Station Eleven

Remembering
Damage

Station Eleven
USA December 2021 - January 2022
Ten episodes Paramount

Warning: To the spoilers, we're the spoilers.

It’s rare that a piece of art comes along which is so overwhelming in both its emotional weight and technical brilliance that I am at a loss as to how to convey a sense of it to others. But that’s how I feel about the ten episode mini series Station Eleven, based on the novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel (which is now hopefully en route to me from ebay, so I can read it). I don’t know what the differences are between this show and the source novel but, I soon will and I’ll post a separate review of that book in a month or two, I suspect.

Station Eleven is set before, during and after a devastating global pandemic (all at the same time). In the present, the flu virus has got out of hand and mutated into a lethal and unforgiving killer, which wipes out the majority of the world in a couple of weeks. If you catch it you’re dead (or, as somebody in a broadcast at one point says... we weren’t ready for something with a 1 in 1000 survival rate).

The story is not presented in a linear fashion (although, it does get more linear towards the end) and it tells the story of separate pockets of characters who all have links to each other over their past or future lives, which you discover over the course of the ten episodes in some quite astonishing ways, as the narrative hops from one character in one time zone to another and slow connections gradually dawn on the spectator.

Primarily we start with the death, on stage, via a heart attack (or possibly from the flu as it happens the first evening of the outbreak) of an actor called Arthur Leander, played by Gael García Bernal (don’t worry, because of the nature of the structure of the thing, Bernal is in quite a few episodes in flashback... depending on your point of view in the story). Jeevan, played by Himesh Patel, is the first to realise that Arthur is dying on stage and rushes up to try and help. Instead, he helps one of Arthur’s co-stars, eleven year old Kirsten (played brilliantly in her younger iteration by  Matilda Lawler) escape the area but problems arise and he can’t get her home, so he holes up with her at his brother’s apartment to try and wait out the unfolding disaster... while everyone they know dies from the virus. Arthur gave Kirsten one of five graphic novels, written and artworked by his ex-wife Miranda, played by Danielle Deadwyler. The book is called Station Eleven and tells of a spaceman, Doctor Eleven, who presents a conundrum to the people who read it and helps them find purpose in their struggle to survive ‘the before’... both the pre-pans (aka pre-pandemic) and the newborns who use half remembered fragments of it as their ideological basis, without getting too much into the complexities of the show, to fuel their possible terrorist campaign against those who came before.

Other figures and actors of note are the brilliant Mackenzie Davis as the post-apocalyptic survivalist, grown up version of Kirsten, David Wilmot as Arthur’s best friend Clark, Daniel Zovatto as The Prophet (his connection to these people is made clear at one point about half way through the show), Caitlin FitzGerald as Arthur’s other ex-wife and, as the composer and founder member of a post-apocalyptic travelling Shakespeare company, The Travelling Symphony, who wander the world putting on shows for various small, surviving communities, we have actress Lori Petty (it’s nice to see Tank Girl in something again).

And it’s actually a simple story in some ways, about the people who are left behind and the connections made through various lives which come together at certain points but, if it wasn’t told in such a rich tapestry of imaginative and mutually supporting edits, which spark big emotions on the realisation of their connections, then it probably wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. My understanding is that this structural concept is taken directly from the novel and so I’m guessing the series creator, Patrick Somerville, did a really good job here at keeping it somewhat close to the spirit of the source.

You’d think, from the through line, that the show would be something of a one trick pony but it’s not. I’m leaving a lot out of my synopsis because there are lots of ideas and situations which you need to discover for yourself. Characters fade to the background and then return in episodes which highlight just what happened to them, when they fell out of one of the other character’s lives. So, for instance, it seems pretty clear from episode two that a main character is dead... even though you know you’ll see him again in flashback. However, much later in the series, you find that he’s not and that he has a kind of rebirth in some ways (no, I’m not talking about Arthur... he stays dead) and you’re on tenterhooks throughout the whole last episode as the two characters who lost each other 19 years before are miraculously in the same place against all odds... and still manage to miss each other in the same room (and I’m not going to tell you what happens right at the end but... you’ll want to stick around... I wonder if this is one of the deviations from the novel?).

