11 ms·

Blade Runner 2099 Sequel Series Coming from Ridley Scott

117 points by evo_9 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thecrumb 5y ago
Yawn. I made it about 1/2 through 2049 and just got bored. Where has all the creativity gone in film. It's just one remake / sequel after another.
- arrakis2021 5y ago
  Whaaaaat 2049 was a masterpiece
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Your username gives away a subtle disposition leaning towards Denis Villeneuve...
    - kadoban 5y ago
      That doesn't mean they're wrong. 2049 is a very good movie.
    - guardiangod 5y ago
      I was watching Dune 2021 on Microsoft Teams streaming (virtual company Christmas party from Youtube Movies), and the auto-diction translated Arrakis to Iraqis. Suddenly the whole story make sense to me.
      - mhh__ 5y ago
        Would that mean watching the movie on YouTube via teams? As in crappy youtube quality through teams? Awful. I'm annoyed you basically have to pirate a movie or go through the faff of actually buying a Blu-ray to watch things in uber-HD properly.
        dhritzkiv 5y ago
        I think they mean they rented/bought Dune to watch, via YouTube's movie platform[1]. The host of the Microsoft Teams video meeting then likely shared their view of the YouTube screen (I don't know how it works in MS Teams, but, for example, I know Jitsi allows a meeting participant to embed a YouTube video for all to watch+listen to. It's surprisingly good quality) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd2DrxUi4H8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd2DrxUi4H8
- postalrat 5y ago
  The second time I watched 2049 I thought it was great. First time not so much. Not sure why I didn't like it the first time.
- MisterSandman 5y ago
  I absolutely loved 2049. Haven't seen the original, yet. hides under desk
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    But have you read the original novella? I enjoyed both films, but "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" has much more depth to its questions about humanity than either of them. It also illustrates Deckard's disfunctional nature better.
    - Trasmatta 5y ago
      Mercerism is one of the weirdest things I've read about in any book. It makes sense it wouldn't be included in the movies, it's almost an unfilmable concept, I think. PKD is one of my favorite authors. Nobody before or since has been able to more accurately capture the slippery nature of reality, in my opinion.
      - technothrasher 5y ago
        Mercerism is one of the best parts of the story. A lonely religion based on simulated shared Sisyphean suffering is just so symbolic of PKD’s overall view of life, it’s delicious to read. But I agree, it works better in prose than it would on film. Still, I kept hoping they’d Easter egg it into the films somewhere just as a nod to those who have read the story. I very much enjoy PKD’s writing, though he gets hard to follow in his later stuff as he slipped further into drug abuse and mental illness.
  - craigching 5y ago
    The original is a masterpiece, but I wonder how much I’m reminiscing. Sean Young and Rutger Hauer we’re fantastic, though, so I do think there is something timeless about it. I have watched 2049 a couple of times now and still don’t see what everyone else sees as great about it. I’m willing to keep trying though.
    - 5y ago
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  It was a remake / sequel, alright. A remake / sequel of Her
  - pubby 5y ago
    2048 was a fantastic depiction of modern male loneliness; unloved and invisible, yet with beautiful commercialized girls at one's finger tips. "Her" didn't capture this well, and frankly I don't think Spike Jonze is the type of author who can. He's too popular to be that pathetic! The movie is great for other reasons, but behind its sci-fi lies a traditional romance movie plot.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Well when you put it that way, that just makes 2049 a remake / sequel of Drive
- Barrin92 5y ago
  It's a decent film but aesthetically it leans way too heavily on the original. When you have allusions to the Soviet Union and flying cars in a film in 2020 it just seems retro-futuristic and anachronistic rather than like science fiction.
  - saltminer 5y ago
    To me, the Soviet aspect makes sense. There was a fear in the US in the 80s that Japan would surpass the US to become the dominant world economy, which was reflected in the original film. In 2049, the Japanese aspect hasn't been erased, but it also exists alongside imagery of Russia, which, if we consider the actions of the Russian government in the years leading up to this film, it fits from the same perspective of a fear of the US being dominated. I'm not sure why the original film seemed to only focus on Japan, PKD's vision also included the USSR. In that sense, 2049 almost feels more faithful to the book. As for the flying cars...they had flying cars in the original film, why would they get rid of that? Or do you mean that you expect they wouldn't look so much like our cars? (If the latter, I kinda agree.)
    - saltminer 5y ago
      My comment is too old to edit now, but I just thought of something: I saw a video on youtube awhile back about the making of the original Blade Runner. In it, they said that PKD did not live to see the film in theaters, but they were able to show him a 10-15 minute "highlight reel", which included shots of the flying cars. PKD said it was like they were reading his mind, it was so accurate. So at least to PKD, the original Blade Runner's flying cars were canon. Not that I think the lack of design evolution between the two films seems too realistic, but given the events that occurred between the two films [0][1], I can see lots of technological progress being lost. Consider the scene in 2049 where K brings in the sample for Rachel and the desk employee says that they lost a lot of data during the blackout, and to not expect much for anything this old. Had all that not happened, I'd completely agree that the design of 2049's flying cars seemed too retro, that they would have pioneered new vehicle layouts by then. [0] https://collider.com/blade-runner-timeline-explained/ https://collider.com/blade-runner-timeline-explained/ [1] https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline Edit: Found the video where PKD seeing the highlight reel is mentioned: https://youtu.be/EByNb7F-A34?t=1556 https://youtu.be/EByNb7F-A34?t=1556 (the whole video is worth a watch, the entirely-analog techniques they used are incredible)
- fullshark 5y ago
  There's only so many scripts/stories you can tell. With the ability to access all filmed media at your fingertips, you can watch Star Wars from 1977 any time you want, you couldn't watch old buck rogers serials whenever you wanted in 1977 so when George Lucas modernized them it blew your mind.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Star Wars was borrowing heavily from Seven Samurai not just western films. Thus swords vs blasters works the same way swords vs arrows do in those films etc. There are basically infinite ways to remix old stories like that. Hell even just the editing significantly improved Star Wars over the original script.
    - fullshark 5y ago
      Yeah point is it was heavily derivative, as are most of the films during the last golden age of film (1970s-pick when?), but the technological advances were dramatic enough and audiences didn't have home entertainment systems and access to every film ever so these films were incredibly novel culturally speaking.
      - Retric 5y ago
        I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies. That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies. But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
  - Findecanor 5y ago
    These days, you would need an official fan-restoration / fan-edit to see the Star Wars from 1977 - and that would legally be a bootleg.
- slibhb 5y ago
  The flashbacks to the original were extremely lame. And I didn't love the story. But visually it was great, it's packed with really compelling images. Highly superior to Dune which has a boring plot and mostly lacks compelling images. Seriously, where were the guild steersmen? The dragonfly vessels were okay but do you even remember a spaceship from Dune? Stellan Skarsgard was unrecognizable and boring in the villain role. Plus the fight scenes were horrible.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    > Highly superior to Dune which has a boring plot and mostly lacks compelling images. Seriously, where were the guild steersmen? The dragonfly vessels were okay but do you even remember a spaceship from Dune? Stellan Skarsgard was unrecognizable and boring in the villain role. Plus the fight scenes were horrible. What movie did you watch? I am so confused. The _fight scenes_ were horrible? In what way? Even just the first fight scene with the shields was cool and well done. The thopters were just _okay_? They were _brilliantly_ done, had really interesting special effects, etc. The spaceship of note in the film would probably be the guild ship, whatever they're called, the hiliners? Looked nice to me. Dune doesn't really have a ton of spaceships, it's planet-centric which makes sense really. And the plot was boring? I don't even know what to say, that story is very well loved and the movie didn't change too much.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      > The copters Ornithopters. > the hiliners? Heighliners.
      - kadoban 5y ago
        Thanks. I fixed copters, just a typo, I've leave the other alone.
    - slibhb 5y ago
      > The _fight scenes_ were horrible? In what way? Even just the first fight scene with the shields was cool and well done. The fight scenes are people slapping each other really fast. There's no weight to it. > And the plot was boring? I don't even know what to say, that story is very well loved and the movie didn't change too much. A more significant consideration than what happens is how it is relayed to the audience. The way the story in Dune unfolds is linear and boring. It is chracters in rooms having conversations to fill the audience in before the real plot starts. It's not exciting or interesting and few risks are taken. One of the cool ideas in Dune is that there are no computers so people take a psychedelic drug to pilot spaceships. Maybe this is explained in some boring monologue or text flash but there's no reason it couldn't be shown and it certainly isn't. It doesn't help that Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya are awful. The only notably good performance is Rebecca Ferguson (Jessica).
- kadoban 5y ago
  Maybe it's just not your kind of film, or you weren't in the mood. There was _very_ little wrong with that movie.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Too long, too slow.
    - kadoban 5y ago
      IMO neither of those are flaws of it. It's a movie not afraid to let scenes breathe and not afraid to take time to set the tone. You do have to buy into it some though, if you're just counting the seconds until the next big thing happens it's not going to be a fun time.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        It doesn’t take a full extra hour to let scenes breathe. It was poorly paced, the number one complaint. About as objective as a criticism gets.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Oh boy, you’d really hate Too Old to Die Young, which I loved.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Thank god for VLC and 1.25x speed. :-)
        iamacyborg 5y ago
        You might need 2x for that one
  - dsego 5y ago
    Jared Leto
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  2049 was an incredible film in my opinion. Hooker sex scene and the baseline test were pretty fantastic.
- guardiangod 5y ago
  I love 2049 and it took me 3 tries to finish the original without falling asleep. I still think the original is a mediocre film made cultish by its genre definition cyberpunk worldviews. Different strokes for different folks.
  - TranquilMarmot 5y ago
    No, see, you have to watch every different cut of the original to really understand it (kidding, of course... it's really slow and I have to be in the right mood to enjoy it)
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      Blade Runner is a total madcap romp compared to Tarkovsky's Solaris, though. (I love that movie, but the threat of punishing my friends with it is a standard joke...)
      - markdestouches 5y ago
        Make them watch the Mirror instead. It's a much better introduction to Tarkovsky. (Solaris is much more of Crime and Punishment than Sci-Fi anyway)
- mhh__ 5y ago
  If you can't see the creativity in 2049 that's on you IMO. Villeneuve is probably the best director in his area of film right now (not necessarily sci-fi), his work is emotionally mature and challenges audiences without mocking them, calling it uncreative is ridiculous.
  - markdestouches 5y ago
    Does this description also apply to his latest film (Dune)? Because I'd describe it as the opposite of that.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Probably not, but that’s likely a problem with the source material more than anything, Dune is nothing but your typical fantasy story of boy discovers he has magic powers and saves the world.
    - bitcharmer 5y ago
      Dune is a visual masterpiece. Some people are just incapable of appreciating art.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        I... I'm not so sure. I really like the universe of Frank Herbert's dune, but a lot of the set design on Dune is just... boring. The ornithopters are built like a Cybertruck, which doesn't make sense in an era where computers were destroyed long ago. The monolithic buildings and spaceships look more like a Quake 2 map than they do professional VFX. Having gone into the film with an open mind, I was severely let down by the visual side of things. Even the cinematography felt... fine. Surprisingly, I thought Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa were the strongest parts of the film.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deaddodo 5y ago
After the letdowns that are Raised by Wolves and the Alien prequels; I’ll pass on a Ridley Scott series, til I hear otherwise.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  I like Raised by Wolves. A lot of it is "here's another unrealistic coincidence" and "that character has a lot of plot armor", but I'm hoping it's because the overarching mystery story makes it that way. I'll be disappointed if this turns out to be sloppy writing. Certainly a chunk of the writing so far is cliche. I'm pretty sure I saw parts of this show a dozen times in various 90s shows and 50s/60s/70s books. Anybody remember Earth 2? Although the child actors are quite bad at acting, the adults largely make up for it. The environment does feel like a Star Trek jungle set, where it's hard to suspend disbelief that it's not just a few hundred square meter outdoor stage in South Africa. But we've been suspending disbelief on low res sci fi shows for years, so long as the story is good, and even when the writing is bad. For instance Babylon 5 is one of my all time favorites and the writing is bad and the acting is worse. A couple actors elevate and save it (Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas, Ed Wasser, Walter Koenig). But what really saves it is story: not effects, not dialog, not delivery, just compelling world-building story. I'm hoping Raised by Wolves turns into something great, but so far as it's at least good, I'm along for the ride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHAwFtJrp3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHAwFtJrp3c https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
  - craigching 5y ago
    I’m liking Raised by Wolves, but the birth kind of was a let down. I’m thinking there is way more to it so I’m holding on to hope. I also liked the Alien prequels. They weren’t as good as the original, but I thought they were still interesting enough. I loved the old ship with the pilot in Prometheus, but I feel like it wasn’t finished either and there could have been more.
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      Yeah, the last quarter or last third of Season 1 was a drop in story quality. But Season 2 has picked up and gotten good again. One thing I'm enjoying, unlike in 90s sci fi, is when the characters call out obvious threats and take them as a given, like "that creature has probably been brain chipped and given as a tool to track you". Indeed, there is no free lunch in dystopia land, whereas 90s sci fi would have the otherwise smart characters be incredibly dumb in situations like this.
baron816 5y ago
Ridley Scott is 84 years old and is currently producing 69 different projects and directing 10 of them. I have nothing else to say here. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000631/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000631/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thinkingkong 5y ago
