I thought Dunkirk was a steaming pile of shit. Christopher Nolan's flaws as a screenwriter and filmmaker have been increasingly apparent the more he's moved away from the kiddie superhero genre. He always lacks three dimensional characters, and with the lack of characters blasting exposition this time, the non-chronological narrative was even more disjointed than before.
I maintain the only three good films he's made are Memento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight, three films which contain simple, blockbuster-friendly stories that don't go over Nolan's unfortunately pretentious head.
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Blade Runner 2049 is insanely good, and better than the overrated original. Villeneuve has impressed me with pretty much every film he's ever got his hands on: Sicario was most definitely channelling Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now; Arrival is just simply one of the greatest sci-fi films Hollywood has ever made; and with Blade Runner he actually makes a good film out of the world Phillip K. Dick invented and Ridley Scott visualised without really forming a complete film from it.
2049 is the rare film I didn't fall asleep in (I normally fall asleep in movies that are mediocre-to-really good. I stay awake if they're horribly bad or insanely excellent). It's also a rare film where I wasn't aware of the running time. And it's an even rarer film that I'm going to go and watch for a second time in the cinema.
Now if only it had invested in philosophical discussions a la Stalker and Solyaris, 2049 would have been within distance of achieving sci-fi immortality. But it makes the same decision (or fatal mistake?) to raise questions of ethics and metaphysics pertaining to what constitutes humanity, without ever really addressing them. So it falls just a tad short of all-time greatness.
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