There’s lots of Hamlet too, if you’re into that kind of thing (I’m really not into Shakespeare myself). And possibly way too many Star Trek references throughout the show although, I was pleased that one of the earliest exhibits in Clark’s Museum Of Civilisation is one of the recent, new wave Mego Mr. Spock action figures.

There’s also some great next level stuff happening where, for instance, Doctor Eleven turns up in a few cases as, presumably, someone is seen in a mild hallucinatory state, although the interpretation is perhaps best left to the audience... or, for example, an episode where both the younger and older versions of a character are interacting in the same space. It’s all rather brilliant and it’s all held together with some nice (if mostly unknown to me) needle drop songs and a really beautiful score by Dan Romer (sadly only released as an electronic download and not on a proper CD. What a stupid thing to do!).

That being said, my one and only criticism of the show also comes from the score, although it’s possibly not Romer’s fault. There’s definitely a case of temp trackitus in the show as a couple of scenes in a few episodes were clearly, it seems to me, cut together initially with passages from Mica Levi’s astonishing score to Under The Skin and the producers maybe didn’t want to leave it out. So Romer creates (and I suspect was forced to create) something very similar to the specific cue I’m thinking of for certain sequences in this show. And what he’s done is good but, for a little while there I almost thought they’d needle dropped the original cues in, it’s that close. Consequently, in certain scenes where I was supposed to be feeling a certain sense of tension, it just popped me straight out of the narrative to figure out where the cue initially originated came from. Which is not the best way to manage the music (or the composer) of your show, I reckon.

But yes, asides from that one thing and the possible sense of a rushed reunion for two of the characters near the end, I’d have to say that Station Eleven is easily one of the greatest pieces of art in television history. I’d recommend this to pretty much anyone interested or enamoured with film and televisual history and, frankly, it’s a huge crime that this show isn’t available on DVD or Blu Ray at time of writing. Instead, it’s been hoarded away by some TV and streaming channel to be the carrot for subscriptions rather than being allowed to flourish in the wild. An absolutely brilliant and, certainly, epic experience. More than worth your time.

The Turning

Screw And Cry

The Turning
2020 UK/Ireland/Canada/USA
Directed by Floria Sigismondi
UK cinema release print.

I’m not going to say this film is completely terrible... more like a beautiful sculpture left two thirds hidden inside the rock that contains the potential for that particular work of art.

Now I’ve never read Henry James’ Turn Of The Screw and, neither, have I seen any of the numerous official movie or TV adaptations of it, to date. I have seen a film once that was supposed to be ‘heavily inspired’ by the book but, alas, I figured out the end of the movie within the first five minutes of that one. In terms of this new ‘updated for modern times’ adaptation, The Turning, I have to say that I came to a conclusion fairly early on... again within the first five minutes of the movie... about how things were going to be revealed at the end of the film but, alas, although I’m pretty sure I was right about that, I have no way of knowing just what the heck the conclusion of this film actually was supposed to be. Yeah, I’ll get to that in a little while.

So, there’s lots of good stuff in this movie but it seems to be packaged into what might be one of the worst representations of what the movie might have been. That the film works best as an atmosphere piece is probably it’s main strength. The performances by the actor and actresses playing the four main characters... Mackenzie Davis, Finn Wolfhard, Brooklynn Prince and Barbara Marten... are all more than competent and work really well together at conjuring up a sinister, almost laid back sense of approaching menace. So that kinda helps things along and the two kids are quite exceptional. Brooklynn Prince knocks it out the park as the charge of her new nanny (the film’s main protagonist played by Mackenzie Davis) and Wolfhard from Stranger Things plays against type as a villainous brat of a brother. He’s hard to like in this so, yeah, he obviously delivered a performance which really worked then.