  Wow. I had no idea he was in that phase of life. Really changes the name based endorsement and also explains some recent activity.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    I think he's getting more irritable as he gets older (and I think he still has a chip on his shoulder for being criticised for being too visual - should a bird not sing?), but wasn't The Last Duel supposed to have been good? As for irritable: Some of these press outbursts are definitely directors trying to whip up some press for their movies, but he got in some hot water for saying --- “The best films are driven by the characters,” he said, “and we’ll come to superheroes after this if you want, because I’ll crush it. I’ll f*ing crush it. They’re f*ing boring as s*." and "Their scripts are not any fucking good" --- Is he wrong? They're mostly not bad* now (marvel ones at least), but they're utterly sedated and breeding a new generation of media-consumers who've literally never seen a "good" movie (By which I mean something driven by a director rather than a producer)
- rasz 5y ago
  so just like Bruce Willis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo
  - philistine 5y ago
    I clapped !
- 5y ago
walrus01 5y ago
Holden : The sequel lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to get studio funding, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Leon : [angry at the suggestion] What do you mean, I'm not helping? Holden : I mean: you're not helping! Why is that, Leon? [Leon has become visibly shaken] Holden : They're just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, they're written down for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response... Shall we continue?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
aaron695 5y ago
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I loved 2049. Thought it was a great film. But it was a great film on its own. It didn't really need the ties to the original. Does the blade runner world really need another piece? Well, idk. I guess I would say its probably going to be pretty good, but I'd suspect trying to embrace the existing canon is going to harm the potential of the movie more than it will help. The 50 year time jumps are good though.
- kirso 5y ago
  Agreed. At this point I am just happy there is any kind of great piece of sci-fi coming out. I think since Expanse it has been quite hard to find anything worth watching in that space.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    Dune is pretty fantastic. It’s definitely not a movie that’s best enjoyed with tv speakers though.
    - kirso 5y ago
      For sure, seems like just Marvelification of all movies has been really annoying. Everything has the same style / humour and vagueness.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  It really cruxes on their being a story to tell. It's like people asking if they're going to do another film with K? (Which I think is symptom of cinema being saturated with feel good movies where there is no conflict or sacrifice, possibly in funny costumes...). He's utterly finished at the end of 2049, there isn't any more to say. I don't know what it would look like but I think a relatively obvious road to go down would probably the ethics of general AI in computers. If you do have your own Joi, is she a slave? Does she "is", at all? I really hope they land it if it gets made, although at worst it'll probably be a really pretty if confusing mess, which is better than most TV shows.
- thinkingkong 5y ago
WalterBright 5y ago
I enjoyed his recent movie "The Last Duel". I thought it was unbelievable, but after reading the book it is historically accurate. The fight scene is blow-by-blow what actually happened. Sooo much better than those silly superhero movies. I'll definitely see more Scott movies!
- TranquilMarmot 5y ago
  I had no idea he directed this! I'm a huge Ridley Scott fan but apparently not enough to know that he just released a movie. I'll have to give this a watch.
  - yannikyeo 5y ago
    He has two movies end 2021: The Last Duel and House of Gucci. Kudos to him for having such energy for his age.
    - philistine 5y ago
      He's like Clint Eastwood; if he stops making movies he dies.
antisthenes 5y ago
This a personal opinion, but I think the most interesting thing in the Blade Runner universe aren't even Replicants. We know Replicants are used for space travel and colony labor, and we also know Earth is overpopulated and mostly stripped of resources. I want to see more of this dynamic, space exploration, life in the colonies, what politics are like on a dying planet. Who the other big evil corporations are. How does space travel work? Who owns it? What do colonies produce? Etc. 2049 had a nice story, but it pales in comparison to what's potentially available in such a rich and deep set universe.
- Lorin 5y ago
  I hope 2099 explorers the stories of people/replicants away from earth. No need to bring back to old characters (although I guess they could bring back certain replicant models).
- chii 5y ago
  then you would really enjoy "the expanse" - esp. the latter seasons.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  Not directly related (some) but the setting of Alien/Aliens is awesome. A deep space ship just out there on its own, great vibe.
- rewgs 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion here, I'm sure, but this line of thinking is precisely what kneecapped Star Wars: the need to know everything. World-building is the antithesis of character-building. We fall in love with this stories because of the characters. We then become fascinated with the possibility of the worlds, then the worlds are built out, and then it sucks, and then people go "well, no, the world should have been built this way or that way," and then that's tried, and it sucks too, and now the franchise has lost all that made it interesting in the first place and all sci-fi just kind of devolves into one bland soup of all the other sci-fi, and everyone along the way forgets to write compelling characters. And who are the compelling characters in Blade Runner? Those who were written about: Replicants, and those who hunt them. The world was not the point, the characters and their conflict/struggles and the issues those raise were the point. Why do we need to know about the other big evil corporations, when the sense that there's only one, and that's the one that builds the Replicants, is so much more compelling? Not to mention that the primary function of the Tyrell/Wallace Corporation is to serve the characters. Who cares how space travel works as long as it does? Who cares what the colonies produce, unless the fruits of that production can aid in telling an interesting story revolving around a character as interesting as Roy Batty? Can you really tell a compelling story about a worker on an off-world colony -- and if the answer is "yes," why does it need to be part of Blade Runner, and not its own thing? The colonies are almost certainly not interesting because they're better than Earth -- there's likely less conflict. Hollywood folks are incredibly influenced by precisely this kind of discourse on the internet (source: I work in Hollywood), and it drives me nuts because it's just the blind leading the blind. Going "what else could happen in this world" feels good, but it almost always is the death knell of a franchise, because it's fundamentally the wrong question to ask when writing fiction. The question that results in good story-telling is "who is this person," or "who does this happen to," and allow the world-building to grow organically from there.
willis936 5y ago
Most of my opinions towards this news are informed by RLM's re:view of Blade Runner. https://youtu.be/adjfTktpIzg https://youtu.be/adjfTktpIzg
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
On first watching, 2049 went straight to the top of my all-time faves. And... I can't imagine where you'd take the story from there. My imagination is limited of course, but I always have those cynical thoughts, 'they made a lot of cash on the film and want to make more and the sequel will be cliché, or tortured, or insipid.' Phantom Menace, early POTA sequels, BTTF sequels were just money grabs. But I have hope. 2049 itself was a sequel, right? Most of the MCU are technically sequels, and pretty good. The latest Star Trek reboot was enjoyable. What do you think?
- chii 5y ago
