this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
139 points (94.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43965 readers
1798 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just watched both bladerunner movies (idk which versions of them) and was rather underwhelmed. The cinematic grand setpieces i can apprechiate and see how they can be captivating for some but the story (or bith of them rather) wasnt very good imo. The worldbuilding is ambitious but the logic behind everything is lacking. Its just not "realistic" enough for me. I get thats sci-fi but for me it feels more like a fantasy movie like idk avatar or harry potter, rather than sci-fi which is supposed to play in our world/universe but with advanced tech. Things like not being able to distinguish replicants (first movie I just didnt buy. And then in the second one there is a gadget that can do just that.
And also Ryan Gosling played pretty badly (maybe it was the script), no emotions, (almost) no storytelling in his mimic, emotions, in his character at all. He is almost like a wax figure, during watching I multiple times had to pause and complain to my co-watcher about his performance, as it too was unrealistic and too stoic for my taste
I feel like I'm the only person I know who really enjoyed the sheer visual masterpiece that was the second movie. Gosling is supposed to under-react here, and that he does well, right until the point that he breaks.
I mean, I get both. Sometimes it felt more like a documentary whith grand and cinematic images of the city and few spoken words, I can apprechiate that, altho its not what I am looking for in a movie.
I suspected that he is supposed to not really show emotions, to show how he is trained/at the "baseline" and how he is not quite human. But I couldn't see a gradual/fine development nor "hidden" or suppressed emotions behind his cold pokerface. (Apart from the one moment at the memory girl's)
To be fair, you have to remember that the story the that the first film was based on was published in 1968. It's basically a form of the "Seinfeld isn't funny" trope. Just about every work of sci-fi, about being able to (or not) tell human from machine has borrowed one thing or another from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or the first Bladerunner film in one way or another. It's basically impossible not to.
So I wonder if your opinion of it, watching it for the first time in 2024 could be colored by that. If all of those themes have been beaten to death again and again, satirized, parodied, meme-ified, then eventually cycling around to being cool again, then maybe you're noticing all of those things as the tropes/memes they became.
I would say like half of Rick and Morty episodes are a take on a Philip K. Dick plot point. Had I not read his novels before being exposed to that stuff, I'm sure I would have probably caught more about how poorly written his female characters were, for example. But at the time I was just too blown away by the concepts this dude had come up with that it didn't matter to me.
Yea, me watching it so many ywars after it came out definitely colored my opinion. Its like that with many "first" movies, from Tron to Metropolis, that the original appeal decreases as the motives and filmmaking techniques arent as new anymore, because of those movies. One would have to watch "generic" movies from that year to really apprechiate the innovative parts which then got replicated over and over.
I try to consume media in the context of the time period it was made, but sometimes it can be difficult to overlook some things.