I did, kinda, right after I saw it Friday, moved as I was by the vision of it, the colorful yet stately photography by Roger Deakins (I wasn't convinced we'd see a more beautiful movie out of Hollywood this year), the score that wasn't overbearing until the end credit crawl, and even a number of the questions it posed about the challenges of (and faced by) artificial life: when does programming turn from algorithms into emotion? What are our responsibilities to the lives we create?
But the more I think about this thing, the less it matters to me. We're shown a more greatly ravaged Los Angeles than previously (it's snowing there in 2049, and a climactic fight scene is staged just outside a levee along the Pacific Ocean), but the effect is one of reading an editorial on the things to come, not a couple of hours spent in that world. It poses intriguing notions about intimacy, sex, and love between different artificial life forms, but the voice that yells OMG SEXBOTZ turns out to be the loudest here; director Denis Villeneuve seems more enthralled by the increasingly larger nude women that dot his landscape than he is interested in interrogating their politics, or even their identities. Taking a cue, perhaps, from the nonhumans it concerns, it doesn't feel like it breathes, and it doesn't linger. The bracing emotional moments seem placed there as part of a design, like Villeneuve's filling a quota, and given nowhere new to land outside the movie's artfully dreary visual stew they can't land with anything like grace.
We're kept at arm's length from the wonders before us, and there's much to marvel at visually but ultimately little to feel. For the latest, largest work by a filmmaker who's made a name for some of the most viscerally unsettling movies of the last decade, Villeneuve's latest is strangely, disappointingly anaesthetizing. And it's made me wonder how much I ever really cared about Ridley Scott's original movie, which is not a terrific accomplishment by a thirty-five-years-later follow-up. Maybe another viewing would clear up my issues with it but it hardly seems worth the effort. Anyway.
