. 2049 had more engaging writing I think.
It's Reddit: the Movie. Standard scifi flick that imitates arthouse aesthetics. It's the $20 Patek Phillipe imitation, the Chrysler 300 with Bentley badge, Ready Player One wrapped in Ulysses dust cover. A film by fedora for fedoras. It's the quintessential pseud movie.
A pedestrian easily accessible scifi story covered in several coats of artistic cinematography and featuring just enough quasi-philosophical meandering to turn away both the ones looking for a fun flick and those looking for serious kino - it has become the Holy Grail of pseuds.
Quite obviously more mentally stimulating than capeshit, yet never as much as to take the viewer out of the comfort zone of the usual evergreen scifi questions and baby's first existential crisis - it's the perfect cultural artifact to attach to for someone desperately longing for the image of "thinking man" or "cinephile", while not actually being interested in challenging themselves or developing authentic taste.
It's a movie for smart-but-lazy dropouts, for young adults who sincerely use the word "normie", for men with "So it goes" tattoos rereading Hitchhiker's Guide for the third time, for community college freshmen that write posts starting with "as an engineer", for "I love Nietzsche! Nihilism, fuck yeah!" people, for those that have buried themselves so deep in irony so they can't even be honest with themselves anymore.
The sort who will make fun of ham-fisted Black Mirror VR episodes in one thread and expunge upon "deep" connotations of holographic waifu in 8000 character multiposts in another, the sort who get off on reddit gold received for their standard issue incoherent teenage "philosophizing" dreck spiced with 'human condition' and 'Hegelian dialectic', the enlightened-by-their-own-intelligence crowd. The painful kind of self-aware capeshit swine that constantly whines about the death of cinema while watching nothing but Hollywood and dismissing everything else as "pretentious".