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Comment by gavinmckenzie | Hacker News Reader

In contrast to the other comments about how 2049 was slow etc., let me say that I took my wife and daughter to see 2049.

We watched the original "Final Cut" Blade Runner a couple of weeks before 2049 and both wife and daughter felt that the original was slow but they respected the movie.

After seeing 2049 my wife said she enjoyed the movie better than the original but wished it could have been an hour shorter.

My daughter was ecstatic and said that 2049 could have been another hour even longer and she would have been happy. But my daughter is a cinematographer, so possibly that's partly why she loved it.

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This was the same reaction my fiancée had. While I consider the original Blade Runner the best sci-fi movie of all time (followed closely by the original Alien in which the doomed ship Nostromo feels like it departed Blade Runner earth), I do think 2049 is right up there and didn't disappoint my insanely high expectations for the film.

Other than my daughter being a writer, this was my exact experience, with identical reactions on their respective parts after taking wife and daughter to 2049. Knowing that the original Blade Runner is my favorite film, my wife gave me the 5-disc collector's edition in the briefcase for Christmas 10 years ago. Picked up the BluRay of 2049 on Black Friday. Was going to opt for the 4K version but haven't seen a review I like of a 4K player yet (and I'm not sure my eyes could tell the difference after staring at screens for the last 35 years).

I thought 2049 was a wonderful, visually appealing film with a neat small story set in a big world. Which makes it a bold movie.

Sure, it was set in a universe we probably never thought to see again. The outset was flogging a horse I thought would have been better off stay dead. But in this age of huge stories - epics even - doing a beautiful, cruel, unforgiving small, and slow-paced story takes some balls.

I wasn't entirely on board with how the universe had been treated, but even then, I liked it.

I have to agree and I think it's one of the areas that cyberpunk stories can really excel in. Telling a small story in a big world helps contextualize and ground the setting.

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