The other main plus is some beautifully composed shots in an almost washed-out colour palette which highlight the fogginess, uncertainty and shakiness of the reliability of Mackenzie Davis’ character. It uses some nice, fluid camera movement to capture the main protagonist as she walks around the house and grounds of Bly Manor... little works of art in themselves, some of these shots.

Alas, although these shots are pretty nicely captured... as is all of the material in the film... they seem to be edited to death in places. That is to say, the edits seem faster than the nature of the footage would seem to suggest or, indeed, required to make them work together. For instance, when Davis is walking somewhere on a very simple route, several smooth and slow shots of her journeying to her destination from all different possible angles are spliced together in a way that calls attention to the way the DNA of the movie has been cobbled together. It’s not quite a case of ‘MTV generation’, fast paced editing but many of the shots in this movie can only last 7 or so seconds before cutting onto another and then another shot of the same thing from a different angle when, probably, one held master shot would have been the better option. Or, at the very least, maybe the shots could have been transitioned easier by having them slowly dissolve into each other on the movement (assuming the pacing of each shot was the same). Instead, everything seems to be chopped up way more than it needs to be and the result is a very fractured feeling in the narrative which... well, I guess that could be used to wrong-foot or unsettle the audience but it just doesn’t seem to work positively here.

And the other thing, apart from showing two or possibly even three approaches to a denouement in the final quarter of an hour of the film which are immediately thrown over for another interpretation, is the fact that the film leads us to an ending which is a big reveal for the main protagonist but... and this is the thing... not for the main audience, because we don’t actually get to see what that reveal is. A face is revealed to Mackenzie Davis but it’s deliberately obscured from the audience so that we really do ‘feel the ambiguity, man!’ instead of being left with something that might have made a little more sense. It’s almost like, by this point in the proceedings, the director or producers decided that the ending they were building up to was way too obvious so they decided not to show us what that ending was and instead, immediately they lead us into a ‘pop song’ with footage which teases a possible build to resolution over the end credits and, yeah, denying us again. It just feels like they’re deliberately 'screwing' with the audience to wind us up by this point.

Not much else to say on The Turning, it has to be said. Disappointing and really not great to recognise that a different assembly of the footage captured may well have given us a fairly decent horror movie. I guess I need to read the book at some point now to find out just what the heck is going on... although I suspect the ambiguity depicted in this film might also hold true to the original work, perhaps. Yeah, I’ll get to it at some point. I’m not glad I saw this one, to be honest.

Terminator Dark Fate

The Fate And The Furious

Terminator Dark Fate
(aka Terminator 6)
2019 USA Directed by Tim Miller
UK cinema release print.

Warning: This one has some spoilers because I don’t have a great deal to say about it but I can, at least, talk about specific plot points.

Terminator Dark Fate is the latest in a long line of Terminator films, starting off with James Cameron’s break out picture The Terminator back in 1984. I saw that first one a year or two after that via a big box video rental from the Off Licence about five minutes walk away (it’s still an off licence but, alas, doesn’t rent videos anymore). Out of all the Terminator movies, that first one was by far and away the best of the series and it’s the only one so far I’ve watched multiple times. All the others I’ve only seen once on their cinema releases. Out of the rest... 2 and 5 were pretty unwatchable, 3 and 4 were a little more entertaining.

This new sixth one is... somewhere in the middle of that lot in watchability, I reckon.

Now, I’ve got no idea just what is going on with the story anymore. They’re a little more contradictory as they go on and all have tried to reboot the franchise in some way. Frankly, the continuity on these things is just as bad as the 1940s Universal Mummy sequels or the various X-Men movies from 20th Century Fox... pretty non existent and disrespectful to the audiences who have plonked down money to see a sequel which fitted in with the prior films in the series.

