Ridley Scott is comfortable in dystopia. There’s scarcely a frame of this dank future-noir that isn’t an eyeful. Constantly in the foreground or background, Scott gives us falling rain, swirling lights, pulsing neon, whirring technology, busy crowds and lost souls. It’s a panorama of the post-apocalypse age, threatening and sumptuous, bleak and luminous, one beautiful hellhole. Scott is less comfortable with Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The film makes a mess of the story, stumbles through it and replaces Dick’s 1960s spiritual struggle with a grizzled cop’s malaise. To be fair, the book is a product of its time and the film is a product of its time, when living with technology was more compelling than finding God (or something close to it). Along the way, Scott mutes the emotions, even at the film’s arthouse slow pace, and does little more than skim the surface of an android-killing lawman’s turning point as he hunts down a rogue pack of the latest model, the most human-like robots yet. It ends up as a film about machines, not people. Its inner workings are artificial with no use for a heart and its brain is a busy microchip. Like its androids, this walks and talks like a great film, but it’s missing something.