Strangely boring, lacking tension and intelligence.

Rating: Null/10 (6 October 2017)

Don't believe the lying shills rating this a ten out of ten. The original Blade Runner is a masterpiece. This film is not. It only deserves a six, but I loved the original so I gave it a seven. My review will compare both films and it contains **spoilers**.
First up its pacing. This film is actually much slower than the original, adding up to two hours and forty three minutes of mind numbing boredom. I love slow paced films provided there's enough drama and tension. The first Blade Runner film has long pauses, but its justified. The silence swells toward sudden violence or it occurs because a character is gnawing over a great line of dialog they've just heard or are about to express. So what makes a slow paced film entertaining? The solution is information provided at the right time.
The first film immediately tells us that replicants are murderous outlaws. We see one commit murder. Some are hiding here on Earth in Los Angeles and Dekkard is forced to detect and kill them. All that information is given to the audience within the first few minutes. So when Dekkard is wandering through crowded streets of futuristic LA, we the audience are afraid for him, because any one of them could be a murderous replicant. Dear Ridley Scott repeat after me: Information creates tension.
This newer film instead begins with long drawn out scenes of dull aimless searching and investigating. Since no villain shows up until the last hour, there's no reason for the hero to actually hurry or feel afraid. When the boring pace finally speeds up toward the end, you're so bored out of your skull, you forgot why anyone is doing anything and you no longer care or even notice what the film thinks is a stunning twist.
Those shill reviewers are glowing about its photography. Compared to its budget, the photography is below standard. There are rare nice moments. Seeing the fusion powered spinners (those flying cars) again was nice nostalgia, but far too many albeit pretty shots of -- nothing happening -- rendered the plot all the more irrelevant.
Now for the production design. The indoor set designs were poor, telling us very little about the world this film is set in. The "production value" looks cheap. I don't mean that in a cheap sleazy film noir way (no that would have been cool), I mean that I don't know where they spent the 185million budget, because only a fraction of that was spent on the sets. Two things did work. The voice comp device has been updated reminiscent of 1984 (the Orwell film starring John Hurt) and there is a Total Recall (the original not the remake) style artificial Female hologram character that is programmed to love K (Ryan Gosling). Interesting, but hardly ground breaking, while the original film was ground breaking in too many ways to mention here. The close up long lens shots in the original made the grimy futuristic streets of Los Angeles really look and feel like a crowded claustrophobic sleazy poverty stricken hellhole. Such a lens also gives size to any character in the foreground making Ford look all the more epic.
This film used wider lenses and so the pent up tension of the original street scenes is non existent. In fact very rarely does it venture outside into the streets, so that we cannot breathe in the human polity as easily as we did in the original. The original film had real light emanating from miniature buildings, vehicles and advertising. I'm sorry but computer generated light just doesn't behave like real light does. Real light goes where it wants. The human eye cannot be fooled. Syd Mead is a genius. But looking at this film makes me think he wasn't given the power he needed to bring out this film's potential. It actually looks like some hack is trying to copy him. This makes me feel sad to write that. His work on Elysium (2013) was far superior.
And now the acting. Gosling plays it straight (and glum) as he did in the pretty to look at but boring Bangkok crime flick Only God Forgives. There is a plot reason for this, but his dull acting compounds this movie's languid pace. There's not enough of Harrison Ford, who only shows up in the last hour (maybe less?). Jared Leto's monologues are just awful. Its not his fault. He's miscast and badly written.
Like Mead, Philip K Dick is a genius too, both films are inspired by his literary masterwork "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". This film didn't delve deep enough, barely scratching the intellectual surface. Since many of his concepts are incredibly visually rich that just compounds the cinematic failure here.
Should you go and see this? If you're a fan of the original, I think you should. The story ends in a way that sets things up for another Blade Runner movie which I hope will actually be entertaining.
This film is meant to be a science fiction noir film, but it has little of the intelligence we expect from science fiction and none of the crime solving tension that is required of film noir. It lacked the brutal immediacy of the original nexus 6 villains the first one had in spades. It lacked the tense cat and mouse hunting game that made the original so intense, a race where the lead changed more than once. It just isn't as clever as its, at times pretty visuals and constantly obnoxious soundtrack, pretends it to be.
Instead we get a self important bloated fatware art-house snoozefest that is bleak, boring and about as intellectually deep as counterfeit artificial snake skin.