"Electric Dreams" is a series recently released by Channel 4 in UK, where each episode is based on a short story of Philip K. Dick. "Blade Runner 2049" follows the '82 adaptation of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by the same P.K. Dick and probably doesn't need more introduction. What's need maybe is a bit of context...
1) Contrary to the general opinion I've never considered "Blade Runner" (the old one) to be a masterpiece. It's just good and that's it. Actually, story concerned, given how much it loses from the original written material, I could even say it's average.
2) What I always appreciated on "Blade Runner" are the visuals and the audio. As much as it loses on the subject from the book, as closer it gets with the rest to a P.K. Dick "feeling".
3) The biggest plus of "Blade Runner", and the one that actually saves the story, is the mystery you're left with.
Now, moving to "Blade Runner 2049": 1) still holds - the movie is ok, but sorry - still no masterpiece here; obviously we have nothing to do with PKD's writing, but that's not such a big problem (was expectable)... 2) is fortunately still sort of valid, although I have complaints... and 3) all is lost, or well... 99%.
I'm gonna use 3) as an excuse not to tell anything about the story. It's already much too... "clarified" let's say. The major issue is the directing here. The movie has way too many lengthened scenes that really don't fit there. I understand the idea of "building momentum" for a scene and the need to relax the pace after others, but here this technique is extremely overused. My eyes shut twice in the first 40 minutes (it's true that I was tired). After, I managed to stay awake, but it still couldn't prevent me to check my watch a couple times. Moreover, the visuals and the audio are indirectly affected by these "zero-action" long scenes. There's one thing to watch for several seconds a transition frame = the dystopic environment, with all the visual filters and the audio synth on background (which is more like Brad Fiedel than Vangelis, but anyway, it works). There's a whole different thing to have that lengthened for minutes or worse, having scenes like that repeated with a noticeable frequency. It's exactly the same thing as in a Michael Bay's "Transformers" - if you would have one single explosion in the whole movie maybe you could get the details up to the piece of shrapnel flowing out Optimus Prime's wheels, and you'll think on how good the VFX team was to manage that. But when you have one hundred explosions is more probable to get tempted on computing if you have enough time to fetch another popcorn until the next story intermission.
I'm too hard on comparing these two indeed, here we don't have explosions, it's not happening for 100 times, and the movie is above all impeccable on the technical side, so at least for a first view the visuals won't bore you. However, fragmenting the action with these lengths is something that doesn't get away. And here I can draw a comparison with "Electric Dreams", or how "Blade Runner 2049" could've been better. An episode in "Electric Dreams" has less than one hour, in which we have story that at least in the 1st, 3rd and 5th part is comparable as amplitude with what we get in BR2049. "Electric Dreams" also doesn't care much about the written original, and obviously we can't compare the budget on an English TV show with a Hollywood production. And still, the idea of alternate reality, thing not being what they seem, and escaping from the current existence, which is the ground of pretty much everything by PKD, seems much better expressed by "Electric Dreams". Maybe it's also the way to leave open to the viewer to figure out what's there, stuff that's pretty much lost at the end of BR2049 and in ED is present in almost every episode. But I think is more continuity you have, or better said the lack of "dead" scenes. So, still the "lengths" are the issue :) ...
Rating: 3 out of 5 (for "Blade Runner 2049", "Electric Dreams" is still open ;) ...)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment