I saw the original Blade Runner many, many moons ago. I have a faint memory that I enjoyed it, but I can’t pretend to remember much about it. My friend Lord Liverpool who knows about these things said that he’d seen the new sequel Blade Runner 2049 and described it as a worthy successor to the original. Thus it was that Mrs Chrisparkle and I, together with our friends Mr and Mrs Flying-the-Flag, checked into the Errol Flynn last Friday night to judge for ourselves.

I think there must be such a thing as a Sci-Fi brain. Sadly, I’m not possessed of one. I wish I were, as it would open up a whole new world of literature and entertainment. It would be great to appreciate the comings and goings of Spurgs from the planet Tharg and such like. I don’t think Mrs C, or Mr & Mrs Flag have one either, as after two and half hours of sheer befuddlement we all emerged into the night air with one common question; “what the friggin’ hell was all that about then?” To be fair, Mrs C and Mrs F never had the remotest chance of following it, as they both spent the majority of the film comatose in the land of Nod. Mr F tried to be upbeat about it by saying, “well at least we found out who the father and daughter were”, to which they both replied, “there was a father and daughter?”

It’s a shame, because I sense this is probably quite a good film, if only you can fathom out what’s going on. I think it needs to be issued with a set of students’ notes, and then we could sit a test after each sequence to make sure we understood it, with the option of taking a resit before continuing if we’re still confused.

There were aspects that I did enjoy. I loved the whole notion of the artificial girlfriend; beautiful, supportive, a great cook – she’s a chauvinist’s dream. Visually, the whole film is very engrossing, and that’s why Mr Flag and I kinda enjoyed it, even though we didn’t have a scooby what it meant. I couldn’t quite work out why everything had to take place against a background of virtual tsunami, when they could just have easily done it on a beach – everything was “virtual” anyway, as far as I could make out, so choose a nice location, why don’t you. There were other aspects I didn’t enjoy. I have a low threshold to violence and it was too violent for my taste. There was a nice girl in white, who suddenly became a horrid, vicious girl in black. Wasn’t sure what that was about.

I can’t really say anything more about it, because I just didn’t get it. You’ll probably love it. Good luck to you.