A long, confusing mess from a great, visionary director

Rating: 5/10 (8 October 2017)

Being a huge fan of Denis Villenueve's The Arrival, I was looking forward to Blade Runner 2049. It looked like it had all the makings for an amazing movie. That said, I feel like Villenueve was consumed by his gargantuan vision for the blade runner world. The heaviness of the atmosphere (from a combination of slow, dramatic dialogue and blaring Inception-esque music) prevented the pace from accelerating at any point during the movie, instead maintaining a constant trudge throughout and leaving the audience mired in perpetual confusion rather than a sense of immersion and discovery. This is in stark contrast to what he did in The Arrival where the audience is initially thrown clueless into the movie but learns things alongside the protagonist, constantly and actively piecing the plot together. The settings, though aesthetically beautiful and meticulously crafted, failed to meld into a singular, cohesive world. The characters were more or less thrust into visually jarring locations to exchange dialogue only to be quickly move to the next location as a means of progressing the complicated plot.