Alas, Terminator Dark Fate is absolutely guilty of the same derogatory attitude towards its paying audience and within the first five or so minutes of the movie, it completely disregards the 3rd, 4th and 5th films by wiping out the possibilities of those futures, having a ‘younged up’ John Connor shot dead by a Terminator soon after the events of the second film. We then jump to present day when another Terminator, played by Gabriel Luna (who you may remember played Ghost Rider in Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D) is sent back to our time to kill a young woman called Danni Ramos, played by Natalia Reyes. However, an ‘augmented human’... basically a synthesis of future tech crossed with a human being, so a super powered cyborg, in other words... is sent back to protect her in the form of Grace, played by Mackenzie Davis.

And, to be fair, things get off to a great start with some strong and unrelenting action sequences which really had me believing that this may be one of the better terminator sequels. I was enjoying what I was seeing a lot and that didn’t let up when, in an early ‘deus ex machina’ moment seen in the trailer, Sarah Connor (with Linda Hamilton returning to play the somewhat iconic role) comes to everyone’s rescue and stalls the pursuit of the new Terminator for a little while. She has been getting anonymous messages from someone ‘off the grid’ for years now telling her when and where a Terminator will appear... “For John...” and is the poster girl for America’s Most Wanted as she has been dealing with various Terminators over the years. When Grace hacks her phone they match some coordinates she was sent back with and they go on a road trip to find themselves at the home of... the Terminator who killed John Connor at the start of the film. He has matured into Arnold Schwarzenneger as he looks now and, since he has new orders and is more or less the cybernetic equivalent of a Ronin (a masterless samurai), he has ‘grown a conscience’ and wants to make amends. And the rest of the film is, of course, more action as this group tries to destroy the Terminator, suffering a few losses along the way.

And... it doesn’t quite do what it needed to do for me to really get on its side. Which is a shame because, for the first hour, I was really into it hook, line and sinker. When Schwarzenegger turns up, though, things kind of go downhill a little and it’s not specifically because of him. As usual, Arnold is really cool in this and he does have some good moments in the film... as do all the cast, who make up a great ensemble. And it’s not even that the script is that bad either, despite its disrespect to the three films that preceded it. I just think that, by this point, there’s been a lot of truly spectacular action sequences and, frankly, the action in the second half of the movie, relentless though it is, just doesn’t really top anything you’ve already seen before and the pauses between set pieces aren’t really enough to keep you invested in them for the whole movie. I kinda had action fatigue by around the midway mark, I think. That was my biggest problem with it.

The ending and the not completely surprising revelation about the importance of the girl everyone is protecting is not that satisfying either, it has to be said. And it’s a shame because, like I said, the movie has got a great opening for the first hour. Then it just gets... well kinda dull actually. I no longer needed to see any action by this point and I was just waiting for all the pyrotechnics to finish. Pacing is everything and the second half of the film didn’t really have much contrast in it, truth be told.

Tom Holkenborg’s score to this however, is pretty cool. It’s quite respectful of Brad Fiedel’s original and it works and lifts the action in the occasional scenes when you can actually hear it without getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak. I believe La La Land are planning on issuing a CD of this one towards the end of the month and I may well pick this one up at some point.

Other than that... not much else to say. Good chemistry between the actors, some nice action scenes at the start and, thankfully, some good editing in those action scenes too... you’d probably not get too confused by what’s going on in this one, so that’s good news. Other than that though... not much else to weigh in with Terminator Dark Fate I think. Fans of the franchise will probably be happy enough with it (although I hear that the box office take on this is not what the studios would have wanted). Newcomers to the franchise could also probably pick up what’s going on fairly early in the film too so if you want to see a lot of explosions and bullets and flying bodies, then this is probably the film for you. I’m not sure however, at least in terms of the Terminator movies, that Arnold Schwarzenneger will ‘be back’ for another.

Blade Runner 2049

Morphology. Longevity. Incept Dates.