  > The latest Star Trek reboot was enjoyable. they were pretty terrible star trek movies - because they didn't have anything of note to say about humanity and society like the old star trek would. These reboots are merely action/adventure movies with a star trek setting. In fact, they use the star trek name to generate marketing hype. Those films would not have done nearly so well had it not borrowed it.
- riffraff 5y ago
  there are quite a few of sequels which are as good or better then the original. Terminator 2, Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back come to mind. But IMO, the likelihood goes down exponentially the more sequels they make.
- otikik 5y ago
  I personally would love to see how things are outside Earth in the Blade Runner universe. Probably bleak.
  - rendall 5y ago
    If you go by the source material, Philip K Dick's novels, they are extremely bleak. 3-5 people huddled in tiny, isolated camps insulated from a toxic environment, where the only joy available is taking drugs that allows them dream they are living back on Earth.
    - 5y ago
georgewsinger 5y ago
Blade Runner 2049 I think has my all-time favorite "villain" of any movie I've ever seen. I put "villain" in quotes because he isn't actually a villain at all, and the movie falsely categorizes him as evil. To see why, here's Wikipedia's description of him: > Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) is the sinister CEO and founder of Wallace Corporation, which dominates replicant production in 2049. A genius genetic engineer, his genetically modified crops and livestock solved a global food crisis – which then gave him enough wealth and political clout to lift the ban on replicant production. Wallace bought out the bankrupt Tyrell Corporation (which had collapsed after several revolts by Nexus-8 replicants). Wallace improved the genetic programming of his new “Nexus-9” replicants to the point that they cannot disobey the orders of humans, even if the order is to commit suicide. By 2049, Wallace Corporation has revitalized the replicant industry and is a major megacorporation with numerous other subsidiaries in other fields, such as Joi unit digital AI holograms. > Wallace is blind, but uses cybernetic implants in his neck to interact with various computers and “see” through flying miniature camera units. > The secret of making replicants that can reproduce died with Tyrell, and Wallace is obsessed with learning it. By 2049, Earth is suffering from resource depletion and heavy pollution, and it was Wallace’s genetically modified foods and new replicants that not only staved off extinction, but allowed humanity to spread to the off-world colonies. Nonetheless, Wallace is frustrated that humanity has only spread to nine other planets, when he wants to see it explode across thousands of planets in the galaxy. Lacking the capacity to build enough replicants for such an endeavor, Wallace is convinced that replicants capable of reproduction on their own are the answer. OK Blade Runner 2049, so you’re telling me that the “evil villain” of your movie saved earth from a mass starvation, got rich off of that, then used his clout and money to smash the regulatory state so that he could give all of humanity personal robot slaves (so no one ever has to do hard manual labor ever again), then cured his own (and presumably others’) blindness, and now is devoting 100% of his resources to Star Trek off onto thousands of other planets across the galaxy? And /all/ by 2049 (which most of us here have a good chance of living to)? That’s your evil villain?! Because all of this seems just 100%, non-ironically good to me[1], and I wished I lived in a world where people could be this competent. [1] Caveat: Ok, so I’m assuming the Blade Runner replicants are actually just robots without real consciousness/qualia. If they do have qualia, then I definitely wouldn't support enslaving them, and would categorize Wallace back in the “evil (albeit complex) villain” category.
highspeedbus 5y ago
"A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem..." This got fixed in my brain since watched the movie. Such a powerful wordplay that make sense in the context of fuzzy testing an android for signs of emotions, like the desire to connect with someone. It was released already into a new age of significant change in cinema values. Everything since is too safe, too clean and reassuring. We need some punk (in blockbuster) movies again.
- hotwire 5y ago
  Much of that baseline test actually comes from Nabokov's "Pale Fire" - which is also the book Joi picks up when she says "do you want to read to me".
- arrakis2021 5y ago
  The second baseline test where K fails is such a hard to watch scene. it’s such a short scene but personally the highlight of the movie because of what it means. He’s becoming human and they need to turn him off.
Apocryphon 5y ago
They should set it in San Francisco like in Philip K. Dick's original story, but since Scott was the one who changed it to L.A. in the first place he probably won't.
- megablast 5y ago
  Why would that make any difference at all.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Different architecture and topography.
javajosh 5y ago
This is exciting! Blade Runner is my favorite dystopia (secret utopia) world. (It's fake dystopia because mankind has pwned the Fermi paradox, so who cares if one out of a billion ecosystems has collapsed?) It's an enormous and very cool world to explore. There is plenty of material to mine, especially since to get to fill in 50 years of lore to account for self-replicating robots. Definitely segues into space opera territory with replicant v human corps Dune/CHOAM/Emporer style intrigue. My guess is that to justify drabbiness they'll posit a long running war between replicants and humans that perhaps leave Earth cut off from her colonies. Maybe one side "won" but pockets of resistance remain. Part of it would follow a pocket of taboo h/r cooperation where humans and replicants live together by choice. (This is juicy messaging for post-woke hollywood when they can spread an acceptance message without pandering to an actual identity group. What would make it really interesting is if replicants are only stronger than humans as much as men are stronger than women.)
- colordrops 5y ago
  The Expanse did an amazing job of featuring powerful women and people of color and focusing on the poor and downtrodden without coming off as forced and "woke". The rest of Hollywood should take note.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    The books tend to harp on certain characters skin color over and over. It definitely comes off as forced after the 10th time.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      I didn’t have that interpretation when I read the books.
    - CodeGlitch 5y ago
      Not read the books apart from the first one, the show definitely didn't feel forced "diversity". Every character was unique and played their role in the story.
rendall 5y ago
I really liked Blade Runner 2049, but I love Blade Runner. I can always watch that movie, and have watched it all my life. While Blade Runner 2049 is an excellent movie and has Ridley Scott's endorsement, I cannot bring myself to see it as canon. Its bleak and profoundly hopeless view was not foreshadowed in the original, which had a sense of humor and awe that was stripped from 2049.
- philistine 5y ago
  Of course you have watched Blade Runner all your life; they kept coming out with new versions!
  - rendall 5y ago
    True that!
Borrible 5y ago
As long as he confines himself to the role of executive producer, doesn't direct or write the script, but does a good job of filling those roles with competent people, it could be entertaining. I'm fine with that and he may let his fame be sold as a promotional measure.
irrational 5y ago
Can someone explain to me the appeal of Blade Runner? I love most sci-fi, but I simply couldn’t make it through the first movie. I thought maybe the newer movie would be better. Nope. Couldn’t finish it. It’s probably the only sci-fi I haven’t liked. But, so many people seem to like it that I realize that I must be missing something.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  Lots of sci-fi is kind of heavy handed, but Blade Runner has a little more nuance and ambiguity. There are things left unstated but implied, and the films don't give you all the answers. There's symbolism that's the viewer can interpret however they wish. They're films that I recommend watching once, then reading a bit about them, then watching them again - they do grow on you.

