I saw it yesterday. It's... quiiiite good?
First off, it looks and sounds amazing, but then of course it does. It couldn't possible fail to, with that much expectation and cash behind it. Aside from the SFX, though, I thought that aesthetically it was a step forward and a step back at the same time. Whereas the first film did the 1980s-does-the-1920s thing so well, the look of the sets in the new one reminded me of nothing so much as 2001, or at least, a very 1960s idea of The Future. Then again, the abandoned industrial areas really reminded me of the proletarian underworld in Metropolis, from the actual 1920s. On the soundtrack side, Hans Zimmer does a great job in setting the mood and following Vangelis's lead without actually ripping him off, I think, and the heavy farty dubstep sub-bass is great. Punchiest gunshots I've ever heard (and felt), too.
But I broadly have to agree with craner. It has nothing like the intimacy and emotional content of the original. The bit near the end where K/Joe is considering doing himself in made me think I wouldn't really care whether he did or not, which is surely not a good sign in a film. It's got none of the mythopoeic potency of the original, all the Promethean-Faustian-Nietzschean God-and-Adam stuff - the nearest it came to references of that sort was the line about K being a "real boy" after all, wasn't it? Another great thing about the older film is the way it avoids the simplistic moral binary and doesn't even really have a villain as such; Deckard is simply doing his job, while the rogue replicants just want to survive and answer questions about their origins, and failing that to get some revenge on the men who created them as disposable slaves and the man who's trying to rob them of the even the meagre bit of life they've been allotted. Even Tyrell isn't actually malicious, he's just an amoral technocapitalist Frankenstein enthralled to his own brilliance. Contrast that with the new feature, with the ludicrous Wallace who is so obviously a Villain-with-a-capital-V that we have to see him gratuitously stab a newly hatched replicant to death while giving a self-aggrandizing monologue just to rub in that this is One Really Bad Dude.
So, I dunno really. Not a bad effort but it can't help but pale next to the original. Good cast for the most part, including the excellent Robin Wright, a.k.a. 'Cate Blanchett's lesbian evil twin' from House of Cards. I also think the hologram girlfriend should have had a shiny letter 'H' on her forehead.