Reviews

While the action and effects of this movie were above the original (thanks to a much bigger budget, after the first was a hit), the story, acting and characters are not. The original had imagination, and characters that felt like real people you could root for. It was a tight, imaginative and stylish thriller.

"T2", as it was marketed, has Sarah Connor turn into a completely unlikable mental case, with a whiny, emo, 90s "grunge hipster" son. Worst of all, for purely commercial purposes, it creates a nonsensical excuse for bringing back Arnold's Terminator -- as a good guy.

Yeah. The Terminator of the original becomes a good guy, and stays that way for the rest of the series. And it had to happen solely because Arnold became a big star. Lame all around. It makes you wonder what would have happened if they had put the story first, Arnold or not. We'll never know.

Some may say, "come on, you're kidding", but the truth is, aside from time travel, everything this movie predicted is coming true technology-wise. Robots, AI, drones, the internet, etc. Skynet...Google? It could actually happen.

That, aside from Arnold and its totally solid plot and action, is why this movie and (some of) its sequels became so successful. It is almost entirely possible that this could happen.

Having watched a lot of sci-fi, I can't think of anything else that predicted this accurately what kinds of technology would be developed in the future.

Aside from that, the movie is kind of a standard thriller with a killer on the loose, but it's done very well. The budget may have been a little bit thin, but the premise and execution by James Cameron are excellent. This is his best movie, before he got pretentious.

As a piece of visual art, Blade Runner is very impressive.

The problem is that it never gets around to telling a good story. The story that is there is extremely drawn out, and depressing. It is a slow, boring, melodramatic movie that has very little humanity (which is part of the premise), and nothing for the viewer to care about. It's a pretentious, navel-gazing art house film dressed up as a sci-fi/film noir thriller.

Vangelis's score is sometimes praised, but really not very good. Aside from a few good moments, he's mostly playing weak jazz and blues on synthesizers, or somber piano music.

As science fiction, it's kind of interesting in retrospect to see what predictions it got right, and what it got wrong. In Blade Runner's 2019, smartphones and flat screen TVs have not been invented, but androids and flying cars have.

The Terminator, which came out two years later and had a similar (but crucially different) concept, is a much better movie on almost every front, both as a story and as science fiction, although it had a smaller budget and less impressive visuals.

It's not hard to see why Blade Runner flopped at the box office, despite the pedigree it had. Word of mouth could not have been good. The fact that it's been resurrected in critical estimation is entirely about the visual imagery it created, which was, to be fair, mind-blowing for the time and extremely influential on later films. But that shouldn't mislead people into thinking it was a good movie. It wasn't. Its rating on this site is way, way too high. Be warned.

*POSSIBLE SPOILER*

The entire film is basically the examination of a concept: "If robots started to develop emotions, what would that be like?". That's it. It just dwells on that question in excruciating, overwrought, detail for two hours. The plot is paper thin, and an afterthought to the real point of the movie, which seems to have been the visual imagery. The word I used above is how I would sum it up: excruciating. It would probably be a better movie if you watched it with the sound off, and some electronic music playing.