117 points by evo_9 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Yawn. I made it about 1/2 through 2049 and just got bored. Where has all the creativity gone in film. It's just one remake / sequel after another.

arrakis2021 5y ago
Whaaaaat 2049 was a masterpiece
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Your username gives away a subtle disposition leaning towards Denis Villeneuve...
  - kadoban 5y ago
    That doesn't mean they're wrong. 2049 is a very good movie.
  - guardiangod 5y ago
    I was watching Dune 2021 on Microsoft Teams streaming (virtual company Christmas party from Youtube Movies), and the auto-diction translated Arrakis to Iraqis. Suddenly the whole story make sense to me.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Would that mean watching the movie on YouTube via teams? As in crappy youtube quality through teams? Awful. I'm annoyed you basically have to pirate a movie or go through the faff of actually buying a Blu-ray to watch things in uber-HD properly.
      - dhritzkiv 5y ago
        I think they mean they rented/bought Dune to watch, via YouTube's movie platform[1]. The host of the Microsoft Teams video meeting then likely shared their view of the YouTube screen (I don't know how it works in MS Teams, but, for example, I know Jitsi allows a meeting participant to embed a YouTube video for all to watch+listen to. It's surprisingly good quality) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd2DrxUi4H8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd2DrxUi4H8
postalrat 5y ago
The second time I watched 2049 I thought it was great. First time not so much. Not sure why I didn't like it the first time.
MisterSandman 5y ago
I absolutely loved 2049. Haven't seen the original, yet. hides under desk
- technothrasher 5y ago
  But have you read the original novella? I enjoyed both films, but "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" has much more depth to its questions about humanity than either of them. It also illustrates Deckard's disfunctional nature better.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    Mercerism is one of the weirdest things I've read about in any book. It makes sense it wouldn't be included in the movies, it's almost an unfilmable concept, I think. PKD is one of my favorite authors. Nobody before or since has been able to more accurately capture the slippery nature of reality, in my opinion.
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      Mercerism is one of the best parts of the story. A lonely religion based on simulated shared Sisyphean suffering is just so symbolic of PKD’s overall view of life, it’s delicious to read. But I agree, it works better in prose than it would on film. Still, I kept hoping they’d Easter egg it into the films somewhere just as a nod to those who have read the story. I very much enjoy PKD’s writing, though he gets hard to follow in his later stuff as he slipped further into drug abuse and mental illness.
- craigching 5y ago
  The original is a masterpiece, but I wonder how much I’m reminiscing. Sean Young and Rutger Hauer we’re fantastic, though, so I do think there is something timeless about it. I have watched 2049 a couple of times now and still don’t see what everyone else sees as great about it. I’m willing to keep trying though.
  - 5y ago
Apocryphon 5y ago
It was a remake / sequel, alright. A remake / sequel of Her
- pubby 5y ago
  2048 was a fantastic depiction of modern male loneliness; unloved and invisible, yet with beautiful commercialized girls at one's finger tips. "Her" didn't capture this well, and frankly I don't think Spike Jonze is the type of author who can. He's too popular to be that pathetic! The movie is great for other reasons, but behind its sci-fi lies a traditional romance movie plot.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Well when you put it that way, that just makes 2049 a remake / sequel of Drive
Barrin92 5y ago
It's a decent film but aesthetically it leans way too heavily on the original. When you have allusions to the Soviet Union and flying cars in a film in 2020 it just seems retro-futuristic and anachronistic rather than like science fiction.
- saltminer 5y ago
  To me, the Soviet aspect makes sense. There was a fear in the US in the 80s that Japan would surpass the US to become the dominant world economy, which was reflected in the original film. In 2049, the Japanese aspect hasn't been erased, but it also exists alongside imagery of Russia, which, if we consider the actions of the Russian government in the years leading up to this film, it fits from the same perspective of a fear of the US being dominated. I'm not sure why the original film seemed to only focus on Japan, PKD's vision also included the USSR. In that sense, 2049 almost feels more faithful to the book. As for the flying cars...they had flying cars in the original film, why would they get rid of that? Or do you mean that you expect they wouldn't look so much like our cars? (If the latter, I kinda agree.)
  - saltminer 5y ago
    My comment is too old to edit now, but I just thought of something: I saw a video on youtube awhile back about the making of the original Blade Runner. In it, they said that PKD did not live to see the film in theaters, but they were able to show him a 10-15 minute "highlight reel", which included shots of the flying cars. PKD said it was like they were reading his mind, it was so accurate. So at least to PKD, the original Blade Runner's flying cars were canon. Not that I think the lack of design evolution between the two films seems too realistic, but given the events that occurred between the two films [0][1], I can see lots of technological progress being lost. Consider the scene in 2049 where K brings in the sample for Rachel and the desk employee says that they lost a lot of data during the blackout, and to not expect much for anything this old. Had all that not happened, I'd completely agree that the design of 2049's flying cars seemed too retro, that they would have pioneered new vehicle layouts by then. [0] https://collider.com/blade-runner-timeline-explained/ https://collider.com/blade-runner-timeline-explained/ [1] https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline Edit: Found the video where PKD seeing the highlight reel is mentioned: https://youtu.be/EByNb7F-A34?t=1556 https://youtu.be/EByNb7F-A34?t=1556 (the whole video is worth a watch, the entirely-analog techniques they used are incredible)
fullshark 5y ago
There's only so many scripts/stories you can tell. With the ability to access all filmed media at your fingertips, you can watch Star Wars from 1977 any time you want, you couldn't watch old buck rogers serials whenever you wanted in 1977 so when George Lucas modernized them it blew your mind.
- Retric 5y ago
  Star Wars was borrowing heavily from Seven Samurai not just western films. Thus swords vs blasters works the same way swords vs arrows do in those films etc. There are basically infinite ways to remix old stories like that. Hell even just the editing significantly improved Star Wars over the original script.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    Yeah point is it was heavily derivative, as are most of the films during the last golden age of film (1970s-pick when?), but the technological advances were dramatic enough and audiences didn't have home entertainment systems and access to every film ever so these films were incredibly novel culturally speaking.
    - Retric 5y ago
      I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies. That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies. But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
- Findecanor 5y ago
  These days, you would need an official fan-restoration / fan-edit to see the Star Wars from 1977 - and that would legally be a bootleg.
slibhb 5y ago
The flashbacks to the original were extremely lame. And I didn't love the story. But visually it was great, it's packed with really compelling images. Highly superior to Dune which has a boring plot and mostly lacks compelling images. Seriously, where were the guild steersmen? The dragonfly vessels were okay but do you even remember a spaceship from Dune? Stellan Skarsgard was unrecognizable and boring in the villain role. Plus the fight scenes were horrible.
- kadoban 5y ago
  > Highly superior to Dune which has a boring plot and mostly lacks compelling images. Seriously, where were the guild steersmen? The dragonfly vessels were okay but do you even remember a spaceship from Dune? Stellan Skarsgard was unrecognizable and boring in the villain role. Plus the fight scenes were horrible. What movie did you watch? I am so confused. The _fight scenes_ were horrible? In what way? Even just the first fight scene with the shields was cool and well done. The thopters were just _okay_? They were _brilliantly_ done, had really interesting special effects, etc. The spaceship of note in the film would probably be the guild ship, whatever they're called, the hiliners? Looked nice to me. Dune doesn't really have a ton of spaceships, it's planet-centric which makes sense really. And the plot was boring? I don't even know what to say, that story is very well loved and the movie didn't change too much.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    > The copters Ornithopters. > the hiliners? Heighliners.
    - kadoban 5y ago
      Thanks. I fixed copters, just a typo, I've leave the other alone.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    > The _fight scenes_ were horrible? In what way? Even just the first fight scene with the shields was cool and well done. The fight scenes are people slapping each other really fast. There's no weight to it. > And the plot was boring? I don't even know what to say, that story is very well loved and the movie didn't change too much. A more significant consideration than what happens is how it is relayed to the audience. The way the story in Dune unfolds is linear and boring. It is chracters in rooms having conversations to fill the audience in before the real plot starts. It's not exciting or interesting and few risks are taken. One of the cool ideas in Dune is that there are no computers so people take a psychedelic drug to pilot spaceships. Maybe this is explained in some boring monologue or text flash but there's no reason it couldn't be shown and it certainly isn't. It doesn't help that Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya are awful. The only notably good performance is Rebecca Ferguson (Jessica).
kadoban 5y ago
Maybe it's just not your kind of film, or you weren't in the mood. There was _very_ little wrong with that movie.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Too long, too slow.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    IMO neither of those are flaws of it. It's a movie not afraid to let scenes breathe and not afraid to take time to set the tone. You do have to buy into it some though, if you're just counting the seconds until the next big thing happens it's not going to be a fun time.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      It doesn’t take a full extra hour to let scenes breathe. It was poorly paced, the number one complaint. About as objective as a criticism gets.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    Oh boy, you’d really hate Too Old to Die Young, which I loved.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Thank god for VLC and 1.25x speed. :-)
      - iamacyborg 5y ago
        You might need 2x for that one
- dsego 5y ago
  Jared Leto
spywaregorilla 5y ago
2049 was an incredible film in my opinion. Hooker sex scene and the baseline test were pretty fantastic.
guardiangod 5y ago
I love 2049 and it took me 3 tries to finish the original without falling asleep. I still think the original is a mediocre film made cultish by its genre definition cyberpunk worldviews. Different strokes for different folks.
- TranquilMarmot 5y ago
  No, see, you have to watch every different cut of the original to really understand it (kidding, of course... it's really slow and I have to be in the right mood to enjoy it)
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    Blade Runner is a total madcap romp compared to Tarkovsky's Solaris, though. (I love that movie, but the threat of punishing my friends with it is a standard joke...)
    - markdestouches 5y ago
      Make them watch the Mirror instead. It's a much better introduction to Tarkovsky. (Solaris is much more of Crime and Punishment than Sci-Fi anyway)
mhh__ 5y ago
If you can't see the creativity in 2049 that's on you IMO. Villeneuve is probably the best director in his area of film right now (not necessarily sci-fi), his work is emotionally mature and challenges audiences without mocking them, calling it uncreative is ridiculous.
- markdestouches 5y ago
  Does this description also apply to his latest film (Dune)? Because I'd describe it as the opposite of that.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    Probably not, but that’s likely a problem with the source material more than anything, Dune is nothing but your typical fantasy story of boy discovers he has magic powers and saves the world.
  - bitcharmer 5y ago
    Dune is a visual masterpiece. Some people are just incapable of appreciating art.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I... I'm not so sure. I really like the universe of Frank Herbert's dune, but a lot of the set design on Dune is just... boring. The ornithopters are built like a Cybertruck, which doesn't make sense in an era where computers were destroyed long ago. The monolithic buildings and spaceships look more like a Quake 2 map than they do professional VFX. Having gone into the film with an open mind, I was severely let down by the visual side of things. Even the cinematography felt... fine. Surprisingly, I thought Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa were the strongest parts of the film.
deleted 5y ago
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deaddodo 5y ago

