‘Blade Runner 2049’ Trailer: I Can Only Make So Many
New Blade Runner 2049 trailer, yo! God damn, I need this movie. Truth be told, I bailed on the trailer about twenty seconds in. I want the experience to be fresh as fuck upon first viewing, and what I saw got me effectively hyped to know how badly this flick is going to rock my nads.
The original 1982 Blade Runner isn’t just one of the best science fiction movies ever made – it’s one of the most influential, with its overcrowded, rainy, beautiful, bleak, and neon-lit vision of a future Los Angeles continuing to inform how the genre looks to this very day. A sequel is a risky proposition. How do you follow-up a movie whose very aesthetic has become commonplace to the point of cliche?
Well, you can start by hiring director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins, who look to have taken Ridley Scott’s original vision and fine-tuned it for 2017 audiences in a big, bold away. At the very least, the new Blade Runner 2049 trailer makes it pretty clear that this long-gestating sequel will look stunning.
But will its story be equally stunning? While the first film is often remembered more for its visuals than its plot points, it remains a noteworthy slice of hardboiled genre noir, a dense, complex, and intentionally obtuse film that offers no easy answers to its many questions. It’s maddening in the best possible ways. It’s maddening in ways that have kept audiences debating its true meaning for decades. In other words, it’s hard to imagine the original Blade Runner getting made today, in a climate where movies tend to be written by following an easily digestible template.