Not Terrible But Fails To Live Up - Light Spoilers

Rating: 5/10 (17 January 2019)

BR2049 is not a terrible film but it really fails to live up to the classic original Blade Runner (1982), even the inferior cuts of Blade Runner.
It is far, far too long. The visuals are stunning but the story is very thin (yet still has holes) and does not justify anywhere near the screen time.
The music misses the mark. The sound is good and hits the right notes with the music but Vangellis' score was a big part of the original that is sadly mostly absent here. And a lot of the sound cues are just brief and blasted at us as if to say "HERE IS THE BLADE RUNNER SOUND!"
The story like I said is very thin. The runner finds everything easily and we know what is going to happen. When we see the flower by the tree do they really need to drag that "discovery" on for so long? The discovery of the wooden horse takes forever too, even though we know exactly what is happening long before that. Everything drags in this movie and it's not like they are creating tension or anything. The emotion is also flat.
They deliberately abandon avenues (the new corporate evil puppet master) and obviously are hoping to do more sequels.
There are annoying nonsensical happenings too, logic holes and lots of questions unanswered.
Here are some of my issues after watching this, and this is where light SPOILERS are---- Olmos does everything but say "Deckard is a replicant" but if so why does he age just like a human? Replicants can have kids now but they don't even explore how or why? Vegas is in a radioactive cloud but Deckard lives there no problem... even if it's safe now wouldn't all the food supplies there be irradiated? If it is safe there now why is he the only one living there in luxury? Gosling sure gets over the loss of his "wife" fast. Gosling's police chief just takes his word that he killed his target even though he is a replicant himself who fails his baseline test, when the stakes are a full-on war with replicants? Why is the police chief in charge of this hugely important security issue? The Lov/her boss issue is just abandoned. These are just the issues off the top of my head.
Again the main problem is the ponderous run time for no apparent reason.
In the plus column are good acting (Gosling's not great in this but doesn't have much to work with, same for Harrison Ford, other supporting characters are good).
Also the visuals like I said are incredible.