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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i don’t rate nolan as high as you do so i haven’t paid attention to it as much as you have— and therefore i haven’t elucidated his personal “stamp”.
i liked nolan best with memento, which was so raw and so well done on the cheap. inception had all this money and special effects and shit but i’m not sure the whole dance of memory and loss and uncertainty in it was an improvement from the tattoos and faded polaroids of memento.
i have not seen insterstellar or dunkirk yet— i should within the year most likely. this and that happened. i am just not a fan of the batman. i loved batman when i was literally 3. it’s hard for me to keep the same interests for life. i feel these movies are too ponderous for the subject matter. not saying this to piss anyone off, just it’s how i see it— i’ve witnessed them as inevitable pop culture phenomena, but wasn’t moved by them in any important way.
anyway i didn’t know villeneuve before this either, i think, looking at his credits, so it’s doubly hard to compare them.
where it’s easy for me to compare is between this and the original movue. and it may be the money or the technology or i don’t know what but aesthetically for me this blows the older one out of the water. it’s roger deakins for sure but also maybe the director’s vision.
***SPOILERS FOLLOW***
in terms of story, the original is pretty straightforward, with just one big reveal, whereas this has multiple twists and turns and surprises—including a twist that changes the original film.
thematically also it’s more ambitious because while in the first one you knew (were told) the earth was a shithole and everybody who could would go off-world, here you actually see huge landscapes, which are presumably worse after the first story, and instead of being stuck mostly in obvious sets (crammed urban streets or the house of the dna designer, what’s his name) here you get this epic sense of a devastated planet. the LA landfill in san diego—ha! there is a whole ecological subtext here that was missing from the original. the bees, and those statues like the planet of the apes.
and the other thing is that here the levels of artificiality are stacked on top of each other—it’s not just human vs replicatn but there’s also digital “life” which we can’t tell about it— is it conscious and does it feel or is it just faking it? this one isn’t spike jonze’s “her” but just a more ambiguous sower of doubts about what’s “real” and what’s not (“i’ve felt inside you and there isn’t as much there as you think”— ha ha ha ha).
but anyway there were some embryonic ideas there that i wanted to see more of— the role of women as the future— the whole movie is about women and their wombs, really, but for all their cosmic importance they get a) very little screen time vs. the menzes, and b) we look at them only from the outside/from a distance c) sorta fill these usual stereotypes. even if supposedly every replicant gets to see inside the child messiah’s head— we the audience don’t get to know her the way we get to know k, who is the center of this film the way deckard was the previous one. so when he returns there’s 2 people we know and they’re both dudes. the “girlfriend”— is sweet, but might just be a mirage. the rebellion leader has 30 seconds of screen time. the replicant girl who evokes pris from the old one— is there only briefly.
and this is why i think this movie points towards a sequel— it actually implies it. the future belongs to women, as one review online states (replicant women, i should add), but we haven’t gotten to that part yet. when is it coming?
***SPOILERS END****
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Very good, except for that nonsense about the he Dark Knight movies not being moving or whatever. It’s like you had a little seizure there in the middle of a perfectly coherent thought. Poor thing.
But yes, I agree about the women.
HOWEVER... I was impressed by just how well Ryan Gosling can hold a movie together on his own. I mean, think about it... he has NEVER be so front-and-Center in a film from beginning to end. Not even in Drive. In this, it was Gosling/K, from minute 3 to the end. He really carried the emotional weight of the entire three hour movie, and he did it surprisingly well.
It doesn’t make the stereotype women any less disappointing, but it’s interestung to see an actor really take the audience trough essentially EVERY SINGLE SCENE. Not just anyone could do that. Not just any film could do that and have it work.
Cinematography was exceptional and I think Deakins will win an Oscar.
I like the way you describe the expanded ecology of this film too. The bee scene was utterly fucking badass.
You might be right. This might be better than the original.