After the letdowns that are Raised by Wolves and the Alien prequels; I’ll pass on a Ridley Scott series, til I hear otherwise.

newsbinator 5y ago
I like Raised by Wolves. A lot of it is "here's another unrealistic coincidence" and "that character has a lot of plot armor", but I'm hoping it's because the overarching mystery story makes it that way. I'll be disappointed if this turns out to be sloppy writing. Certainly a chunk of the writing so far is cliche. I'm pretty sure I saw parts of this show a dozen times in various 90s shows and 50s/60s/70s books. Anybody remember Earth 2? Although the child actors are quite bad at acting, the adults largely make up for it. The environment does feel like a Star Trek jungle set, where it's hard to suspend disbelief that it's not just a few hundred square meter outdoor stage in South Africa. But we've been suspending disbelief on low res sci fi shows for years, so long as the story is good, and even when the writing is bad. For instance Babylon 5 is one of my all time favorites and the writing is bad and the acting is worse. A couple actors elevate and save it (Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas, Ed Wasser, Walter Koenig). But what really saves it is story: not effects, not dialog, not delivery, just compelling world-building story. I'm hoping Raised by Wolves turns into something great, but so far as it's at least good, I'm along for the ride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHAwFtJrp3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHAwFtJrp3c https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
- craigching 5y ago
  I’m liking Raised by Wolves, but the birth kind of was a let down. I’m thinking there is way more to it so I’m holding on to hope. I also liked the Alien prequels. They weren’t as good as the original, but I thought they were still interesting enough. I loved the old ship with the pilot in Prometheus, but I feel like it wasn’t finished either and there could have been more.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    Yeah, the last quarter or last third of Season 1 was a drop in story quality. But Season 2 has picked up and gotten good again. One thing I'm enjoying, unlike in 90s sci fi, is when the characters call out obvious threats and take them as a given, like "that creature has probably been brain chipped and given as a tool to track you". Indeed, there is no free lunch in dystopia land, whereas 90s sci fi would have the otherwise smart characters be incredibly dumb in situations like this.

