Great movie, but no masterpiece

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2017)

Let me first say that Blade Runner:2049 has amazing visuals. This can't be described enough. The scenes are a display of the best camera work, CGI in its finest form and the colors are perfect bland of bright and grim. The sets are quite beautiful, with a lot of focus on lighting to create beautiful shadows and shading in a dark, hectic and immersive sci-fi world. Needless to say that the tech noir is a masterpiece in this area. The scene in the casino concert hall with colorful projections of well-known performers in the background and the scene with the giant commercial-version of Joy and agent K are perfect examples of that.
However, if you peel of the beautiful visuals and analyze the core of the movie left, then what remains is great, but not even close to a masterpiece.
I will start with the story. I am not familiar with its predecessor, but the story lacks depth to fill 2hr 50 mins. At the end of the movie, I felt dissatisfied, as a lot of the movie was build-up and world-setting and the story still had a lot of loose ends by the end. I simply felt like a lot of more still had to come. The scene with the fight between K and his arch enemy Luv is a good climax, but what before that, the main character never was in much danger, even though the film starts off with a good fight, so a lot of the tension was not really there throughout the whole film. And what happened after this big fight was too little to do the long viewing time justice.
Arrival suffered from a similar problem as Blade Runner in the sense that there is a very interesting preface: a mystery to solve with only one (simple) answer that is found after many long-winded, yet captivating scenes.
There is a moment in the film where a flying copter filled with enemies comes to get Deckard, but the main character is simply left alive by the ruthless Luv. Afterwards, agent K simply ends up with a group of peers who tell him the truth in the movie's most important plot twist, but it still bugs me how he got in the hideout of these people in the first place after left for dead in an old and forgotten casino in Las Vegas, but maybe I simply missed this transition.
A lot of time is spent with the main character, but the relationship with the viewer is still a little weak at the end of the movie, because by then he has no future and no personal relationships left. It also does not help that he is quite emotionless. Ryan Gosling portrays the Replicant well, but his face doesn't communicate much. One great asset of the movie is the relationship between agent K and Joy, which is abrupted too early in the movie. The performance of Harison Ford is very solid. The other characters are fine, but Jared Leto's character is a bit pointless, as his future and what remains of his corporation remains a mystery, despite his very ambitious motives.
The audio is clearly present, especially in the form of bass. The sound vibrations were sometimes even a bit too noticeable. I cannot say that the music was very memorable, but it definitely was a thrilling experience.
Overall, I cannot give Blade Runner:2049 a perfect score for the main reason that the story had too little to offer, lacked some depth and did not challenge me much on the intellectual level. 8.5/10.
I watched the 3D version of this movie with Dolby sound on a big IMAX screen.