It's about 24 hours since I walked out of the cinema...

This reads like a troll post. Did you really love it THAT much?

I wanted to love this movie, I really did. I did like individual parts of it, but when it was done it just didn't work for me overall. Some of the things that bugged me:

  • The cinematography just felt like "art for the sake of art". It completely threw me out of the movie. Everything looked "too perfect", "too meticulously designed". I just kept imagining the whole set outside the view of the camera, instead of being taken in by the world. It didn't feel real. It was missing the messiness / randomness / imprefection of reality. It felt like a series of perfect photoshoot sets edited together. I never felt drawn into the world.

  • Gosling's character evolution was confusing and his acting felt emotionally inconsistent. His character growth hinges entirely on the childhood memory. The bullied orphan with a single treasured posession has been done to death and was so shallow. If there had been more substance in the plot to support his character growth, I could have overlooked that one point. But there wasn't anything else. I liked the Joi subplot but it didn't fit into the overarching story. I felt like the Gosling / Joi plot and the Gosling / memory / child plot were two separate ideas and they were never quite able to figure out how to connect them together.

Also, at the beginning of the movie we're told new model replicants were designed to "obey", that they didn't have the flaws of the old models (Gosling even makes a comment about this in the scene with Bautista). So the whole movie I'm thinking, ok maybe Gosling is different because he's a replicant child and that's why he's having this struggle. But then at the end we find out he's just a normal replicant. I never felt like the motivations behind his journey were genuine.

  • The only threat in the movie was from Leto's enforcer replicant. Leto was ridiculous and over the top, couldn't take him seriously. While the enforcer replicant is a bit of a standard "henchman cut out", I thought the actress was quite good and elevated the character. Without her there would have been no tension in the movie.

  • I didn't have any reason to care about the real replicant child / memory girl. She had one scene in the entire movie and half of it was taken up by the exposition of her explaining her situation. Like, she's just sitting in this room her whole life creating replicant memories as a sub contractor? It just seemed bizarre.

  • Robin Wright's character was just silly. She's talking about maintaining the balance of society, but she's just some run of the mill police Lt. The stuff she's talking about seemed way above her pay grade, it was an eye roll.

  • The replicant rebellion thing at the end seemed tacked on. They were barely part of the movie and then they used that scene for major revelation of the child. It fell completely flat to me.

Idk, I feel kind of bad beeing a killjoy about this movie. I went to the theatre for this because this is the kind of movie that I want to support and see succeed. But I just think it was a 7/10 at best and probably more like a 6/10 for me personally.

/r/movies Thread