baron816 5y ago

Ridley Scott is 84 years old and is currently producing 69 different projects and directing 10 of them. I have nothing else to say here. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000631/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000631/

deleted 5y ago
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thinkingkong 5y ago
Wow. I had no idea he was in that phase of life. Really changes the name based endorsement and also explains some recent activity.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I think he's getting more irritable as he gets older (and I think he still has a chip on his shoulder for being criticised for being too visual - should a bird not sing?), but wasn't The Last Duel supposed to have been good? As for irritable: Some of these press outbursts are definitely directors trying to whip up some press for their movies, but he got in some hot water for saying --- “The best films are driven by the characters,” he said, “and we’ll come to superheroes after this if you want, because I’ll crush it. I’ll f*ing crush it. They’re f*ing boring as s*." and "Their scripts are not any fucking good" --- Is he wrong? They're mostly not bad* now (marvel ones at least), but they're utterly sedated and breeding a new generation of media-consumers who've literally never seen a "good" movie (By which I mean something driven by a director rather than a producer)
rasz 5y ago
so just like Bruce Willis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo
- philistine 5y ago
  I clapped !
5y ago

walrus01 5y ago

Holden : The sequel lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to get studio funding, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Leon : [angry at the suggestion] What do you mean, I'm not helping? Holden : I mean: you're not helping! Why is that, Leon? [Leon has become visibly shaken] Holden : They're just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, they're written down for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response... Shall we continue?

deleted 5y ago
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aaron695 5y ago

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I loved 2049. Thought it was a great film. But it was a great film on its own. It didn't really need the ties to the original. Does the blade runner world really need another piece? Well, idk. I guess I would say its probably going to be pretty good, but I'd suspect trying to embrace the existing canon is going to harm the potential of the movie more than it will help. The 50 year time jumps are good though.

kirso 5y ago
Agreed. At this point I am just happy there is any kind of great piece of sci-fi coming out. I think since Expanse it has been quite hard to find anything worth watching in that space.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  Dune is pretty fantastic. It’s definitely not a movie that’s best enjoyed with tv speakers though.
  - kirso 5y ago
    For sure, seems like just Marvelification of all movies has been really annoying. Everything has the same style / humour and vagueness.
mhh__ 5y ago
It really cruxes on their being a story to tell. It's like people asking if they're going to do another film with K? (Which I think is symptom of cinema being saturated with feel good movies where there is no conflict or sacrifice, possibly in funny costumes...). He's utterly finished at the end of 2049, there isn't any more to say. I don't know what it would look like but I think a relatively obvious road to go down would probably the ethics of general AI in computers. If you do have your own Joi, is she a slave? Does she "is", at all? I really hope they land it if it gets made, although at worst it'll probably be a really pretty if confusing mess, which is better than most TV shows.
thinkingkong 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

I enjoyed his recent movie "The Last Duel". I thought it was unbelievable, but after reading the book it is historically accurate. The fight scene is blow-by-blow what actually happened. Sooo much better than those silly superhero movies. I'll definitely see more Scott movies!

TranquilMarmot 5y ago
I had no idea he directed this! I'm a huge Ridley Scott fan but apparently not enough to know that he just released a movie. I'll have to give this a watch.
- yannikyeo 5y ago
  He has two movies end 2021: The Last Duel and House of Gucci. Kudos to him for having such energy for his age.
  - philistine 5y ago
    He's like Clint Eastwood; if he stops making movies he dies.

antisthenes 5y ago

This a personal opinion, but I think the most interesting thing in the Blade Runner universe aren't even Replicants. We know Replicants are used for space travel and colony labor, and we also know Earth is overpopulated and mostly stripped of resources. I want to see more of this dynamic, space exploration, life in the colonies, what politics are like on a dying planet. Who the other big evil corporations are. How does space travel work? Who owns it? What do colonies produce? Etc. 2049 had a nice story, but it pales in comparison to what's potentially available in such a rich and deep set universe.

Lorin 5y ago
I hope 2099 explorers the stories of people/replicants away from earth. No need to bring back to old characters (although I guess they could bring back certain replicant models).
chii 5y ago
then you would really enjoy "the expanse" - esp. the latter seasons.
jcun4128 5y ago
Not directly related (some) but the setting of Alien/Aliens is awesome. A deep space ship just out there on its own, great vibe.
rewgs 5y ago
Unpopular opinion here, I'm sure, but this line of thinking is precisely what kneecapped Star Wars: the need to know everything. World-building is the antithesis of character-building. We fall in love with this stories because of the characters. We then become fascinated with the possibility of the worlds, then the worlds are built out, and then it sucks, and then people go "well, no, the world should have been built this way or that way," and then that's tried, and it sucks too, and now the franchise has lost all that made it interesting in the first place and all sci-fi just kind of devolves into one bland soup of all the other sci-fi, and everyone along the way forgets to write compelling characters. And who are the compelling characters in Blade Runner? Those who were written about: Replicants, and those who hunt them. The world was not the point, the characters and their conflict/struggles and the issues those raise were the point. Why do we need to know about the other big evil corporations, when the sense that there's only one, and that's the one that builds the Replicants, is so much more compelling? Not to mention that the primary function of the Tyrell/Wallace Corporation is to serve the characters. Who cares how space travel works as long as it does? Who cares what the colonies produce, unless the fruits of that production can aid in telling an interesting story revolving around a character as interesting as Roy Batty? Can you really tell a compelling story about a worker on an off-world colony -- and if the answer is "yes," why does it need to be part of Blade Runner, and not its own thing? The colonies are almost certainly not interesting because they're better than Earth -- there's likely less conflict. Hollywood folks are incredibly influenced by precisely this kind of discourse on the internet (source: I work in Hollywood), and it drives me nuts because it's just the blind leading the blind. Going "what else could happen in this world" feels good, but it almost always is the death knell of a franchise, because it's fundamentally the wrong question to ask when writing fiction. The question that results in good story-telling is "who is this person," or "who does this happen to," and allow the world-building to grow organically from there.

willis936 5y ago

Most of my opinions towards this news are informed by RLM's re:view of Blade Runner. https://youtu.be/adjfTktpIzg https://youtu.be/adjfTktpIzg

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago

On first watching, 2049 went straight to the top of my all-time faves. And... I can't imagine where you'd take the story from there. My imagination is limited of course, but I always have those cynical thoughts, 'they made a lot of cash on the film and want to make more and the sequel will be cliché, or tortured, or insipid.' Phantom Menace, early POTA sequels, BTTF sequels were just money grabs. But I have hope. 2049 itself was a sequel, right? Most of the MCU are technically sequels, and pretty good. The latest Star Trek reboot was enjoyable. What do you think?

