Here’s a great way to start your Monday: Warner Bros. just dropped the new trailer for Blade Runner 2049 via Good Morning America just a few minutes ago, and it’s a doozy. It’s action-packed and set to some retrowave that’s a little less Vangelis and a whole lot more Stranger Things. Plus you get to see Dave Bautista and Ryan Gosling go at it, which we’ll cop to having a few messy dreams about.
Take a look, and then join us for some thoughts about this at the bottom:
See? Still looks dope as fuck.
Now, we can already hear a few of the cinema purists out there in the world screeching about how “this isn’t Blade Runner!” and how director Denis Villeneuve doesn’t understand that the dreamlike poetics of the original text made it an essential counterpoint to bland ’80s science-fiction and so on and so on. We’ve got one point of comparison for your consideration, and it directly confirms your thesis, but what the hell: What if this wasn’t meant to be the same kind of gorgeous nightmare that Sir Ridley Scott made way back in 1982? What if, in fact, this is a lot like a sequel to another one of Scott’s works, which drastically departed in style and tone from the first?
Yes, we have a weird feeling that this new film will be the Aliens to the original’s Alien, and we think it’s thusly important to give the new guy some space to work. There’s only so much you can do with these comparisons to the original, and it’s utterly limiting for all involved to bring your own prejudices to it — we can’t even decided upon a definitive cut of the film all of these years later.
So with that, we’ll leave you with a synopsis: Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.
And a release date: Blade Runner 2049 hits theaters on October 6.
Featured photo via trailer screengrab/YouTube.
