This is a warning. I saw Blade Runner this afternoon... at least some of it. I would have seen more of it but I kept falling asleep. At one point I thought to myself, maybe there's some kind of drug you need to take to slow your mind enough to match the phlegmatic, painfully slow. almost slow motion pace of this movie. I found it to be excruciatingly slow.
My take is that the director, Denis Villeneuve, was so pompous and self-righteous in trying to keep the acting low key, except for Harrison Ford's predicatable outrage (it was good in StarWars, okay in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but by now, it was predictably tiresome.)
I have to say that I did enjoy Villeneuve's previous movie, Arrival. But I walked out of the movie wanting to blame someone and to identify a director or screenwriter I would never want to see again. The blame is probably with Michael Green, who wrote the screenplay.
Believe me, I wanted to love this movie. But it the best word to describe it was soporific, and I watched it in an iMax theater with huge surround sound speakers. I'd hoped the music would be good, but they abusively over used deep bass synth sounds to go with air cars driving through a futuristic city with giant holographic women. The vision of the future was hackneyed and stale
The actors had little to work with and seemed to have been forced to talks a s s . l o . w . l . y a s t h e y could. I can't even type to represent slow.
On top of that, the movie is two hours, forty two minutes long-- about an hour longer than it should have been. They could have cut out that hour without eliminating any scenes or dialogue. Seriously.
I went to see an afternoon screening, in a giant iMax theater that usually sells out with hot movies. This time there were maybe a dozen people in the whole theater.
This could be THE bomb of 2017.
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