Clearly the film was about K's search for meaning and what it means to be "human", love and things people call love (presumably, the ultimate human emotion), how it is twisted and how it drives people, and the simple correlation of K's demoralized, dehumanized, emotionally repressed existence in his dystopian world to our present reality.
The movie is naturally derivative. You can't outdo the original. The first had mystery and was somewhat novel in its themes. The sequel just continues the exploration of the themes while trying to avoid falling into a base pandering or formulaic repetition.
Villeneuve's steadfast refusal to follow trite big budget movie conventions and turn Blade Runner into a cartoon like other rebooted franchises, and instead present a bleak cerebral cinema is, if anything, a huge filter. It's a movie in a dystopia. It's meant to leave you feeling depressed and vaguely anxious... that it achieves it is a feature, not a bug. Some people understand that... many don't. The big problem is it's too damn long. Bleak and long together is a hard sell.
Clearly though a lot of people got the movie's message, even if only subconsciously, because it produced so many memes. K as an avatar of the lonely, emotionally repressed, nameless modern man engaged in a sisyphean pursuit. Joi as the ideal girlfriend you can never have. People really resonated with the vibes. The casting of both was superb.
K is driven by his memories that give him a sense of meaning and humanity through familial love, but these are fake and ultimately he must reject them and find his own true meaning. The familial love was Deckard's, not his. One could argue this we all feel as children, and then coming of age demands leaving the familiar to find yourself, and the director is playing with the typical heroes' journey, one in which he is in search of love and identity, and goes through several sequences of false starts until he finds them.
K is given a sense of romantic love through the eponymous Joi, and this explores a lot of ideas around male loneliness, fantasies, feminine ideals and the reality (or lack thereof) of such love. Joi is an ersatz relationship, an escapism, a bought and paid for fantasy of love and humanity for K, the perfect girlfriend, caring, beautiful, attentive, supportive and loyal till death. He is jabbed by the prostitute that "he doesn't like real girls", pointing out this common problem of young men putting women on unrealistic pedestals. He is infatuated by a mirage. Ultimately they "make love" by getting the prostitute to be a physical proxy. But is sexual intercourse any more real "love" than holographic interaction?
Joi's character arc leads to an ever increasing "reality" later to be *crushed*, and while a lot of people seem to think that the holo ad scene cements the point of view it was all fake, I don't think that was the director's intent. I think it is meant to be ambiguous. The whole theme of Blade Runner is about the possibility of real free will, intelligence and emotion in artificial beings (and therefore, our exploration of the reality of our own). K is a replicant yet the audience is made to humanize him, you take the reality of his emotions and free will for granted. Somehow that is not afforded to Joi. But why not? Because she is programmed, obviously. But isn't K too programmed, an artificial being with fake memories and all? And aren't we all programmed by biology? Isn't "love" programmed into us? A biochemical tyranny that forces us into these behaviors?
So I think that theme is playing on two layers and left deliberately unresolved. One, can artificial, disembodied, programmed AI have true emotions and free will? And two, do we??, or is the human condition biological machines programmed just the same, pretending not to be? Does love and free will even exist? Therefore, the crushing feeling of the holo ad scene was not that it was definitely fake love, or that it was definitely true love but is now gone... but the more disturbing sense that you cannot even know if it was real or fake. Like some complicated breakup... it's over, but what exactly is over? Either conclusion is bad, but not having any conclusion is worse. You can drive yourself crazy over it. Perhaps a lot of people don't interpret it that way because they haven't experienced such a thing.
These themes are further reinforced by Niander and Luv's characters. Their relationship is again, of the creator and the created, and deal with the issues of determinism vs free will, what it means to be human, and emotions. Both represent what we'd call pathological forms of love. One only loves himself, he thinks himself god (an all too human conceit), and the other has a twisted sense of self-love and has placed her entire identity and self-worth in the external approval of someone else, an abusive, obsessive and hollow "love".
K finally discovers his humanity and will when he sacrifices himself. He chooses to die for the sake of others. His life gains meaning in his death. A higher kind of love. It was religious in that way.
The movie concludes with the victory of true love over false love, of true humanity.
Seen in this way, I don't agree with Cog's assertion that there is no payoff because the true antagonist is not addressed. It is not the setting that is the real antagonist. It is the struggle for meaning in the human condition. The setting is merely an externalization of it.
