A big movie

Rating: 8/10 (8 October 2017)

Finally, a major motion picture for a change.
There are very few films that get higher than a 7 out of 10 from me. Hence a rating of 8 indicates films that I highly recommend.
The big challenge for film makers these days is that the production levels of TV have gone up so much that a lot of movies seem like just one big episode of a television show. There aren't many films that are able to impress the viewer with the feeling that they're watching a classic big motion picture.
Thankfully, Blade Runner 2049 succeeds in putting itself into the Motion Picture category.
This is a film that takes you places and makes you think. The acting's nicely done and all homages to the original are subtle enough to come across as sophisticated instead of cheap. There are plenty of nice glory shots in here and the scenes take their time. They even allow the ends of scenes to linger for a while in order to immerse the viewer in the material. This is something that the director of The Empire Strikes Back highlights as an important technique and one that less experienced directors often forget to do. He should know, since he used to teach cinematography. You see this technique also used extensively by Tarkovsky (1972's Solaris).
The editing is good and you get a lot for your money with a running time of almost three hours. The pacing is surprisingly well executed, considering the long duration of the movie. It uses a very interesting sequence of scenes ranging from medium to slow to fast to slow again. Seriously, there are meetings that film makers have just to figure out how to properly pace a film and what sequence to put the various intensities of scenes in.
Topping this off is a sound track that is true to the original material and also calls back to the 1982 film's score. Nicely done.
Something that certainly helps this movie feel enough like the original is the involvement of the director of the original (now in a producer role), one of the producers from the original movie, plus one of the two main writers from the 1982 feature. All of this pays off and is coupled nicely with the style of the new director (kudos to him for handling the material properly).
In conclusion if you enjoyed the 1982 Blade Runner movie, then there's a very good chance that you'll like this one as well.