The original “Blade Runner” is a sci-fi masterpiece that was in no particular need of a sequel. It was a strange yet it was thought-provoking and in terms of visuals, it was spectacular. “Blade Runner 2049” comes decades later and it tries so hard (too hard in my view) to be a strange and thought-provoking film and in the end, it just comes across as pretentious.

In 2049, a young ‘blade runner’ (Ryan Gosling “Gangster Squad”, “Drive”) is busy hunting down ‘replicants’ (humanlike robots) even though he himself is a replicant. He uncovers a secret evolutionary development/miracle among replicants and embarks on a mission to resolve the situation.

I think most people going into a “Blade Runner” sequel expected to see Harrison Ford (“Air Force One”) reprise his role as Deckard and he does but he has a very short amount of screen time and looks severely bored. Instead, we get saddled with Gosling’s character and while there isn’t anything wrong with his performance anything like that, I just didn’t care about this new character. Much like the first “Blade Runner”, many of the characters and their motivations are fairly cryptic but I feel that this time, they went overboard.

“Blade Runner 2049” does have some stunning moments (I particularly enjoyed the scene with the woman creating memory implants) and there are some intriguing sci-fi concepts here but the movie really didn’t tell me anything that I cared to know. Actually, the film comes close to fully validating a certain fan theory about the original film, a theory that I sincerely disagree with. The original “Blade Runner” has stood the test of time and remains a classic of the genre but I think this sequel is trying to recapture the anomaly that was the success of the first film without pulling it off.