chii 5y ago
> The latest Star Trek reboot was enjoyable. they were pretty terrible star trek movies - because they didn't have anything of note to say about humanity and society like the old star trek would. These reboots are merely action/adventure movies with a star trek setting. In fact, they use the star trek name to generate marketing hype. Those films would not have done nearly so well had it not borrowed it.
riffraff 5y ago
there are quite a few of sequels which are as good or better then the original. Terminator 2, Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back come to mind. But IMO, the likelihood goes down exponentially the more sequels they make.
otikik 5y ago
I personally would love to see how things are outside Earth in the Blade Runner universe. Probably bleak.
- rendall 5y ago
  If you go by the source material, Philip K Dick's novels, they are extremely bleak. 3-5 people huddled in tiny, isolated camps insulated from a toxic environment, where the only joy available is taking drugs that allows them dream they are living back on Earth.
  - 5y ago

georgewsinger 5y ago

Blade Runner 2049 I think has my all-time favorite "villain" of any movie I've ever seen. I put "villain" in quotes because he isn't actually a villain at all, and the movie falsely categorizes him as evil. To see why, here's Wikipedia's description of him: > Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) is the sinister CEO and founder of Wallace Corporation, which dominates replicant production in 2049. A genius genetic engineer, his genetically modified crops and livestock solved a global food crisis – which then gave him enough wealth and political clout to lift the ban on replicant production. Wallace bought out the bankrupt Tyrell Corporation (which had collapsed after several revolts by Nexus-8 replicants). Wallace improved the genetic programming of his new “Nexus-9” replicants to the point that they cannot disobey the orders of humans, even if the order is to commit suicide. By 2049, Wallace Corporation has revitalized the replicant industry and is a major megacorporation with numerous other subsidiaries in other fields, such as Joi unit digital AI holograms. > Wallace is blind, but uses cybernetic implants in his neck to interact with various computers and “see” through flying miniature camera units. > The secret of making replicants that can reproduce died with Tyrell, and Wallace is obsessed with learning it. By 2049, Earth is suffering from resource depletion and heavy pollution, and it was Wallace’s genetically modified foods and new replicants that not only staved off extinction, but allowed humanity to spread to the off-world colonies. Nonetheless, Wallace is frustrated that humanity has only spread to nine other planets, when he wants to see it explode across thousands of planets in the galaxy. Lacking the capacity to build enough replicants for such an endeavor, Wallace is convinced that replicants capable of reproduction on their own are the answer. OK Blade Runner 2049, so you’re telling me that the “evil villain” of your movie saved earth from a mass starvation, got rich off of that, then used his clout and money to smash the regulatory state so that he could give all of humanity personal robot slaves (so no one ever has to do hard manual labor ever again), then cured his own (and presumably others’) blindness, and now is devoting 100% of his resources to Star Trek off onto thousands of other planets across the galaxy? And /all/ by 2049 (which most of us here have a good chance of living to)? That’s your evil villain?! Because all of this seems just 100%, non-ironically good to me[1], and I wished I lived in a world where people could be this competent. [1] Caveat: Ok, so I’m assuming the Blade Runner replicants are actually just robots without real consciousness/qualia. If they do have qualia, then I definitely wouldn't support enslaving them, and would categorize Wallace back in the “evil (albeit complex) villain” category.

highspeedbus 5y ago

"A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem..." This got fixed in my brain since watched the movie. Such a powerful wordplay that make sense in the context of fuzzy testing an android for signs of emotions, like the desire to connect with someone. It was released already into a new age of significant change in cinema values. Everything since is too safe, too clean and reassuring. We need some punk (in blockbuster) movies again.

hotwire 5y ago
Much of that baseline test actually comes from Nabokov's "Pale Fire" - which is also the book Joi picks up when she says "do you want to read to me".
arrakis2021 5y ago
The second baseline test where K fails is such a hard to watch scene. it’s such a short scene but personally the highlight of the movie because of what it means. He’s becoming human and they need to turn him off.

Apocryphon 5y ago

They should set it in San Francisco like in Philip K. Dick's original story, but since Scott was the one who changed it to L.A. in the first place he probably won't.

megablast 5y ago
Why would that make any difference at all.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Different architecture and topography.

javajosh 5y ago

This is exciting! Blade Runner is my favorite dystopia (secret utopia) world. (It's fake dystopia because mankind has pwned the Fermi paradox, so who cares if one out of a billion ecosystems has collapsed?) It's an enormous and very cool world to explore. There is plenty of material to mine, especially since to get to fill in 50 years of lore to account for self-replicating robots. Definitely segues into space opera territory with replicant v human corps Dune/CHOAM/Emporer style intrigue. My guess is that to justify drabbiness they'll posit a long running war between replicants and humans that perhaps leave Earth cut off from her colonies. Maybe one side "won" but pockets of resistance remain. Part of it would follow a pocket of taboo h/r cooperation where humans and replicants live together by choice. (This is juicy messaging for post-woke hollywood when they can spread an acceptance message without pandering to an actual identity group. What would make it really interesting is if replicants are only stronger than humans as much as men are stronger than women.)

colordrops 5y ago
The Expanse did an amazing job of featuring powerful women and people of color and focusing on the poor and downtrodden without coming off as forced and "woke". The rest of Hollywood should take note.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  The books tend to harp on certain characters skin color over and over. It definitely comes off as forced after the 10th time.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    I didn’t have that interpretation when I read the books.
  - CodeGlitch 5y ago
    Not read the books apart from the first one, the show definitely didn't feel forced "diversity". Every character was unique and played their role in the story.

rendall 5y ago

I really liked Blade Runner 2049, but I love Blade Runner. I can always watch that movie, and have watched it all my life. While Blade Runner 2049 is an excellent movie and has Ridley Scott's endorsement, I cannot bring myself to see it as canon. Its bleak and profoundly hopeless view was not foreshadowed in the original, which had a sense of humor and awe that was stripped from 2049.

philistine 5y ago
Of course you have watched Blade Runner all your life; they kept coming out with new versions!
- rendall 5y ago
  True that!

Borrible 5y ago

As long as he confines himself to the role of executive producer, doesn't direct or write the script, but does a good job of filling those roles with competent people, it could be entertaining. I'm fine with that and he may let his fame be sold as a promotional measure.

irrational 5y ago

Can someone explain to me the appeal of Blade Runner? I love most sci-fi, but I simply couldn’t make it through the first movie. I thought maybe the newer movie would be better. Nope. Couldn’t finish it. It’s probably the only sci-fi I haven’t liked. But, so many people seem to like it that I realize that I must be missing something.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Lots of sci-fi is kind of heavy handed, but Blade Runner has a little more nuance and ambiguity. There are things left unstated but implied, and the films don't give you all the answers. There's symbolism that's the viewer can interpret however they wish. They're films that I recommend watching once, then reading a bit about them, then watching them again - they do grow on you.