On October 6, 2017, audiences will get a chance to see a vision of the future's future. In 1982, director Ridley Scott brought us BLADE RUNNER, which offered a look at a 2019 that we know, now that we're just two years away, looked quite different from the 2019 we're likely to live through. That hasn't deterred director Denis Villeneuve from building upon that vision for his upcoming sequel BLADE RUNNER 2049.
Scripted by Michael Green and Hampton Fancher from a story by Fancher (who also co-wrote the first BLADE RUNNER) and Scott, BLADE RUNNER 2049 has the following synopsis:
Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, 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, a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.
For Villeneuve's sequel, the color palette has changed because the world has changed between 2019 and 2049. The director explained to Entertainment Weekly:
The climate has gone berserk and the ecosystem has collapsed and the ocean has risen. There are a lot of refugees trying to survive on the West Coast. … The presence of the winter brings more charcoal and there’s sparks of color. The yellow is something I can’t talk about, but… it’s a very important color."
The fact that Villeneuve is taking the color so seriously is just one example of the perfectionist approach he and cinematographer Roger Deakins took to the film. According to star Ryan Gosling, they treated everything with the same level of detail and importance, even going so far as to have large sets built for scenes that didn't even take up a full page in the script. They wanted to create a world that looked like it could exist, and in Villeneuve's view everything – the lighting, every extra, every set, prop, and vehicle – was saying something about the 2049 they were creating.
Entertainment Weekly got their hands on a batch of new images from the film that show a glimpse of the results of Villeneuve and Deakins' collaboration. We'll get to see a lot more of their future world in less than three months.
Gosling co-stars in BLADE RUNNER 2049 with Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Dave Bautista, David Dastmalchian, Lennie James, Sylvia Hoeks, Carla Juri, Hiam Abbass, Barkhad Abdi, and Edward James Olmos.