'Blade Runner 2049' Is Better (and Worse) Than the Original

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares when you’re exploding into laughter every two minutes? It’s far more rare for a drama to pull this off, since a drama is almost nothing but a story told. Still, the unsatisfying aspects of a piece of popular dramatic art can fade over time as more memorable qualities take up permanent residence in the collective unconscious.

That’s what happened with Blade Runner.