Blade Runner 2049 is a deep and interesting film fueled by visual spectacle and cleverly-handled ambiguity. The film’s dialogue is sparse and carefully weighted, and the intricate plot resolves itself fairly satisfactorily (even though the film takes its sweet time getting there). Nonetheless, it fails to live up to its predecessor. It struggles to make headway with the theological commentary of the original – lines about Replicants being “angels” are unjustified, and are thankfully marginal. (more…)
The iron cage of abstract materiality threatens to suffocate Western man. In a time when his systems of government threaten to devour him; when his pride is condemned as hate; his women are cold, mocking, and infertile; and the virility of idealism is desecrated everywhere, a miracle has happened: out of the pit of Hollywood itself a film has erupted bearing witness to the mysterious and inexhaustible fertility of love.
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Greg Johnson, John Morgan, and Michael Polignano reconvene for a new weekly Counter-Currents Radio podcast. This week, we discuss Blade Runner 2049 and the commemoration of Syrian martyrs event in Belgium that took place earlier this month. Note: There are lots of plot spoilers. (more…)
American popular culture is vile, degenerate, and a substance so toxic that it should only be kept within the Level 5 containment vault of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta next to the Petri dish that contains the only remaining sample of smallpox. The typical Hollywood movie is an offense to morality, the senses, and the intellect. Only a handful of post-1960 movies can be said to achieve the status of art. Curiously, one of these is the original Blade Runner of 1982.
It is dangerous work, making a sequel to a classic like Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 magnum opus. French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a very good film, but it inevitably falls short of the original.
I first discovered Villeneuve’s work with his 2016 science fiction film Arrival (discussed with John Morgan here). Arrival impressed me as a highly imaginative science fiction film with an original visual style, told with an appealingly deliberate art-film pacing, with a stunning plot twist and a powerful emotional payoff. (more…)
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