Blade Runner 2049: 10 Reasons It's Massively Overrated

It's hard to pinpoint what, exactly, makes Blade Runner 2049 such a tensionless ride from start to finish, but it's likely a combination of the flat performances (save for Harrison Ford, who gives it some real gusto in his geriatric reprise of Rick Deckard), clinical tone, and a camera that prefers to stay very, very still.

And because the characters are at the whim of a relatively thin detective story, too, there isn't much room for actual drama - every scene is about the next clue, and so there is no room for them to develop or change or grow as human beings (or replicants); they get to be paper thin constructs designed to say their lines.

Throw all these problems into the cinematic blender and you get a movie that's hard to invest any real emotion in. It's impossible to care about anyone because everyone is the same, just characters at the mercy of a script that directs them to one place, then another, then back again, then to somewhere else.

You can't care about Blade Runner 2049 because it doesn't let you. It doesn't give you the means or the space to worry or feel anything about what's going on, which ultimately results in a wholly unsatisfying experience.

You cared massively whenever a replicant died in the original film, but the world laid out here is an emotionless void.