The son also rises for Blade Runner prequel
Luke Scott helms thoughtful, thrilling prequel to his father’s classic Blade Runner
It’s ironic, given all the attention and anticipation for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming sequel to
Blade Runner, that Luke Scott, son of the original movie’s director, should be the one to sneak into theatres with a prequel to that famous science-fiction tale.
Granted, this is not an official prequel — there’s no young Rick Deckard who will grow into Harrison Ford’s grizzled, Replicant-hunting police officer. But the screenplay, by Seth W. Owen, presses many of the same philosophical buttons as the elder Scott’s 1982 classic, which was set in the “distant” future year 2019.
What does it mean to be human? And what happens when we can’t distinguish ourselves from our creations — or, even more troubling, when they can’t?
The film opens on Lee Weathers (Kate Mara), a risk-management officer with something called “The Corporation.” She’s been sent to a remote wilderness laboratory (shades of last year’s superb Ex Machina), to investigate a new life form that’s been created by a small team of Corporation scientists, headed up by Toby Jones and Michelle Yeoh.
The human/machine hybrid, Morgan, is played by Anya Taylor Joy, whose big-screen career got off to an excellent, creepy start with the 2015 horror film, The
Witch. In this one, her character is just five years old, although due to accelerated growth she walks and talks like a teenager (Taylor Joy is 20). She is also an “it,” according to the severe, almost Terminator-like Weathers.
She (or it), has been locked in a spartan cell after attacking one of the research team (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Everyone’s trying to put a brave face on the incident, but it’s clear that Weathers is there to decide whether to pull the plug on this experiment. She does have orders from corporate to “preserve the asset,” however; shades of Scott Senior’s Alien this time.
Weathers engages in a crafty, low-key game of cat-and-mouse with Morgan and her creators, but the tension ratchets up sharply when a prickly psychologist named Shapiro (Paul Giamatti), shows up to perform a more official evaluation. If you know your Blade Runner, you’ll remember the Voight-Kampff test, designed to “provoke an emotional response” in the subject. Shapiro does that, and then some.
Scott handles the story and its setting with agility. The research facility where most of the action takes place is part glass-and-steel laboratory, part wood-panelled Victorian house; a hybrid location befitting the title character. Morgan has been allowed to make trips into the surrounding forest with the scientists, and is developing a love of nature that borders on worship.
Some trailers for the film seem to place it in the horror genre, but it’s really more of a thoughtful thriller. So on the one hand, some fantastic combat sequences; on the other, one of the best “I’m sorry, I can’t do that’s,” since 2001: A Space
Odyssey. And while it is set firmly in the present, or at best a few years out, the message is clear; the days of Blade Runner are closer than we may think.