I Watch Films: Blade Runner 2049

Ten reasons Joi might not like Nabokov’s Pale Fire:

1. A nine hundred and ninety nine line poem is just too long. I mean, really, too long.
2. She knows three lines of it are used for Kay’s baseline tests, which are stressful and potentially dangerous.
3. Kinbote, who writes the notes that make up the majority of Pale Fire, is an extremely unpleasant man.
4. In fact everyone in Pale Fire is unpleasant, they’re petty and annoying and bound up in their own concerns.
5. Kinbote is clearly misreading the poem, forcing it into his own frame that it doesn’t fit.
6. Not only does the frame not fit, but the very ideas he’s trying to claim it’s about are weird, nonsensical, and self-aggrandising.
7. Someone in Pale Fire hints they’re the lost prince, and this is too close to a major plot point of Blade Runner 2049.
8. The book operates on several levels of reality, or rather several levels of fiction, and a holographic artificial human in a relationship with a replicant does not want to dwell on how appearances and reality intermingle, and how self-delusion is a very powerful force in their artificial life.
9. Nabokov was a native Russian yet wrote amazing gorgeous English and she’s jealous.
10. The film is already deeply in conversation with its predecessor and more intertextual nonsense just annoys her.

As for Blade Runner 2049, it’s slow-paced, insists on leaving (Greater) Los Angeles at every opportunity which is weird for an urban cyberpunk neo-noir film, creates several stunning visual sequences and nicely matches theme, plot and character together. A polished, confident and clever film.

Watch This: Even if you’ve not seen all the 2048 previous films in the franchise
Don’t Watch This: If long slow scenes of weird landscapes with music that is – perhaps, just – not as iconic as the original film, interrupted by flashes of brutal violence, is not for you.