dutifully reports to his superior, a tough as nails Robyn Wright with slicked back hair.
He seems unquestioning of his role until the day he stumbles upon a conspiracy that sends him investigating his own mysterious past.
This story — co-written by original Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher and Michael Green — is a soul-searching "Who am I?" journey, but the film's tensions are more akin to a mechanistic puzzle than an emotional web.
Not that it doesn't reach for the same intensity, but Gosling fails to convey his inner emotional storm, and his external relationships — including one with a personal assistant hologram (Ana De Armas) that's tinged with auto-erotic ickiness — never approach the chemistry of Deckard and Rachael.
Gosling is not alone in underperforming, however.
Much worse is Jared Leto, wearing opaque contact lenses — a frankly disappointing corporate villain and a much less memorable mogul than Dr Tyrell, played by Joe Turkel in a pair of sinister coke-bottle spectacles all those years ago.
Leto's Marvel-esque bad guy act takes second place to a chilling but elegant Sylvia Hoeks as the homicidal replicant Luv, but she's surprisingly underutilised and can't bring any real dramatic tension to the film.
Perhaps what's missing most is a deeper sense of why this film needed to exist at all.
Apart from some overwrought lines that draw a parallel between replicants and slavery — a kind of ham-fisted effort to bring a contemporary racial inflection to the film's human-replicant tensions — none of the story feels particularly insightful.
Ridley Scott's original, with its decrepit but sublime vision of LA as a futuristic, polyglot melting pot filled with noodle shops and a Eurasian underclass may have been rife with orientalist clichés, but it was an exciting and daring Cold War vision of America in an advanced stage of corporate decadence.
Scott and his cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth employed several budget conscious but effective tricks to conjure the film's lush noir mood, including an ever-present smoke machine that lent the neon-lit, rainy streets an atmosphere so thick, it looked like you could slice it with a knife.
Fast forward to Blade Runner 2049.
Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and British cinematographer Roger Deakins are a highly skilled pair of stylists, who worked together on Sicario and Prisoners.
But their film is crisper, their shadows less mysterious, and the smoke is gone — though they replicate the shimmering effect of light reflected off water throughout.
There's less left to the imagination.
The story might be about the blurred lines between human and replicant, but it never offers a challenging moral ambiguity.
Apart from one final twist, what ends up happening, including Harrison Ford's reappearance (not a spoiler, he's on the poster), seems as inevitable as another film to follow this one. If this is anything to go by, it won't be much to look forward to.
Topics: science-fiction-films, action, film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, united-states
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