Rebooting cult classics is always a gamble, especially with today’s shaky audience. Most of the time, these reboots or remakes are almost always mediocre or bland.

“Blade Runner 2049,” Warner Brothers’ brand new attempt at bringing back the excitement of a cult classic, might seem like another one of those silly summer movie flops. Instead, “Blade Runner 2049” is something much different. Where every other studio reboot/remake destroys itself due to a lack of concern over its own story, this brand new Blade Runner destroys itself due to an intense perception of self-importance.

“BR2049’s” first flaw sits at its running time. A sluggish 163 minutes drags on and on, barely pushing itself narratively in anyway. Director Denis Villeneuve, known best for the fantastic sci-fi head spinner Arrival, is at the helm of this long-awaited sequel. His grasp of visual storytelling is clear as each frame of “BR2049” pops with awe-inspiring cinematic flair.

With the help of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, each shot of “Blade Runner: is meticulously composed, crafted and cared for resulting in a breathtaking Dystopian world that looks good enough to eat. The world of “Blade Runner” is a bleak, gloomy, Neo-noir future Los Angeles. Inspired heavily from German Expressionism and Classic Hollywood Noir, the atmosphere of “Blade Runner” perfectly captures the dread of the film’s language.

The problem is that Villeneuve seems so set on crafting a beautiful film than he forgets a story must be told as well. No doubt there is a story in “Blade Runner,” an interesting as well, but the film endures a terrible issue of slow pacing resulting in what seems like a half-baked idea stretched out to three hours.

Riddled with age-old ideas about humanity and artificial intelligence, “Blade Runner 2049” seems to have missed the last 35 years of film where other movies seem to explore the same themes in a better manner. Sadly, leading man Ryan Gosling can barely save this mess of a film either. Due to spoilers,f I won’t go into Gosling’s character or even the story itself, but his character lacks any sort of emotional or charismatic resonance resulting in a protagonist so bland that the always amazing Gosling actually seems like a talentless actor. Harrison Ford, on the other hand, gives an impressively nuanced performance which singlehandedly raises the quality of the film. With that being said, Ford barely appears in the three-hour film, degrading his role in the picture to a glorified cameo. Pretentiousness abound, Villeneuve and his team seem to think that bleak, slow storytelling should be taken as deep, philosophical reverence. Yes, films can be deep but they do not need to be boring.

• Zain Hashmat is a film student from Meridian. An avid lover of film and literature, Hashmat will check out one movie on Thursday nights and give his take on the best (and worst) that cinema has to offer that weekend. He hopes his passionate reviews will get The Star’s readers excited to get up and go to the movies.