Inhuman touch: A new Blade Runner show flips the script on the films

Résumé détaillé

As a bit of Hollywood era-defining science fiction intellectual property with a passionate fan base, Blade Runner has been treated with remarkable restraint. Either that, or it’s…

Buddy cop mystery: Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer off to find errant humans. Photo / Clay Enos

As a bit of Hollywood era-defining science fiction intellectual property with a passionate fan base, Blade Runner has been treated with remarkable restraint. Either that, or it’s just proved too risky an investment.

There’s been just the one feature sequel – 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 by Dune director Denis Villeneuve – and a few smaller by-products since the original 1982 movie. Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ridley Scott’s film was the first of many Philip K Dick stories to be adapted for the screen, but the writer died a few months before its release. Despite starring Harrison Ford – at the height of his Han Solo/Indiana Jones fame – as blade runner Rick Deckard, the movie was a box office flop.

But it has cast a long shadow. Its story of Deckard as a detective hunting down rogue “replicants” – empathy-free bio-engineered humanoids made to be slave labour on space colonies – on the dirty, neon-lit, rainy streets of Los Angeles was its own bold experiment in genre-splicing. That was something Scott had done in previous film, Alien, when he set a horror movie on a spaceship.

With future-noir visuals and synthesizer-heavy score by Vangelis, Blade Runner became a style guide and a landmark for dystopian sci-fi cinema. It was eventually recognised as one of the great films of its decade, and an influence on a generation or two of film-makers.

Scott went back and recut it for re-releases in 1992 and 2007. And the cachet it acquired over the years led eventually to the 2017 sequel starring Ryan Gosling as a blade runner picking up the pieces of the previous film’s story 30 years later. It won plenty of acclaim for what it looked like and how it built on the ethos and story of the original. But 2049 also fell short at the box office, ruling out further cinema sequels.

But now there’s Blade Runner 2099, an eight-episode series for Prime Video.

The show runner…

“…

Début de l'article, extrait de NZ Herald. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.