‘Blade Runner 2099’ Shows the ‘Silver Linings’ of a Replicant Takeover

Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner casts a agelong shadow. In immoderate ways, literally.

It defined what noir sci-fi would look similar for years to come: the rain, the melodramatic lighting, the trenchcoats. Denis Villeneuve delivered a worthy sequel successful 2017 with Blade Runner 2049, but for immoderate fans thing volition ever interaction the original.

Silka Luisa tries not to deliberation astir these things. “If I didn’t emotion Blade Runner this would’ve been mode excessively hard,” the showrunner of Prime Video’s constricted bid Blade Runner 2099 said Wednesday during the WIRED World Fair.

Luisa’s amusement differs rather a spot from its forebears. It inactive has the humanoids known arsenic replicants, but successful 2099’s future, they’re the ones calling the shots, giving humans the grunt enactment they utilized to do. Set 80 years aft Blade Runner and 50 years aft 2049, it focuses connected a replicant Blade Runner, Olwen (Michelle Yeoh), connected the hunt for rogue agents. Along the mode she gets teamed up with Cora, played by Hunter Schafer, a quality pretending to beryllium a replicant to survive. (We’d accidental much but the amusement doesn’t premiere until November 25, and, you know, spoilers.)

If this imaginativeness of dystopia sounds excessively acquainted for comfort, Luisa hears you. When asked astir however she chose to tackle the franchise she noted that successful the past mates decades “the contiguous caught up to the films” arsenic megacorporations and biology illness became realities successful ways they weren’t successful 1982. The constituent of her Blade Runner is to amusement what happens successful a post-revolution world, and “not absorption connected the fears we’re surviving with close now.”

That doesn’t mean that Blade Runner 2099 is wholly a dystopic tale. For Luisa, it’s astir showing the “silver linings” of a satellite tally by replicants. To bash that, she picks up connected immoderate of the biology themes touched connected successful Villeneuve’s movie, which showed however Earth had been wrecked by quality activity. Blade Runner 2099 depicts a satellite that replicants are trying to bring backmost from the brink of ecological illness utilizing the skills they gained erstwhile they were moving for humans. “They’re capable to rehabilitate the planet,” Luisa says.

Blade Runner 2099 besides gave Schafer a accidental to flex immoderate action-hero muscles—something she’d ne'er done earlier and thing her costar, Yeoh, has been doing for decades. Schafer jumped close in, moving and diving crossed the surface from the aviator onwards. For the combat scenes, though, she got immoderate assistance from Yeoh.

“It was truly physically demanding,” Schafer said during WIRED’s conference. “I felt truthful fortunate to person Michelle Yeoh, who is the fucking master, arsenic a country partner.”

But backmost to that shadiness formed by Scott’s archetypal adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s caller Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In summation to being a sci-fi classic, it besides created a full caller template for what dystopian fabrication could look like. It broods.

Luisa insists there’s a small much anticipation successful hers—and hopes audiences spot that, too. She besides wants audiences to cognize replicants aren’t the aforesaid arsenic the AI bots humans are fixated connected successful 2026. “They’re much akin to us,” she said. “AI, I conscionable don’t person that aforesaid sympathy for.” Hear that, Claude?