Blade Runner 2049
2017 USA/UK/Canada
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I could have written a spoiler free review here but I decided I wanted to address the issues that this film throws up a little more freely. So, fair warning, all the big spoilers will be covered here. If you don’t want to know this stuff then don’t read until after you’ve seen the movie. Lots of spoilerage per paragraph and you won’t see them coming until I blindside you with them so, seriously, if you don’t want to know, don’t read further than this warning paragraph.

To paraphrase another famous movie, this was not the sequel I was looking for.

That being said, I really wasn’t looking for a sequel to Blade Runner at all and I’ve always dreaded, even back in the 1980s when the subject first came up, that anyone would ever get around to doing one. I’ve already made clear my thoughts on the first film, which I first saw at the cinema in 1982 in its most perfect cut (as far as I’m concerned), the original studio cut. You can read my Blade Runner review here where I look at the various cuts of the movie and also detail my personal relationship with the film, helping to keep the movie alive long after it expired as a box office flop by going to see it with my friend at various midnight screenings before it suddenly started to gain popularity again in the 1990s. I must have seen the first movie somewhere between 50 and 100 times by now and so, yeah, I have a lot to be compromised by a bad sequel to a perfect movie which, lets be honest, doesn’t really need a follow up anyway.

So the first and most positive thing I will say about it is... it’s not a terrible movie. It’s actually, in fact, a pretty well made, modern science fiction film which harkens back to the 1950s or earlier for its central themes... themes which writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote the original source novel pillaged by the first movie, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, explored on a number of occasions in his writing career. So, for a nice, adult themed, science fiction movie... yeah, Blade Runner 2049 is quite successful in that sense.

As a sequel to the original film both in look and in spirit though... well that’s another matter and, much as I like Villeneuve as a director, I don’t think he does either of those things justice here.

For example, the film does, indeed, look spectacular but, honestly, compared to the look of the original movie which, it seemed to me, was much denser and more coherent in its portrayal of a crowded, urban environment in meltdown... this film felt a little inconsistent and sketchy. Maybe it’s because none of the establishing shots or fly bys of the various environments are long enough but... it didn’t really hit me the way it should do, I think.

The director eschews the classic opening titles of the first film and cuts to the intro text. At various places in the film we get text highlighting the various locations but, I can tell you, I was sitting fairly close to the front with a giant screen and those titles were so small I could barely make them out. The white type just about but the red type just above them... no way. Goodness knows how this would play in a home environment with a smaller screen. We then get a vista of landscape and, while its set in a different environment and we still get the giant eyeball shot to echo the first movie, it just all feels a bit ‘by the numbers’ to me. I’ve seen the first movie a gazillion times on some great screens and, almost without fail, the opening shots of the city on that old one flip flops your stomach over and dazzles with the sheer spectacle. Alas, this movie doesn’t have anything nearly as close as that opening and... yeah... I really felt it.

One thing this film does have which is similar to the original in terms of positive stuff is a cast of very good actors. Ryan Gosling is amazing (as he pretty much always is), Harrison Ford is... well, he’s Harrison Ford (so that means he’s always watchable), Ana de Armas  is pretty great as Gosling’s virtual companion, Sylvia Hoeks as a ‘bad gal’ replicant is actually more like the ‘andies’ in the original Dick novel than Ridley Scott’s movie (in that she’s actually genuinely evil rather than the like the morally superior replicants of the first movie) and Mackenzie Davis looks stunning as a working gal replicant who slinks about and is dressed similarly to Daryl Hannah’s Pris from the first movie. The film does, indeed, try and echo a lot of the beats of the first film and the gait of this particular character is one of the things which actually works as an homage here, I thought.

And then you have two genuinely outstanding performances which I think were worth the entry fee... although they are both fairly small roles. One is Robin Wright as Gosling’s boss. She really knocks it out of the park here playing an equivalent role to Deckard’s old boss Bryant from the first film in terms of inherent species-ism. She was great in Wonder Woman (reviewed here) and she is truly, old school, hard boiled, tough as nails here. Her final scene in the movie opposite Sylvia Hoeks is pretty memorable. And then we have David Bautista playing a truly sympathetic replicant. He shines in, literally, his only scene in the movie which is the opening sequence. I’m beginning to really like what this actor can do and this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen him perform so... yeah, very impressed with his performance here. So those two were the stand out performances for me in this film, it has to be said.

