In a menacing, not-too-distant future, androids and humans live in an uneasy kind of symbiosis, the synthetic people serving at the rapacious and wary pleasure of the organic ones. But something is shifting—a new consciousness is brewing, autonomy is being reached for—in an alluring story that probes existential quandaries both profound and primal. Man, I love Westworld.

Oh, sorry, did you think I was talking about Blade Runner 2049? I mean, in some ways I am, though I wish I was as up on the movie—a sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic—as I am on HBO’s robot coming-of-age series. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a devotee of the original movie; I saw it once (while stoned), and have not felt compelled to revisit it. But I think it might have more to do with a problem that has gnawed at much of director Denis Villeneuve’s work; all his enveloping style can smother the spirit of his films. He tends to create gorgeous, but rather empty, vessels.

Blade Runner 2049 may be Villeneuve’s most stunningly rendered film yet. Working with cinematographer nonpareil Roger Deakins (just give him his damn Oscar for this one, won’t you?), Villeneuve expands on the visual motifs that Scott created 35 years ago, paying careful homage while adding his own more modern inventions. The Los Angeles of 2049 is gray and teeming, a dying city on a dying planet, steadily abandoned by people moving “off-world,” while replicants—useful but maligned androids—do the necessary work that humans don’t want to. Those stuck on Earth have fled reality, finding comfort in replicant prostitutes or in lifelike girlfriend-experience holograms. (This future L.A. is decidedly engineered with the heterosexual male in mind. Not exactly unlike the current L.A.) It’s grim, hopeless stuff, but not without its beauty.

Villeneuve’s images are striking: ominous cityscapes washed in garish light, cold interiors cut with harsh lines. He honors the original’s 1980s aesthetic—its stark vision of a future, 2019, that’s now almost here—by including anachronistic technology, logos for companies that don’t exist now and probably won’t resurface by 2049 (like Pan Am), and retro-looking cars and clothing. His camera, slowly gliding as it surveys, captures a howling enormity, a true dystopia of human making that is terrifying in its consuming malevolence. All of these stately and forbidding pictures are intensified by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s groaning, grinding score, a nod to the pulsating, synth-heavy Vangelis original with the volume turned way up. There are moments in Blade Runner 2049 when sight and sound converge mightily, and the film feels as bracing and urgent as any of the best big-ticket cinema spectacles—a gripping reminder of why we go see things in movie theaters.

Video: 8 Must-See Cult Classics

For that, Villeneuve’s film is a success. But of course, there is also the matter of plot, which is hard to discuss without spoiling some pretty significant elements. So I’ll be vague, and brief. 2049’s tale concerns another blade runner (a policeman specializing in hunting down and executing renegade replicants), this one played by Ryan Gosling. During a routine case, the cop, named K, discovers something highly irregular, sending him down a rabbit hole that links his story with that of Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford in the 1982 film and again in this one. 2049’s script, by original Blade Runner writer Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, presents an intriguing enough mystery, only to then give up its answers too readily.