Photo: Craig Barritt/Getty Images for ReedPop
According to Blade Runner 2099humanity is only about 73 years old, which seems about right. In the Prime Video limited series, which takes place 50 years later Blade Runner 2049the simmering conflict between artificial beings, known as Replicants, and humans erupted into outright war, and the humans lost. The series, creator Silka Luisa (Bright girls) said during the NYCC panel, is about “what happens when our time as a species ends… can we accept this loss and retain our humanity?” »
Like the Blade Runner movies, 2099 will explore this question through the prism of a detective novel. Michelle Yeoh plays replicant Blade Runner Olwen, who is at the end of her life and embarks on a final hunt that brings her into contact with Cora (Hunter Schaefer), a human posing as a replicant.
“I don’t want to be a mere human,” Yeoh joked to the crowd gathered outside New York Comic-Con’s Empire Stage. As an incredibly physical actress, she thought a lot about how she would alter her performance to accentuate her lack of humanity, but ended up getting philosophical because you’re not really supposed to be able to tell the difference between a human and a Replicant. Empathy, she decided, was the differentiator. “When you care about another person, (replicants) are simply a matter of TO DO things.”
With empathy being humanity’s defining quality in the face of an artificial intelligence that has subjected us to its will, this certainly seems timely, perhaps in a way that was not intended. But the exploration of humanity and how different characters on both sides of the divide search for it or lose it is one of the major themes of the series.
“The Replicants are controlling, but they are made in our image, so they have our desires,” Luisa said, noting, for example, how the Replicants’ red light district in the series is very different from the one frequented by humans. “Instead of selling sex, they sell experiences. » A new trailer shows this bizarre role-playing game for sale, as a female replicant wears a prosthetic womb with a screaming animatronic baby in her arms, the umbilical cord still attached.
It is Blade Runner 2049 examine the other end of this new status quo. Replicants are also searching for their identity as the dominant species, and if God created humans in his image like humans did for Replicants, well, some Replicants might want to figure out how to become gods.
But Blade Runner is not only known for his cerebral questions about existence and purpose, he is also known for breaking new ground in visual matters. Luisa highlighted how indelible the original vision of the 2019 film is and that the Denis Villeneuve-directed sequel brought its own visual touch to the universe. It was therefore important to find a new aesthetic for 2099.
“This is a birth – the birth of a city, of a society, of a new era,” Luisa said. “When I think of birth, I think: hot, sticky, chaotic. That shapes the look of the show.”
This is reflected in the clips shown to the audience which, unlike previous films, really make this place feel the smells. People sweat under a perpetual golden haze, and in one scene, Matthew Needham’s squirrel cop remarks that he knows where people come from based on their smell, the different pollutants marking different neighborhoods. Him? He’s from Los Angeles. “Don’t I feel the sun?” he joked.
Gn entert
