Yes, it's really that bad.

Rating: 1/10 (19 October 2017)

Hey, I just got back from watching "Blade Runner 2049". What did I think, you ask? I think that if I had paid attention to math back in my school days, I would maybe be able to come up with some equation to describe just how much SUCK this movie SUCKS. Something like SUCK multiplied by infinity to the tenth power level SUCK. This movie SUCKS to the point where I was checking the time every few minutes to see how much more SUCK (O hell, another hour) I was going to have to endure. As tempted as I was to call it quits and skip out, I bravely went on SUCKING up the SUCK until the SUCKY end. That's dedication, folks.
Was there anything good about the film? Well, yeah, the rain soaked neon city is still cool, but it was already done much better in the original, where there was a sense of it being a real place that the characters knew (hey, what happened to city-speak?) and inhabited. Of course, back then it was original and fascinating, like nothing seen on screen before, in this re-tread, the futurist noir city merely serves as a less than integral backdrop to a few scenes, mostly it exists as something to fly over, almost totally wasted as we follow bland sock puppet of an actor Ryan Gosling going about his excruciatingly dull mission to find Deckard and Rachael's replicant baby (it's a long story and not worth telling, I wish they hadn't). There's some evil industrialist type bad guy with ridiculous weird looking eyes now running what's left of the Tyrell Corporation, he and his hot chick hench-woman are also after Deckard and the kid (I think), I was never sure exactly why, I may have missed it, struggling as I was to stay awake.
Eventually Harrison Ford shows up in a very bad mood, perhaps because his Depends® are too tight for him. Apparently Deckard has spent the last 30 years hanging out in an abandoned Las Vegas, being entertained by a hologram Elvis Presley. Then Gosling meets some rebel replicants who are planning a revolution (ho-hum, wake me when it's over), thankfully they are gone after one scene, not sure why they bothered showing up at all, except to demonstrate how much worse the film could have been. The movie slogs on, characters that no one cares about fight and kill each other, Harrison Ford almost drowns, but alas, doesn't, would have ended the film sooner, sparing us the tiresome reunion with his long lost daughter blah, by the lame ending I was barely paying attention.
I'll tell you something else. This movie made clear how important Vangelis's music was to making the original film work. Those smokey late night themes, simultaneously retro and futuristic, perfectly complimented the nocturnal visuals, drenching the film in melancholic ambiance that draws you back to it again and again. This new film's score, if you can even call it that, is little more that a series of ominous drones, cranked up to ear splitting volume, with apocalyptic booms randomly thrown in when nothing else is happening. As one of my fellow audience members commented on the way out of the theater, those sudden loud thuds were the only things keeping her awake, so perhaps they did serve a purpose.
If you're like me and love the original Blade Runner, avoid this monumental waste of time. The only silver lining to this snooze-fest is that the film is so painfully dull that it's sure to be quickly forgotten, without much tainting by association it's classic predecessor. Damn, I wish they would stop making crap sequels.