Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

My past experience of Blade Runner (1982) consisted of watching the Director's Cut with my dad in 2003 and the Final Cut at AFI in 2015, the latter serving only to enhance my already great appreciation. I'd also read the loose literary basis, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in between, helping me understand a couple aspects that hadn't gotten much explanation on screen. Thus Dad and I independently got the idea to see the sequel in a theater before long. I can't speak for his optimism, but mine was cautious, noting that (1) long waits usually mean big differences, (2) people were saying nine years ago that Harrison Ford was getting too old to reprise his action roles, (3) Ridley Scott ceded the director's chair to Denis Villeneuve, and (4) Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty couldn't appear in it.

Thirty years after the events of BR, uncannily humanoid organic robots, called "replicants," have become common and mostly legal on Earth, albeit subject to rampant bigotry. Older models, which don't all have the limited lifespan from BR are less cooperative as slaves and thus marked for death at the hands of special forces inexplicably called "blade runners," who are at least typically replicants themselves. LAPD Officer KD6-3.7 (Ryan Gosling), usually going by "K," shows no desire to rebel -- until after the site of one of his hits reveals the fossils of a once-pregnant replicant. Since news of this possibility interferes with the public narrative that replicants are too distinct for human rights, K's boss (Robin Wright) orders him to hunt down and kill the now-adult child. His subsequent detective work continues to blow fuses in his head, metaphorically speaking; and the closer he gets, the more that certain parties try to remove him from the picture....

The Martian (2015)

Thanks to my vacation and time catching up on other things, I have a lot of movies to review. For once, I won't review them in the order in which I viewed them, because it doesn't matter and I'd rather give priority to the more widely interesting ones. In particular, I'd like to review the Oscar nominees before the ceremony on Sunday.

Set at some unspecified but probably near-future date, the action begins on Mars -- and I do mean action, within the first five minutes. A massive dust storm jeopardizes a small crew of astronauts. When Mark Watney (Matt Damon) gets knocked out of visible range and his suit stops sending signals, the mission commander (Jessica Chastain) reluctantly decides that they are better off presuming him dead and leaving the planet early. (Sounds familiar, but Watney doesn't blame them.) Having miraculously survived the onslaught, Watney uses his relevant knowledge, especially as a botanist, to extend his food supply, enhance his transportation capacity, and eventually establish communications with Earth. But no matter what solution the best minds in science can devise, any rescue effort will be a close shave. Manned flights to Mars take years, after all.