Blade Runner 2049: Aerodynamik

Lovely edit. Improves enjoyment of watching by cutting some dragged scenes, without making it feel 'snappy'. Great fine-tuning overall. Personally, I like the dialogue to music volume a bit more balanced. For some dialogue, I had to increase the volume just to turn it down after when the soundtrack blasted my ears.

Still, it's a great improvement over the original.

TM2YC has done an amazing job of editing a film in a way that makes you wonder how the original version was 13 minutes longer. Seriously, Blade Runner 2049 was wayyyyy too long and the fan editor helped shorten it without changing anything besides tightening up the pace. The audio and video are flawless, and my only wish would be to see TM2YC further hack away at the fat in the rest of the film. Getting it down from 163 mins (2 hrs 43 mins) to 150 mins (2 hrs 30 mins) with just speeding up the pace is impressive enough. However, 1982's Blade Runner was a much tighter 118 mins (1hr 58 mins) and I believe there are enough overly-long investigative scenes that can be further trimmed or entirely excised to get a follow up fan edit down to under 2 hours.

I rather enjoyed this edit and I have a feeling that if this had been the version released in cinema's, then the film would have done better financially and we would be getting sequels right now.

I personally prefer the slower pacing of Denis Villeneuve's film, as it allowed the opportunity to really take in how well the shots are constructed and I just really love slow-burn films, but I still absolutely adored this version. This is basically what the film would be like if Ridley Scott took over in the editing bay, since he wasn't a fan of the running time and pacing. Everything I already loved about the original Blade Runner 2049 is still present here, and as much as I dug Roger Deakins' gorgeous cinematography (he absolutely deserved the Oscar, in my opinion), I did enjoy how the editor made it look closer in style to Scott's 1982 original. Excellent stuff.

TM2YC turns in another one of my favorite fanedits with this carefully-crafted cut of Blade Runner 2049. A film that many people liked but thought felt overly slow or long, this version with shortened shots does a lot to improve the flow and feel. I think it reveals that part of the issue is actually in the script rather than the direction (as I elaborate on in my review here: https://letterboxd.com/nottheacademy/film/blade-runner-2049/) but I'm not actually sure any edit can change that. Perhaps if you cut out the C-plotline of the revolution and focus instead on "K" and his Pinocchio-esque quest, but I don't know if there's enough conflict in the end then.

What we have here instead is a cut that ups the dramatic tension, though it does leave you feeling a bit disoriented at times. The film lacks any narration and with such a silent protagonist, I think a bit of on-screen text would be subtly helpful to orient a first-time viewer, though seemingly unnecessary for a rewatch. That little quibble aside, I want to point out how well the other subtle changes that TM2YC made work to enhance the story. Even when I read the change-list beforehand, the push-ins and reordered shots were so subtle that I missed most of them, though I was aware of the greater dramatic effect. The wooden horse (broken unicorn?) reveal scene in the factory is particularly tense, as is that Sapper Morton opening.

Overall, this is a great example of what fanedits can be. Too often, we focus on adding or cutting whole scenes or plot lines. Here is an edit which significantly improves the original film, without any extreme alterations. It simply makes the experience more "aerodynamik".