On a fundamental level, Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi noir Blade Runner asked what it means to be human, using the central mystery of Harrison Ford’s Deckard and whether he was man or Replicant machine to explore our mortal condition. Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 flipped the script, taking Ryan Gosling’s known replicant Officer K and reverse-engineering an enquiry into the soul and what makes life real. Now, Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) Prime Video bound Blade Runner 2099 is going further yet, pushing the narrative 50 years on and bringing together ageing Replicant Olwen (Michelle Yeoh) and human-disguised-as-a-Replicant Cora (Hunter Schafer) as they search for missing Replicants and find themselves faced with a new existential question: What if Replicants were always meant to be more than ‘More Human Than Human’? It’s a hell of a question, we know — and there’s a hell of a cool new trailer below asking it;
A pseudo Red Light District selling human experiences to machines in a post-Replicant Uprising LA? Check! A thickly accented android asserting Replicants’ destiny to become gods? Check! Industrial synths, apocalyptic blue-and-orange aesthetics, and an inscrutable Schafer and Yeoh reluctantly teaming up to hunt down fugitive Replicants while simultaneously A) on the lam from the LAPD, and B) getting monologued at by a kind of Roy Batty 2.0 Tom Burke? Triple-check! This is so Blade Runner that we’re actually fairly certain androids dream of this instead of electric sheep. Do we have any idea what the amniotic fluids, ‘Replicant cure’, and all of the threads dangled here entail? Not really. But Yeoh’s Olwen and Schafer’s Cora both aren’t 100% sure in this trailer either, so we’re happy to live in the ambiguity for now, anyway.
The official synopsis for Blade Runner 2099 — which also stars Dimitri Abold, Matthew Needham, Daniel Rigby, and Lewis Gribben among others — reads: “Fifty years after the events of Blade Runner 2049, Los Angeles has been reborn, just not by humanity. Cora, a fugitive in a final bid to stop running, takes on one last identity: a Blade Runner. Forced to partner with Olwen, a Replicant days from dying, she hunts down a runaway hiding a truth that could collapse their fragile city.”
We look forward to finding out how Blade Runner 2099, Blade Runner 2049, and the OG Blade Runner are interlinked (within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked….) when Silka Luisa’s new series hits Prime Video on November 25.