About that opening sequence though?

Well, it’s something I’ve been half wanting to see since 1982 in that it’s a throwback in spirit to an early draft of Blade Runner, as a way of establishing what the central protagonist does in an action sequence. Here it further serves to establish that Ryan Gosling’s character 'K' is also a superhuman replicant... so it proves useful. It also kickstarts the story when certain ‘clues’ are found on the farm residence where Bautista’s character is working. Instead of pulling the retired replicant’s jaw bone out and revealing a serial number as in that old draft screenplay I am referring to from the first film, Gosling just harvests one of the characters eyes as proof of something he already knows from what amounts to a mini, portable Voight Kampff test replacement he carries in his pocket. It’s actually a pretty good scene and plays with a lot of tension... Villeneuve using that ‘old chestnut’ of the boiling pot in the corner as a way of enhancing the suspense of the scene. And it works really well here. Here’s the thing, though... I remember back in the early 1980s, Phiilp K. Dick complaining about that scene when he read it in the script and saying that it was one of the worst things he’d read (or words to that effect), condemning the tone of the film Ridley Scott was about to make (although I understand that, from what footage was available of the original that Dick actually saw back in 1982 before his untimely death, he really liked the final film Ridley was making and praised it wholeheartedly). However, I can’t help but think that, with the reintroduction of a variant on that opening (which I kinda guessed they would be doing here, to be fair), he would be turning in his grave.

One of the things which I’ve always loved about the original is the fact that Deckard is never portrayed as being a replicant... something Scott tried to change on all subsequent versions of the movie. There are lots of reasons why he actually wouldn’t be a replicant (quite apart from the fact that Philip K. Dick’s original novel explores the same issue more implicitly and categorically states that he’s not an android)... for instance the weakness of him against any other replicant in the film (newer model or not). In fact he actually gets rescued from death by two replicants in that first film... admittedly by one who is trying to, at first, kill him at the end of the picture in the case of one of them. I’ve never believed for a moment that Deckard could ever be a replicant, despite Scott continuing to say he is... because the evidence just doesn’t stack up. My biggest worry would be that this film would paint him as a replicant but the writers are quite clever here. We have a scenario where Jared Leto’s Niander Wallace character... a more evil equivalent of Doctor Eldon Tyrell from the first movie... kinda assumes that Deckard is but poses the question to him because he isn’t certain.

And... I still think he isn’t. And here’s why...

Villeneuve has gone on record that the original studio cut is his favourite (like me) but that he’s made this one as a sequel to the Final Cut. I think not, actually. This film seems to me to be a sequel more to the original studio cut than people might, at first, realise. The story involves Gosling’s ‘K’ hunting the child of Deckard and his replicant lover from the first film, Rachel (played by Sean Young back in 1982 and again... wait, I’ll get to that in a minute). The back story here is that Rachel died about five years after 2019, in childbirth, due to a C-section. So there you go, if I got my timelines correct, already the film is sequelling the original ‘drive off in to the sunset’ ending where Rachel is deemed a special replicant with no built in, four year life span. Secondly, if Deckard was a replicant then how could he have impregnated Rachel? One or the other sex would surely be manufactured as impotent? Especially since a lot of them were destined to be ‘pleasure models’ and engage in sexual activity. After all, if you’re making replicants, you surely don’t want your male replicants running around shooting anything other than blanks in the reproduction department, do you? So, yeah, I’m happy to say that, as far as I’m concerned, this movie categorically proves Deckard is not a replicant. Finally. End of discussion and we can finally return to seeing that original ending with the origami unicorn fashioned by Edward James Olmos’ character Gaff (who returns in a brief scene with another origami animal here), as the metaphor for Deckard believing in a myth, for what it was. Thank goodness.

