By: Nick Gambino
I’m a huge fan of the original Blade Runner film so needless to say my last 48 hours have been mainly taken up with watching the newly dropped trailer for Blade Runner 2049.
Harrison Ford’s words from the first film lingering over gritty yet visceral images was all I needed and I was hooked.
When Blade Runner was released back in 1982 it brought something new to the Sci-Fi world. It gave us a glimpse into a future that wasn’t all slick gadgets in a clean dystopia. Instead it showed us the depths to which man could fall.
With dirty/gritty Los Angeles 2019 as the backdrop it was a sure sign of where we were headed at the time if we didn’t make some major changes heading into the 80s.
It’s not that no one had shown us our future decadence before. John Carpenter showed us a rotting Big Apple the year prior in Escape from New York while in the same year George Miller gave us Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
It’s just that no one did it quite as well as Blade Runner. Though it can be argued that those two films didn’t really fall into a Science Fiction category. Ridley Scott on the other hand gave us a new sub-genre that can only be described as Sci-Fi Noir.
With the perfect blend of drama, action and stunning visuals, the film runs deep with themes that a lot of us are still grappling with today, 30+ years removed.
It helped that the source material was so rich. Based on the Phillip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? this was the first in a line of successful movies based off the author’s work (Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, etc.).
Talks of a sequel to the successful ’82 film have been floating around for years but it was only in the last couple of years that it gained any real traction.
Harrison Ford is returning as a now retired blade runner (as referenced at the end of the original) while it seems Ryan Gosling is the new blood on the scene tasked with tracking down and “retiring” replicants.
Ridley Scott has turned over directing duties to Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Arrival) but is still producing.
The official synopsis on the website reads, “Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling) unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.”
Blade Runner 2049 hits theaters Oct. 6th 2017…
Now I’m depressed.
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