‘Blade Runner’ returns with bad news
The future has no Internet and a rough climate
It’s been 35 years SAN DIEGO since director Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner, but some things never change, like the arresting neonoir world or Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard still dealing with melancholia and loneliness.
However, director Denis Villeneuve ( Arrival) gets to make that futuristic sandbox very much his own in Blade Runner 2049, the sci-fi sequel (in theaters Oct. 6) that stars Ryan Gosling as Officer K.
Like Deckard decades before, K is a blade runner, an L.A. Police Department operative who hunts down extremely humanoid androids called replicants. In the process, K uncovers a secret that could throw Earth into complete chaos and goes searching for Deckard.
Villeneuve doles out five things his fellow Blade Runner fans need to know about the sequel:
SORRY, GUYS, THERE’S NO INTERNET IN THE FUTURE. A blackout event has occurred between movies, “an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that destroyed all the records,” Villeneuve says. “The digital world went away, so they lost track of everything. In this world, there’s another way of dealing with memory, which is that they went back to a more analog approach. It’s a world where we are back into a physical world so we need blade runners.”
THE FIRST FILM’S MYSTERIES REMAIN INTACT. When talking with Scott (who’s an executive producer), Villeneuve quickly realized that one of the key things he needed to do was keep hidden some of the aspects that were introduced in the first movie, like how replicants are made and what it looks like off-world. “There’s a certain blur about the world outside of L.A. and what that looks like,” Villeneuve says. “I did my best to protect the mystery. It’s my favorite thing in cinema, what we don’t show.”