Saw it yesterday. Thought it was good but not great, not awful. It was worth seeing once but I would not watch it again. Logan I could watch again.
My positives:
My favorite part is the set design and props/special effects. The director created the world of the movie with a Tarkovskian attention to detail that made it believable. There's a couple of instances where stuff happens that has been done in other movies (to the best of my knowledge), but these moments are so far and few between that the movie never devolves into the formulaic Hollywood movie.
My negatives:
The plot was good enough to link the first blade runner into the second but I thought a couple of the plot points were forced and/or not really fleshed out. I mean the coming together of the story hinged on a really big coincidence. Although it's possible that this coincidence was part of a larger, pre-determined plan, that's not outlined in the film and, if it were, would make it even more forced.
To echo what has already been said, the characters kept their inner views inaccessible. That was a problem I had, the remoteness of their inner views. The characters had depth but the depth could only be accessed through obscure comments. I was like a detective having to piece together details strewn out here and there. Take that big replicant Sapper in the beginning of the movie, the one who buys and sells those worm looking things. That character carried around a special point of view on par with the perspective of an "apostle"....he's seen something. however you don't even really know that until two hours into the movie after he's been retired. It's similar with Ryan Gosling's character. The viewer is left to make educated guesses about his inner perspective, but the script never lays it out. It's only hinted at through the character's various reactions and responses. the moments of character revelation never come to the surface. To me, that was the best thing the characters had to offer in order to give the plot its much needed flesh. But because those moments never came watching the movie was like eating caviar instead of a juicy steak.
I found the movie totally devoid of theme. Are the hero and villain replicants freely choosing good or evil at the end or are they just doing what they are programmed to do...either interpretation works. You can read almost anything into the movie, from a pro-spiritual theme to a pro-atheist theme, from a pro-feminist theme to an anti-feminist theme, from a pro-free will theme to a pro-deterministic theme...hence all the agenda-driven movie reviews. The movie is so open-ended that multiple, conflicting interpretations hold up. This open-endedness somehow gave me, or reinforced for me, the impression that Ryan Gosling's character was simply hollow. I could not get into the replicant-as-hero or even the replicant-as-villain. At times the characters even looked like they were striking poses in order to create a neat visual...like sculptures in a museum.