Okay... so Rachel. Just under a year ago I complained about the bad job the computer graphics guys had done with resurrecting Peter Cushing’s character in Rogue One (reviewed here). Something I still  stick by now. Well, we have a similar disappointment here where Niander Wallace has created a new version of Rachel who looks somewhat similar to what she did in the original (presumably voiced by Sean Young? It doesn’t say in the IMDB). Except, like Cushing in Rogue One, the CGI character looks really dodgy to me and if I didn’t know she was a recreation of a younger character, I would still see that something was really ‘off’ about her here. This just doesn’t work for me and although the way the character bows out of the film is quite dramatic, it kind of takes the edge off any emotional response to the character I might have had, I think.

One last thing...

There’s a scene in Dick’s original novel emphasising the lack of empathy the androids have which is where, after finally saving enough money up to afford to buy a real animal (a sheep which Deckard names Groucho), one of the female androids throws it off the roof and kills it. There’s a similar incident going for the same emotional beat here, where Gosling’s virtual companion has deliberately put herself in a situation where she has become... for all intents and purposes... mortal. The lead replicant villainess destroys her in a similar throwaway moment and this, at least, is something which I think Philip K. Dick might have been able to appreciate. So there’s that.

Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s new score is trying hard to be like the Vangelis original but it gets way too overbearing a lot of the time. I would have preferred to hear what Jóhann Jóhannson would have done with the movie before he ‘left’ the project. Interestingly, there’s a moment at the end where, from what I can tell, ‘K’ dies from his wounds. As he lets go of his life, we get a new version of the Vangelis Tears In Rain music from the original movie, which underscored the death of Rutger Hauer’s character. However, since the replicants don’t seem to die from injuries too seriously unless shot somewhere vital, it seems to me that you could interpret this moment as 'K' just having a rest for a while. After all, there’s no visual metaphor like the release of the dove from the replicant’s dying hands as in the 1982 version. So it’s interesting that, unless you know the music, you may not realise the character has died at the end, I suspect. However, I could be wrong and placing too much emphasis on the strength of the original score, to be fair. The soundtrack is filled with lots of similar (and in some cases identical), ambient sound effects as the template movie and sometimes, just like the original, you may have a hard time trying to work out where the music ends and the sound design kicks in.

The thing which the story did really well is to actually fool me with the twist reveal of the child of Deckard and Rachel. I was pretty sure who it was all the way through the movie until this moment it’s spelled out and it gives the character in question a new beat, as it were, in that the person is obviously ‘recruiting’ a replicant army by giving memories to various artificial characters. It’s a nice moment in a film which looks great (although not nearly as good as the original) and is full of nice moments such as this. However, for me, even though it’s trying, it just doesn’t feel anything like a sequel to Blade Runner. It doesn’t quite get there... but it does get close on the odd occasion.

One last piece of symmetry with the original, though, was the audience size. When the film came out and flopped back in ‘82, I remember being in a cinema with my parents and there were literally maybe just over ten people in the audience. Well, quite surprisingly, since this new movie has had such high praise, I found myself in the same situation in a 3D screening on opening night, where there were again just over ten people. Which puzzled me and, I can tell you, I saw two couples walk out of the movie at various points. Which I find quite interesting because, whether it lives up to the original or not (and I’m siding with ‘not’), it’s still quite a nice piece of cinema on its own merits.

My friend, who I have been seeing screenings of the original film with since the mid 1980s, was with me for this performance and I think his reaction to the movie pretty much sums it up the best for me. As we both left the cinema, he looked in about as pretty much a state of mixed irritation and dejection with Blade Runner 2049 as I was feeling. He turned to me and said six words... “What was the point of that?” Other than to point out the studio were going for some cash again, I really couldn’t think of a good answer or disagree with his sentiment. For me, I’m afraid, it’s too bad this sequel won’t live... but then again, who does?