Completely over-hyped and undeserving of the praise

Rating: 3/10 (7 October 2017)

I never was one of those people asking for a Blade Runner sequel. Now that Blade Runner 2049 is out, my position still stands. This film is simply a massive letdown and nothing more.
The year is 2049 and the world has grown in technology, but not humanity. Ryan Gosling plays K, a Blade Runner (a futuristic cop) tasked with tracking down the last of the Replicants-androids that look like humans. Knowing that he himself is a replicant, he goes on a journey of his own when he finds a box containing the bones of a Replicant who gave birth to a child and is tasked with finding the child. Little does he know that the new head of the Tyrell Corporation that makes the Replicants, Mr. Wallace (Jared Leto), plans to use the missing child for his own purposes and kill K if he has to.
My main problem with the film is that it was unforgivably boring. The film is two hours and forty-five minutes long, which is already enough to test one's patience (and bladder), but it feels so deliberately paced; the characters almost always move so slow, that it feels like the filmmakers thought that it was the best way to pad out the running time, despite having not enough material to justify it.
The performances range from great to laughable. Harrison Ford is hardly in the movie, and his inclusion is clearly a marketing ploy, but he gives the best performance in his brief running time and he feels like a continuation of his character from the original, Deckard, in a world where things have just gotten worse. Gosling isn't bad as K, and his stone-face actually is pretty effective in a couple of scenes, but Rutger Hauer in the original gave his Replicant character more of a personality. Leto is trying and failing to bring a degree of menace as the villain, and his female Replicant sidekick competes with him in the field of phoning it in.
What else shocked me was how unsubtle the film was. The original was not only a futuristic crime noir that had Harrison Ford's Deckard chasing down androids, but also a personal journey involving himself and Rutger Hauer as the villain that involved trying to find a degree of humanity in such a futuristic world, and that maybe, Deckard is a replicant himself. Here, the story is mainly of Gosling trying to come to terms with the fact that he is a Replicant and what it means in terms of his humanity. Whereas in the original, there were subtle signs, images, and bits of dialogue that hinted at Deckard's purpose in the original, everything is spelled out for the audience to the point that old bits of dialogue are repeated thrice at important moments. It doesn't respect the audience's intelligence at all. The first and final thirds of the film are mainly filled with dialogue that is basically speeches that preach ideas about conflict and the ethics of machines, but hardly any of it is explored in an interesting fashion. What's worse, the film feels so empty and devoid that for a time, I forgot what K's objective was.
What I will say is that the cinematography is beautiful. There are a lot of colorful images with ancient ruins and futuristic tech in the background and foreground that could easily pass as being part of an art gallery. The only downside is that there is too much gray in some shots and it feels too clean compared to the original.
Why Warner Brothers and Sony wasted their time making this film, I have no clue. Maybe it was Ridley Scott's fault. After being unimpressed with his Alien: Covenant earlier this year (and was also quite the snooze-fest), watching this only proved to me further that Scott just doesn't care about good filmmaking anymore. Denis Villeneuve is clearly an ambitious director, but his style didn't feel completely right for this film. Clearly, in a film that tries so desperately to say much more humanity than its predecessor, it comes out feeling empty and feels less human than the original did.
P.S. A lot of people have accused me of being too shallow and wanting this film to be more action packed. I do not have that mindset. I enjoy films that take their time as much as the next film enthusiast, but this one just didn't do enough to justify what it was aiming for. I'm not ashamed in expressing my opinion. Just let me be clear on something: going at a slow, deliberate pace and speaking lines of preachy dialogue does not, I repeat, does not equal intelligence. The positive reviews baffle me, especially on Rotten Tomatoes. Sony owns the company, which leads me to think that maybe it bribed more than a few critics in the hopes that more people would see it. Clearly, that is backfiring and I'm happy that people are rejecting it.