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Comment by plasma_beam | Hacker News Reader

So I like 2049 better than the first one. I think maybe has to do with I didn't grow up watching the first one, in fact didn't watch until I was an adult. I like the coldness aspect of 2049, and I think what really makes the difference is the Hans Zimmer score. The musical atmosphere is fantastic.

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It would be a far better movie if every scene with Jared Leto was deleted.

Interesting that the score makes the difference, the score from blade runner 1982 is really unique to me and inseparable from the movie. If I hear a single note from it I think about the movie and if I see a frame of the movie, I think about the music. I can't remember a single thing about the 2049 score, except that at the time I thought every interesting part was a shallow clone of the original mashed up with the main theme from Terminator 2 because someone thought it was about robots.

The original Blade Runner score is certainly innovative, and not bad, but I'd argue that it aged very poorly. The synthesizers they used may have sounded futuristic at the time, but watching it today, the soundscape screams "this film created in the early 80s." The use of a purely orchestral score in the Star Wars films is a big reason why they continue to hold up.

I mostly agree with you about Leto.

Aging well and also being instantly recognizably made in the early 80's are mutually exclusive outcomes. :)

That said, check out the synthwave genre for a modern/retro take on all this.

I grew up on Bladerunner, and the Vangelis score is like a part of my being.

I think 2049 was great. I cant say it's better or worse because it's different but it fits and was more than I hoped for. Of course it has problems but so did the first one, and nothing is perfect especially in sci-fi. The Hans Zimmer score is fantastic.

I thought the Hans Zimmer score was only okay, in a pastiche-of-the-original kind of way, but maybe I should give it another chance.

For me the Vangelis score is one of the all-time greatest movie scores, although I’m probably biased from having heard it young. Such a unique and recognisable sound, and just the perfect mood for the film.

The opening sequence over LA's skyline with the iconic Vangelis CS-80 song has to be one of the greatest moments in movie scoring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6dKU22lt3E

Interesting. I found 2049 bleak and cold and without any real meaning. Just some well produced scenes without a story. I feel a lot of today's movies are like this.

Even though I liked 2049 I agree with you, there wasn't much meaning to it. In contrast, in the first movie I was fascinated by the idea of literally travelling to meet your maker if you are not content with the limits of your existence. And of course the cheesy but wonderful monologue by Rutger Hauer.

Yeah, if it has meaning, it's a bit too bleak for my taste.

It feels a little bit like how the "camp" Batman got dirty and gritty in the later movies. If "gritty" is the first order derivative, Bladerunner 2049 took the gritty of Bladerunner and went for the second-order derivative, fatalistic.

I grew up with blade runner and the hardest part to accept was that Han Solo was such a wimp. I didn't return to it until I became interested in Syd Mead.

Pretty sure it was the same summer he got frozen in carbonite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Mead

The freshness of the technology is what I like about the first film and makes the second film a more of the same feel to me.

Just read the Syd worked on both Blade Runners...

I adopted the book last.

Wow, Vangelis' score is the best thing about the original and an epochal masterpiece. Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for the second one is just another Zimmer score, swiftly done to replace Johannsson's work. How different can perceptions be!

I agree the score is really excellent.

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