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When I first saw Blade Runner 2049 in the theater in 2017, I didn’t really like it.
Ryan Gosling lying in the snow at the end of Blade Runner 2049.
I’d had too many beers, and I was watching it with my dad, my aunt, and my wife, whom I’d just married. The four of us had never hung out together before, so the stakes were somewhat high.
The film was playing in a janky, smalltown theater in rural Massachusetts, where we were on vacation.
It was the kind of place where the lobby air was permanently scarred by the acrid scent of burnt popcorn, and the carpet had stains that probably traced back to the Reagan administration.
You couldn’t have asked for a less futuristic place in which to watch a movie about the future.
I believe it was a combination of this setting, the beer-induced drowsiness, my high expectations, my desire for my family to like the movie, and to like hanging out together, that prevented me from processing this much-hyped sequel on its own terms.
I was disappointed as I walked out of Blade Runner 2049, and even though my family assured me that they had enjoyed it, I sensed that they were just being polite.
A few years later, bored at home, with a newborn napping in the corner of the living room and my wife out running errands, I watched Blade Runner 2049 again, thinking I’d just fall asleep with it on in the background.
Instead, it was the best movie I had seen in many years, rivaling even the original, and maybe even becoming my new favorite movie of all time.
I was shocked at how badly I’d misjudged it.
This is not the only movie I’ve been disappointed by in the theater only to see it later and realize I was wrong.
Although I did enjoy The Lord of the Rings trilogy when I saw them in theaters in the early 2000s, I didn’t think they were anything amazing.
Frodo and Sam leaving the… *prolonged yawn*… Shire.
They were just not quite as fun, or alive, or… something… as I had imagined they were going to be.
I also felt that they were too slow, too ponderous, too devoid of sharp ironies and memorable dialogue.
It was as if Peter Jackson had pushed the very ordinariness of the world and people of Middle Earth so far to the foreground, he’d forgotten to hew the efficient, compressed, exhilarating, explosive popcorn experience that all cinematic fantasy post-Star Wars ought to hew, at least to my mind, at the time.
Now, as an older person with more life experience, everything about the slowness, the simplicity, the absence of irony, the ordinariness of The Lord of the Rings trilogy feels like the greatest virtues of those movies, and a rare virtue in the context of all movies.
There were once, to me, nowhere near as good as they should have been. Now they are far better than I could’ve imagined.
Every time I re-watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I see new levels of meaning, deeper depths of theme, and higher heights of artistry.
Having learned a little bit about filmmaking myself over the years—namely, how hard it is to make anything, let alone anything remotely thoughtful—I can do nothing but bow down to the phenomenal literary and artistic achievement of these three remarkable films.
There’s a lesson somewhere in here about the underacknowledged inaccuracy of many an initial impression, or, perhaps the lesson is about the changing of the value of a film over time as one’s own context shifts.
In any case, I hope to one day re-watch the Dune movies and have my initial feelings of being underwhelmed wiped away in a retroactive epiphany that this franchise was always more amazing than I was ready to accept.
I think this is Timothée Chalamet from Dune Part 2 about to ride a worm.
Furthermore, I hope every person in the world has this happen to them, over and over, and not just with movies, but with every phenomena that seems less amazing than it is upon first contact.
Even in death, whenever it comes, my wish is that each one of us experiences something so much more meaningful than we ever feared or expected.
Discovering that we can love—and, in some cases, almost more than we can bear—things we once hated, misunderstood, or were distinctly disappointed by—what could be more wonderful?
I hate the pious, overreaching tone of this essay, as well as its reliance on global entertainment properties for vaguely introspective fodder, but maybe in 10 or 20 years, I will happen to re-read it and realize… it was the right thing to say at the time.
Thank you for reading and supporting Opaque Hourglass.
