Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 is heavy with portentous and pretentious hoo-ha.

It takes on the themes and universe set forth in the original and builds on them, and manages to live up to the massive expectations that greet it. This is no replicant, it's the real deal.

There's a frisson in seeing fecundity exalted in a world bent on selling pleasure-sex.

On its own merits, Blade Runner 2049 is a very strong film; as a sequel, it's nothing short of brilliant.

Blade Runner 2049 has been made with impeccable craftsmanship and taste, yet the film is so terrified of disreputability that it renders itself dead from the waist down, unable to derive pleasure even from a theoretically kinky robot three-way.

If every new film made today is to a greater or lesser degree an echo box of past possibilities, what's notable is how much Villeneuve gives those echoes room to breathe and to be new.

In the end, for all its pleasures, it's difficult to view Blade Runner 2049 as anything but an elaborate echo of the original, neither true sequel nor reboot, unclear of its own identity.

Watching Ford and Gosling onscreen together suggests an evolution of masculinity within the films, one that exists along a continuum of noir leading men, from those failing to hide their tenderhearted nature to the solemn figures who make stoicism an art.

From the grayed-out countrysides over which the sky has closed like a lid; to the drizzly neon decadence of Los Angeles; to the Ozymandian wreckage of Las Vegas-the film is a visual splendor of the first order.

It does something sci-fi movies rarely do anymore, and sequels do even less: it shows us things we've never seen.

A meditative and moving film, sumptuously photographed by legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins in the finest and most astonishing work of his career.

Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, manages to be prettier but far more prosaic.

Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins give us staggering new visions of the future, ones that confound and trance and mystify in Blade Runner 2049 even while making rich cinematic senses.

Despite all the overlaps, this is not a simulacrum of a Ridley Scott film. It is unmistakably a Denis Villeneuve film, inviting us to tumble, tense with anticipation, into his doomy clutches.

Director Denis Villeneuve, who earned his sci-fi bona fides with Arrival, successfully replicates the cold austerity Ridley Scott brought to Blade Runner.

Harrison Ford, for his part, is nothing less than a revelation.

Blade Runner 2049 gives us a hyper-realized aesthetic and tries to convince us that it has given us a world.

Yet despite Ryan Gosling, a striking visual template and Harrison Ford reprising the role he played in the 1982 sci-fi classic, glitches mar this undeniably ambitious but drawn-out exercise.

It could stand to have as much clarity afforded to its narrative and thematics as to its visuals.

I admire the hard work that went into this film by a team of people who are devotees of the original and strove to do it justice. Fans and admirers will weigh in en masse, I'm sure...but I found Blade Runner 2049 long and boring.