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.

When the science fiction film starring Harrison Ford premiered in 1982, almost everyone thought it just didn’t deliver the goods. Blade Runner was slow and oddly paced; its ghastly narration from Ford sounded as though someone had put a gun to his head and made him read it; and its ending was forced and false. It received indifferent reviews and was a box-office disappointment—for good reason.

Then something happened. Over the subsequent 35 years, director Ridley Scott released no fewer than four re-edits on videotape and DVD. He removed the horrible narration, eliminated the absurd ending, and undid some clumsy studio-ordered deletions. These revisions certainly enhanced the movie’s reputation. But far more important was the simple fact that no one who saw it at the time or who has seen it since, even those who had negative feelings about it during its initial run, has ever been able to forget Blade Runner. And its reintroduction into the marketplace every few years had a cumulative positive effect on its reputation. This nightmare vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is now universally recognized as a masterpiece—even though it’s just as true today that Blade Runner is messy and confused.

It’s also true that the movie’s speculative depiction of 2019 has proved wrong in every particular. The world is not awash in acid rain (an environmentalist fad subject of the early 1980s). The sun still shines. We still have living animals. America has not become a cultural colony of Japan. Our cars do not fly. Los Angeles isn’t ferociously overpopulated, with its residents living in endless billion-story skyscraper complexes. We aren’t mining in outer space, and we don’t have robots with four-year life-spans that are all but indistinguishable from humans performing slave labor.

So why has Blade Runner not only stood the test of time but risen to the summit among American films? Because it is so fantastically imaginative and detailed in its rendering of its false 2019 that one doesn’t mind how badly it has dated. Because it’s just eye-poppingly beautiful even as it seeks to portray a city mired in ugliness. And because screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples took the skeleton of a Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and turned it into a 1940s-style detective picture, so that it exists in a glamorized past and a dystopian future.

An ex-cop named Deckard (Ford) has taken a job tracking down runaway “replicants.” He wanders into a giant conspiracy—and as he tries to unravel it, Deckard begins to understand that these artificial people can suffer and hate and love. At the climax, he comes face to face with Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the replicant who has come to Earth to take revenge on the corporation that brought him to life as a worker-bee slave and programmed his death four years from the moment of his inception.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Batty says. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Batty does not try to kill Deckard, as we expect and as it is in his power to do; rather, he shuts down. It is a scene of surpassing beauty. It may sound pretentious to say so, but Blade Runner has proved itself, over time, one of cinema’s deepest examinations of what it means to be human.

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Now we have Blade Runner 2049, cowritten by the original’s co-scenarist, Hampton Fancher, and directed by Denis Villeneuve. He made last year’s Arrival, a wonderfully creative and emotionally wrenching work of science fiction, and with this new picture, Villeneuve aims for the fences. Blade Runner 2049 runs 45 minutes longer than the original and cost a staggering $185 million, more than twice the budget of the 1982 film in constant dollars.

The scale is monumental. Where Blade Runner was set entirely in Los Angeles, the sequel shows us a ravaged Western United States in which San Diego has been reduced to a gigantic waste dump and Las Vegas has all but crumbled into nothingness. You must see it, just to goggle at it; Villeneuve and his collaborators, chiefly master cinematographer Roger Deakins, really do succeed in transporting the audience to another place and time. Where Scott’s world was lush and lavish and overstuffed, Villeneuve’s is so bleak and denuded that your eyes have difficulty adjusting when flashes of bright color appear.

Villeneuve is a far more controlled filmmaker than Scott, and he manages the extraordinarily complex plot of Blade Runner 2049 with masterly skill (a feat that made me wonder anew at his ingenious storytelling in Arrival). The new replicant-catcher is himself a replicant named K, played by Ryan Gosling. K is hunting and “retiring” old versions without fixed lifespans that have hidden themselves in the blasted Western landscape. He makes an inadvertent discovery beneath a ruined tree—a box with bones in it that suggests a long-dead female replicant once actually gave birth. The possibilities raised by this robotic evolution are so terrifying that K is ordered by his superior (an enigmatic cop known only as “Madame” and played chillingly by Robin Wright) to hunt down the child and kill it.

The film moves slowly, almost hypnotically, for its first hour, and it is just about to overstay its stately welcome when Gosling comes upon an aged Deckard. Then, just as he did when he took the screen 45 minutes into Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Harrison Ford gives the movie a powerful new jolt of energy. This is a fascinating development. Aside from the fact that Ford spent the decade before returning so delightfully as Han Solo somnambulating his way through a series of really terrible performances, he is the key reason the original Blade Runner doesn’t quite work. Ford stumbles through that picture with a quizzical and confused expression indicating he doesn’t understand what the hell is going on and doesn’t really care.

One weird consequence of his lousy acting in Blade Runner was the ludicrous theory that Deckard was also secretly a replicant—an idea Ridley Scott even championed 20 years later in a nakedly transparent ploy to seduce fanboys into buying a new DVD version of the movie that supposedly offered more hints that this is the case. It’s preposterous balderdash.

The moral complications of the original movie (like the Philip K. Dick novel that served as its source material) arise from its portrait of a human race slowly losing its humanity even as its synthetic creations are gaining a measure of their own. Deckard is desiccating; Roy Batty is more of a human being. That is the fact that gives Blade Runner its unique and haunting power. Turn Deckard into a replicant and all of that is lost.

Ford brings to Blade Runner 2049 all the grief and anger and pain he failed to bring to Blade Runner, and he becomes the new movie’s beating heart. He also has the one great line of dialogue that, in context, is as powerful as Batty’s death speech: “Her eyes were green.”

Blade Runner 2049 is a very impressive picture and, despite its excessive length, better than the original in almost every way—except the one that really matters. It’s not going to stick. Unlike Ridley Scott’s maddeningly imperfect film, Blade Runner 2049 isn’t an original. It renovates elements not only of its predecessor but also of Steven Spielberg’s A.I., Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, and even Pixar’s Wall-E. It builds on those and even improves on them to some degree, but it doesn’t show you anything genuinely new. And the perfunctory questions it raises about the souls of artificial beings are by definition not as interesting as ones about the human condition.

Blade Runner 2049 may be more satisfying at first glance, but I don’t think it’s likely to reward a second, whereas Blade Runner rewards a fifth, a sixth, a seventh. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Roy Batty says—and that, in the end, is exactly why Blade Runner is great and Blade Runner 2049 is not.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic.