I was really excited about his career until Blade Runner 2049 which I thought was just as pretty and vacuous as the original. After that disappointment I watched Incendies and it made me realize the downhill slope he’s been riding on since that movie. He has rarely come close to making something as good as that movie, or just the bus scene in that movie alone (ending of Sicario is close).
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I’ve seen all his readily available movies and I still have no sense of who he is beyond being a solid and glacial craftsman.
For what it’s worth, this is the first film since Incendies which he’s actually written.
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Oh shit! That makes me feel a lot less cynical about this.
idk, the idea of a movie wherein the sapir-whorf hypothesis is used to explain how learning a language can make you see the future being something that is intriguing and exciting for people interested in linguistics is kind of like if there was a movie where scientists figure out that gravity can make things fall upward if you turn them upside down and people expected it to be exciting to physicists
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In terms of its emotional stakes it was an extremely complicated way to ask the question “would you still have a kid if you knew for certain they would die young and in pain” which is more an Okcupid question than a genuine internal struggle.
The thing about Villaneuve’s movies is they always work for me, in the moment. They only fall apart when the credits hit and I think about them for 10 seconds
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oscar isaac looks like he’s wearing origami armor, i’m into it
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If you all haven’t watched Day of the Soldado yet, you really should.
i love 2049, the sequence in/around the crashed vehicle near the end is pretty much canon imo
never seen his other movies lol
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I have a similar reaction, his films are near-perfect imitations of good movies.
But that’s enough for me! Bring on dingy office Dune
truly a ridley scott for our times
but honestly, scott has managed to make a couple of movies that are actually good over the years, so i think this is a good place to be.
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Ridley Scott is an anti-auteur.
Consummate professional/craftsman who brings almost nothing (specifically, identifiably them) to any given project other than “it will look really good by some metric” and “the performances will probably mostly be fine?” He’s a jobber like any other except his gift as a visual stylist helped him make a couple stone classics* early in his career, and he’s a confident white dude with enough connections who started at the right time to bull past all the misses between his hits.
When he really gets into development on the script level, his instincts seem to be pretty hit-or-miss? Extremely inconsistent storyteller with no real voice. But he can shoot the hell out of a movie!
He’s like a living fossil from the golden age of the Studio System. Just cranking out movie after movie well into old age when most folks I can think of that map closely are like, stuck grinding out Netflix comedies seven to twelve people have scrolled past on their roku, now.
*one of these is of course The Duellists
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like,… WHAT?
OpenRA?
Yeah I think it’s notable that a lot of the feminist subtext of Alien for example seems to be derived from Geiger’s aesthetics and the casting of Ripley as a woman, neither of which were true at the start of the project.
Didn’t Hauer actually write the tears in the rain monologue too?
It’s to Scott’s credit that he didn’t get in the way of the good things about those movies, and perhaps even encouraged them once he saw they were there, but it’s pretty clear he wasn’t the main reason for them in the first place.
And I don’t even like most of blade runner outside of the tears in the rain monologue that much.
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Hauer rewrote the monologue, yeah.
The set, prop, and costume design are all great as well.
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I can understand the story and characters not gelling with people, but more than a lot of near future anticipation stories, the sets of Blade Runner feel naturally busy, lived in and built upon with the weight of time and history in a way that’s still engrossing, something that 2049 doesn’t seem to fully grasp.
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If you caught me early enough in life (like 15-23?) I’d have told you that Blade Runner (I watched the Director’s Cut on VHS) was one of my Three Favorite Movies (tied with Apocalypse Now and My Own Private Idaho (yes it still took me until I was 30ish to admit to myself I was A Gay shut up no you it’s you who are a dumbo not me, never me!)) and it still lulled me to sleep half the time, between the haze and the meandering and the Vangelis noodling. It’s a technical masterpiece that follows a cipher around while they murder all the interesting characters, which is obviously The Point, but then Scott is obsessed with underlining the cipher as also secretly one of the oppressed class that they’re murdering, which pays off some details and can smooth off some of the more problematic parts (if you’re feeling generous) but undercuts… the entire movie? If Roy saves the life of, and makes the tears in rain speech at, Secretly Another Replicant, instead of this asshole murderhuman, then… ?
Just an oblique gotcha for true internet hollerboys to insist on until the sequel negates it.
He is popularly credited with Let’s Make This Ripley Fella A Woman, though.
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I think in the context of like ill advised attempts to revisit sci fi classics of the 80s, BR 2049 is incredibly good (its company here being like The Thing prequel, the Total Recall remake, etc. This is also how you can prove that the Star Wars sequels are good), but like most of these things it probably just… did not need to happen.
I don’t really like the way making a sequel to a movie set in 2019 in the year 2017 forces you to concede that the whole thing is just some kind of alternate reality fantasy. I would much rather see someone try to make a similarly aesthetically ambitious take on what “the future” looks like from the perspective of the current present, rather than make something that is so beholden to the now outdated version of the future we got in the 80’s.
That’s I guess why I’m kind of weirdly optimistic about Dune? We will never have to worry about getting anachronistic perspectives on the year 10,000 or whatever. But it would be better to just have something new…
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Just a reminder to all that the best followups to both Blade Runner and Alien are the adventure game (and >Observer_) and Isolation.
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how else can Villeneuve exploit the Westwood Studios back catalogue after doing Blade Runner and Dune? Maybe a Command and Conquer movie?
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