Blade Runner 2099 Sequel Series Coming from Ridley Scott
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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.
Prometheus had some good pieces - I particularly enjoyed the travel to the alien world and its vistas. Arguably this is 90% special effects instead of talented directing, but worthy of my time nonetheless. The movie does fall apart when they start exploring, though...
I think it's a great film on its own, and the people I've met who didn't like it expressed sentiments similar to yours (ruining the Alien universe").
I feel that a lot that makes Prometheus a good movie in itself is how it's paced and the graphical effects, albeit it still suffers from bad writing in a lot of places. The story per-se however is a complete dumpster fire because it changes and retcons the Alien universe lore to fit a story that perhaps didn't need to be told. At the same time there were deleted scenes that literally would have added 10-15 minutes to the run time and would have made it at least a 20% better Alien movie.
What makes a good movie and what makes a great sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe are two different sets of things. A good movie can be a good moviein itself but at the same time an absolutely terrible sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe. If you're working on an original idea then all bets are off, but if the work you're doing is in the exact same universe as preceding works then it needs to follow the lore of that universe - or at least NOT contradict previously established things. And you have to ask yourself - is the story that you're telling belonging in this universe? Does it enrich it? Does it bring something new? And by this you answer if the movie is worth actually making from an art point of view.
Would you like to see a modern version of the Mona Lisa painted in 3D on a computer? What if this art would have a blonde woman in it? With curly hair? And skimpy clothing? It can be a great work of art in itself, but has no business piggy backing on the Mona Lisa original.
As another example, there is a school of thought to subvert expectations by writing really dumb stuff, whereas you could subvert expectations in a manner that fits the universe. Star Wars VII, VIII, IX, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and a lot of other works basically step all over established lore to tell submediocre stories, thus harming the universe in the process. I mean with Star Wars there's a whole 'nother can of worms - they literally made a huge part of the universe that exists non-canon. Why would you discard a lot of good stuff just so you can push your sub-mediocre stuff is beyond me, but hey, it's their IP, they do with it what they wish. I just can't be over the moon about it.
It's gnostic existential sci-fi horror with gorgeous set-pieces and style evocative of LOT 2046's more out there designs. Amanda Collin's emulation of an android is the best I've ever seen.
What? It's so poorly written it's even amazing.
When making critical comments, can you please use more substantive words than "amazing" without evidence? There's no content there on its own. What examples do you have from the series that cause you surprise or wonder (in the negative)?
I believe the existential meditations on a largely evil demiurge figure are fresh takes in the genre. The birth of a serpent from an android's body that could be the insane prison warden of a far-flung planet and the odd forms of punishment the Mithraic people mete out (like the explosive helmet tethered to an android caretaker) are lovely adornments on a thoughtfully realized world.
The first thing the robot build by the atheists does when her child is lost - is some pagan ritual. To be honest it was hard to take the rest seriously.
The whole story feels like someone is trying to tell a biblical story through a scifi setting (again) but can't find the right words. Or create believable characters. They are so primitive it's hard to feel anything about them.
It's hard to point out any evidence given that I finished the thing long time ago and did not like it one bit. All that is left is howling Mother afterimage and bitter taste.
Speaking of technical merits slipping a Mickey to a parched audience, see: The Mandalorian.
Ironically it felt like something that was written and directed by an android (or rather, a replicant) trying to imitate emotions and symbolism.
Loved the original 1982 film and saw it many times, read and written about it, and know it by heart by now. So I was disappointed, but not too much, I expect this much from sequels. It's tough making a successful one.
Critics would probably also notice the attention to thematic continuity and pull the public in :)
I'll definitely see more Scott movies!
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?
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.
But IMO, the likelihood goes down exponentially the more sequels they make.
I think it was a flop, actually. But I also loved it.
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)
a producer is basically the money man - they procure funds, and organize the pay and contracts etc. They are in no real way, responsible for the artistic direction nor the script etc. They might have some influence on the hiring of the actors.
Putting a famous director in as a producer is merely a marketing tactic - people who would casually like such a director would assume the movie is going to be directed by them and thus might watch it.
But each production usually has a single actual producer with great authority, traditionally including final cut in Hollywood: if they don’t like the finished movie, the producer may hire another director to shoot more footage and re-cut.
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.
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.
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.
He’s becoming human and they need to turn him off.
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.
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.
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.
Its like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, a lot of nonsense they make up on the spot one episode ahead of filming.
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.)
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.
They're films that I recommend watching once, then reading a bit about them, then watching them again - they do grow on you.
> 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.
Everything you said is true, except for the "robot" part. Almost the whole point of the story is that replicants are human. He's breeding human slaves.
Suddenly the whole story make sense to me.
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.
Now, do I think it needed a sequel? No.
However, it's better, because of the sheer power of the visuals and worldbuilding. Some things in it have not aged well (like the "love" scene), but it is still simply jaw-dropping. It's what Scott is just unmatched at doing. A villeneuve film probably makes more sense, but Ridley Scott does Ridley Scott better than anyone. Give him a good script and watch him fly.
They're both excellent, they don't need to compete. Be glad 2049 ever got made (similarly with Dune really).
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
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/
[1] 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 (the whole video is worth a watch, the entirely-analog techniques they used are incredible)
There are basically infinite ways to remix old stories like that. Hell even just the editing significantly improved Star Wars over the original script.
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.
You could try Harmy's despecialized edition.
I'm not going to mention where you can get it, but there is a Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy's_Despecialized_Edition
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.
Ornithopters.
> the hiliners?
Heighliners.
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).
The guild navigators I'd expect will be in the next movie, as the spice and its effect on Paul are explored more.
This concept though was well done with the mentat(s) in this one though IMO, they didn't explain it, just showed it. I'd expect they'll do similarly with the navigators when it comes up.
> It doesn't help that Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya are awful.
Zendaya's character is barely in this one. Maybe you know her from elsewhere.
I didn't have any real complaints on Timothy Chalamet's performance myself, but it didn't particularly stand out to me either.
Sure but don't you think it would give more weight to the story if we understood viscerally, visually how spice enables space flight? It would be challenging to show but that kind of challenge should excite a talented director, it's an opportunity to do something experimental.
> Zendaya's character is barely in this one. Maybe you know her from elsewhere.
I've only seen her in trailers and in Dune. I didn't find her credible as a desert-hardened bedouin woman. Whether it's her voice or physical acting, she seemed too much like a teenage girl.
At this part in the story? IMO, no. It's enough that they started to show it for mentats and a bit for Paul and etc. The navigator part of spice becomes important for the story once it affects our main character directly and once we need to get into the galactic politics more. It's a big part of what will be the finale for the next movie. I'm fine with it not being spelled out yet.
> I've only seen her in trailers and in Dune.
I'd say give her more time. Her character is just barely even in this movie, she'll be a huge part in the next. What did she even get, like 5 lines?
Honestly the first thing I thought when the throat-singing started was why the fuck does anyone watch star wars (Not that the originals are bad, but the universe has no depth). Dune isn't perfect, but it's just so much more intriguing and obviously from a smarter author than it's competitors in the space opera genre.
I'm reading the book again recently - I had forgotten that we actually get to see what the Baron is thinking, and when it happens, he looks almost human, like an executive in an evil corporation - like weighing about his potential successors, ranting about the cost of the war, or fretting over how the Sardaukar may see him as incompetent.
Different strokes for different folks.
(kidding, of course... it's really slow and I have to be in the right mood to enjoy it)
(I love that movie, but the threat of punishing my friends with it is a standard joke...)
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.
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?