The story is so much more than "marginally interesting."
When do creations made by human gain true sentience? When do they gain rights? What happens when these replicants are so advanced that their status as replicant is difficult to impossible to detect?
What makes us human in the first place? How do we know our memories are genuine? Without our experiences and memories, are we just organic robots?
Blade Runner gets a few of common pieces of criticisms:
1. Pacing. It feels slow. This might blow your mind: The movie is only 2 hours. The sequel is about 45 minutes longer. I think this criticism is, frankly, invalid. Plenty of art/indie films get positive points for being contemplative, but this is a detractor from Blade Runner for some reason. Pineapple Express has the exact same run time, Sex and the City 2 is longer.
2. Story and dialog. The movie is hard to understand the first time you watch it if you aren't hearing every word of dialog and processing it. I think this is the most valid criticism, but, again, it's supposed to be a good thing for a movie to challenge you to think, to take in context clues, rather than spoon-feeding you how you should feel like it's a summer blockbuster Marvel movie.
3. The ending. It's not much of one, there isn't a big payoff anywhere. This type of ending is somehow totally fine for art/indie films but "not okay" here. Personally, I think we're supposed to feel like being a Blade Runner is a bit pointless. The ending is unsatisfying on purpose, just like the endings in Disco Elysium.
>1. Pacing. It feels slow. This might blow your mind: The movie is only 2 hours. The sequel is about 45 minutes longer. I think this criticism is, frankly, invalid. Plenty of art/indie films get positive points for being contemplative, but this is a detractor from Blade Runner for some reason. Pineapple Express has the exact same run time, Sex and the City 2 is longer.
Pacing has nothing to do with movie runtime. A movie can be 3 hours with incredible pacing. Additionally a movie CAN be both contemplative and have great pacing. In the group of movies that have pretty bad pacing, Blade runner is one of the front runners.
That being said, many people have the ability to ignore pacing many people can't. Personally for me I can ignore pacing, but I very much notice it's absence and a movie is actually worse off without good pacing. Blade runner to me is therefore a good movie despite horrible pacing.
>2. Story and dialog. The movie is hard to understand the first time you watch it if you aren't hearing every word of dialog and processing it. I think this is the most valid criticism, but, again, it's supposed to be a good thing for a movie to challenge you to think, to take in context clues, rather than spoon-feeding you how you should feel like it's a summer blockbuster Marvel movie.
This is debatable. There's a sort of catharsis involved with solving a puzzle and deriving solutions from information not given explicitly. But if a movie delivers information too obscure not everyone can fully solve the puzzle and for those that don't the movie is raw shit. Seriously. If someone can't figure it out, then the movie is effectively horrible to THOSE people.
A movie is not suppose to be a puzzle. It's just suppose to feel like one. A movie should provide the right amount of foreshadowing, hints, expose, and explanation such that the audience FEELS like they are solving a puzzle. Movies that are actual puzzles are sort of snobbish as they are deliberately targeting puzzle solvers, not a general audience.
Blade runner to me is unintentionally a puzzle. It wasn't Ridley's scotts intention to make the thematic elements of the movie so hard to parse.
>3. The ending. It's not much of one, there isn't a big payoff anywhere. This type of ending is somehow totally fine for art/indie films but "not okay" here. Personally, I think we're supposed to feel like being a Blade Runner is a bit pointless. The ending is unsatisfying on purpose, just like the endings in Disco Elysium.
I thought disco elysium was more satisfying. It had better pacing which made the ending have a better payoff. Inception is also a movie with a ambiguose ending but PEOPLE loved it.
The problem with Blade runner is not really the ambiguous ending. It's because the pacing that built to the pay off was really bad and the thematic elements are hard for a general audience to parse so throwing an ending that's ambiguous on top of all of that just makes everything seem much worse.
That's what a movie is. Most people judge a movie strictly on the story but you can get a story from a book. What does the film medium add? A movie is also editing, sound design, cinematography, acting, sets, costumes, etc.
Same. I've always liked the phrase, "it's not what you say, it's how you say it."
The human voice is an instrument and I don't care about the lyrics to most songs. They usually aren't saying anything interesting. To me it's more about how they say it.
The story pacing was horrible. However thematic elements in the story were revolutionary sci-fi at the time. The whole AI/replicant/consciousness thematic elements really spawned from this movie.
Terminator 2 is an example of a movie that sort of built on these concepts but had incredible pacing.
Blade Runner was a masterpiece in those areas (when combined) and defined it’s genre/aesthetic.