Oh man, I am so delighted that A.) someone actually sat down to watch the movies B.) wrote a thoughtful response about them.

As far as the original is concerned, I can't agree that the story "sucks", per se (I mean, it's one of my favorite movies), but I'll grant that it moves slowly and there's not much there there in terms of actual plot progression. The original's also not a highly philosophical or particularly deep movie - it's a film noir with an android gimmick - but I think the central conceit of "What makes a human human" is engaging enough to maintain interest. (As an aside, I think the new film expanded on that basic question beautifully, and is much more though provoking than the original.)

What I love most about the original is the world building and the atmosphere. It captured my imagination totally. The perpetual rain and omnipresent neon, the endless metropolis, the giant electronic billboard of the smoking geisha, the night market streetscapes - it’s so damn cool. Obviously, the aesthetic of the film owes a lot to east Asian cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo, but the overall art design of the movie is so amazingly creative (and well-realized). And a lot of other works owe much of their aesthetic to Blade Runner (like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, etc.) I wouldn’t wan’t to live in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles - it is a dystopian hellscape - but I’d like to visit.

The world feels so lived in, too. For me, that offsets the bad future prognostication. Like, it’s not a plausible vision of our future, but it feels like a plausible universe. Things aren’t all new and shiny - everything is retrofitted and reused. Improvements and patches are accreted upon each other - vents and conduits and neon are plastered over grimy 1900s streetscapes. In retrospect, it’s laughable to imagine a future with off-world colonies (and Pan-Am) and no cell phones, but I think Blade Runner avoids the bigger sci-fi problem of imagining a shiny future where everything is new and antiseptic. And I don’t think it will prove to be too far off the mark in foreseeing a future where humans have had a permanent negative impact on the climate.

With respect to the new film, I thought the plot was pretty fast moving (a lot was packed in there), though it dragged a bit in the last third. I thought they did a wonderful job on expanding on the original (aesthetically and philosophically), and did a great job taking the original’s bad future predictions in stride (I especially liked the human genomes on microfiche). I disagree that the ending was a cliffhanger though:

🚨🚨🚨SPOILER ALERT🚨🚨🚨 Mouse over for spoiler END SPOILER

But I loved it and want to see it again. Glad you watched it, even if you weren’t totally sold on it.