Random fragmented sub-plots hinder a touching story about an AI's dream of becoming real

Rating: 1/10 (12 February 2018)

(Starring Ana de Armas, Pinocchio Gosling, and several other stars who deserve better)
While the original Blade Runner followed a group of replicants' quest for full long lives and self-realization, Blade Runner 2049 follows an AI's quest for purpose and meaning beyond her product design.
Joi is a virtual domestic companion to LAPD Officer K who helps him stay grounded after a long day terminating stray replicants (he's a replicant who kills replicants, how meta). Projected as a hologram she engages K in 1950's homemaker chit-chat, joins him at the dinner table, helps him vent, and rubs his weary shoulders as best a trick of the light can. She conceptually understands the world outside the apartment's walls but accepts her isolation from it as her lot in life.
When K buys Joi a portable Emitter (think the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager) the walls fall away from her world. The most commonplace activities like embracing K in the rain or accompanying him to the food court fill her with, well, joy, and a passion to connect ever more deeply with K. She watches him ply his detective skills and survive shoot-outs with scavengers her admiration and love for him grows ever more substantial. Joi even realizes a way to share sexual intimacy with K by enlisting a flesh-and-blood body double.
Now deeply realized, Joi attains a virtue shared by too few humans: Self-sacrifice. When K must go on the lam Joi volunteers to be deleted from the apartment computer console so she can't be misused by the goons hunting the man she loves. Existing only in the portable Emitter she becomes as vulnerable as him and accepts the risk as the unquestioned price of love. And when her time comes she pays that price unflinchingly.
There are several meandering sub-plots that are touched on but never explored and they only waste time and raise more questions. The LAPD police captain fears the discover of a fertile replicant would tear apart society, but her fear mongering has all the authenticity of a click-bait news web site. Bioengineering tycoon Wallace yearns to build more off-world colonies but he can't make enough replicant slave labor and wants Deckard and Rachel's love child so he can learn how to build fertile replicants. Two problems there: Bred replicants would be born as infants but manufactured replicants would be fully grown and ready for the workforce. Also, Wallace was able to build another Rachel so he already has a replicant capable of giving birth, why the murder-filled quest to find the love child? The replicant underground wants the love child because they believe that replicant ability to procreate would lead to their freedom, but there's not a word mentioned of how those dots are connected. When K reunites Deckard with his long-lost daughter it turns out she's been passing as a human for 30 years, so apparently she's not a identifiable as a replicant after all. Why all the turmoil, death, and destruction to find her? The movie could have been trimmed down to a more engaging 100 minutes without all that self-defeating fluff.
Joi owns the only story you'll care about.