How tedious and boring...please stop!

Rating: Null/10 (6 October 2017)

Saw this movie last night...and boy was it a tedious, overly long watch! This movie felt like having to do overtime at work.
Dennis Villeneuve is a terrific director, loved "Sicario" and "Arrival", but this was a misfire in every possible way.
An uninteresting story, the script is just muddled, highly convenient and disappointingly pedestrian. While the first movie retained, despite notable differences, the spirit and essence of Phillip K. Dick's amazing novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep", "Blade Runner 2049" is at best an outlier, the story having been diluted to nothingness.
Ryan Gosling is completely miscast in the role, as I knew he would, the guy just doesn't cut it. Harrison Ford just looked bored, bored with acting and bored having to revisit these characters he clearly doesn't want to but for the paycheque. Much like he was in "The Force Awakens".The problem is that Ford gets paid to look bored, whereas I have to pay to watch him looking bored. Maybe retirement is in order.
Jared Leto is just awful and does nothing but look menacing or foreboding, the only expressions he seems capable of, either in the movies or music videos he makes. I am not exactly sure how and why this guy continues to be cast in anything these days.
Losing Johann Johansson as the composer for the soundtrack was also big mistake. Hans Zimmer is usually a good, reliable, composer but when he misses, he misses big. The score is terrible. It's just noise...heavy, loud noise and when it isn't, it sounds like what would have happened if the soundtrack for "Inception" and Vangelis's original score for"Blade Runner" had a baby.
The use of 3D is also completely useless here and I think, it detracts from the movie and it's visual narrative. The visuals and special effects everybody seems to be applauding, were, I found, lost in an unnecessary murkiness and annoying, orange tinged twilight.
Roger Deakin is one of the best cinematographers ever, and for example there were some shots in "Sicario" which took my breath away, not so in this movie. He missed the mark here. In "Blade Runner 2049", never for a moment did I experience the feeling of awe I did, and still do, when I watched the original, especially the opening scene. (Do a search on Syd Mead and then you will know why the original "Blade Runner" looked and felt the way it did.)
The bit towards the end with Rachel and the use of the character and employment of the technology came off as cheap and an unnecessary add-on. Something like that worked very well in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", here it doesn't.
It is not an awful movie, or one of those "the worst I've seen" types, but it cannot hold a candle to the original on any account. It is too long, too boring for long stretches and in the end it just left me with a headache as well as mostly indifferent.
I never wanted a sequel for "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner 2049" proves why.