Despite Blade Runner 2049’s disappointing opening weekend, the sci-fi film is a remarkable spectacle that deserves your patronage. The cool cinematography and blaring synthesizers alone are enough to satisfy fans of the 1982 original, but even those unfamiliar with the story will come away stunned. As I walked out of the film, a friend of mine believed it was the most beautiful film he’d ever seen. That assessment didn’t strike me as hyperbolic.

Aesthetics aside, the real beauty of Blade Runner has always been found underneath the hood. The questions of mortality, of memory, and of being are the true motor of the story, and these philosophical confrontations ground the futuristic story to relatable and timeless human concerns.

Like the original, Blade Runner 2049 creatively uses cinematography to relay these motifs. If the film’s cinematographer Roger Deakin wanted the entire aesthetic to “really feel atrocious,” then he should consider himself successful.

Existential panic, or at least unease, does not encompass the sequel in quite the same way as the original, but where the dialogue falls short, the cinematography is there to remind you that the answers to various questions are not obvious. In many scenes, Deakin pairs angst-ridden characters with rain-drenched windows and blizzard backdrops, highlighting the opaque nature of life.

The interpersonal conflict certainly propels Blade Runner 2049, but this focus can blind viewers to the critical commentary going on in the literal background. While questions around existence take center stage, the Blade Runner series has also famously examined other timeless human concerns: money and power.

Blade Runner 2049 offers a warning to 2017 — the trajectory of capitalism looks bleak. Deakin’s eye for atrocity sees late capitalism as a cruel, immoral, and suicidal system. Only those cocooned in the towering corporate headquarters of Los Angeles could say otherwise.

The City of Angels is again used to envision how the sacred free market would change us, and the film’s answer is clear: its ruinous, but not necessarily apocalyptic.

The St. Elmo’s fires which roar during the original’s opening sequence are replaced in the sequel’s beginning by an endless sea of solar farms. These renewable sources hint to some sort of capitalist “progress,” but seem more like desperate acts instead of redemptive advancements used to stave off inhabitability.

Director Denis Villenueve admirably juxtaposes earth’s decay with a flourishing corporate world, prominently employing symbols of capitalism “in the presentation of a dystopian world.” Earth may be destitute in the future, but business is good. Coca Cola bottle holograms and SONY billboards light up the city, all while nuclear winters blanket the night sky. The film’s envisioning of the future can’t help but force us to question the course of our “current forms of life and social organization.”

An allegorical commentary on modern capitalism could not have come at a better time. As corporate profits hover around all-time highs and our climate displays scary volatility, we need art like this to remind us about the dangers of an economic system based on extraction and exclusion.

While the cinematography leaves no doubt that the pursuit of profit has sent the world into a dire state — no one really says so. The dystopia is assumed. Frustratingly, the dialogue is quite evasive when it comes to condemning modern capitalism. Whereas the existential reckonings are emphasized via the script and the cinematography, 2049's critique of corporations and monolithic capitalism is almost all visual.

The only time it is ever dealt with head on is through Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the CEO of the “Wallace Corporation,” who manufactures slave-replicants. The screenwriters Michael Green and Hampton Fancher use the dead-eyed corporate titan as the embodiment of the capitalist worldview. However, they stop short of giving Wallace’s character any real, sustained opportunity to challenge viewers on the advantages of capitalism.

In one brief scene early on in the film, Wallace tries to justify his corporation’s practices by pointing out that all civilizational progress has come through exploiting the labor of others—so why not repress replicants instead of humans? The argument is compelling, but just as your grappling with the validity of his case the dialogue shifts. Like tears in the rain, this central question at the heart of capitalism is forgotten.

This brief flash of ambiguity is extinguished by a screenplay looking to establish certainty—and that is frustrating, considering Blade Runner’s bread and butter is presenting the dualities of life. Wallace’s rationalization should have been opened up and revisited. It would have given the audience some empathy for his otherwise monstrous actions. Yet instead of developing a capitalist with honorable justifications, Green and Fancher indulge viewers by pigeonholing Wallace’s character into a one-dimensional “bad guy.”

The removal of uncertainty wasn’t a mistake or oversight, either. Michael Green “admitted he looked to the separate stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for inspiration.” It should come as no surprise then that the sequel offers viewers a trite divide between good and evil, reminiscent of a superhero film.

The viewer is left with the impression that capitalism, like Wallace, is evil and irredeemable. I usually don’t find myself in the position of defending capitalism’s merits, but the film grossly oversimplifies a truly complicated topic in order to make it more desirable to market forces. Life rarely offers tidy answers, yet Blade Runner 2049 does just that.

We live in a moment where America is struggling with the untethered nature of capitalism and inequality. Great gains and improvements to life have come from this extractive economic system that is imperiling our planet. But lives are improving—and therein lies the rub.

By deliberately removing ambivalence from the critique of capitalism Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t adequately challenge its viewers and misses an opportunity to provide an honest insight into contemporary society.