Even when all the pieces are there for a great movie — a visionary director, a talented cast, a script based on a groundbreaking first movie — there’s always some room to doubt the final product. After all, the stars were all aligned for The Phantom Menace to be an amazing film, and we all know how that turned out. Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Jeremy Irons, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Adams and Lawrence Fishburne couldn’t save the dumpster fire that was Dawn of Justice. Even Psycho, a star-laden remake of one of the most praised movies of all time that came out the year after its director was Oscar-nominated for his work on Good Will Hunting, was an outright embarrassment for everybody involved with it.
So even though everything was in place for the belated sequel to the celebrated tech noir Blade Runner, it is only understandable that people were still a little ill at ease. They had Harrison Ford reprising his role as Rick Deckard. They had Ryan Gosling as a young, up-and-coming Blade Runner. They had Jared Leto and Dave Bautista in unnamed, presumably Replicant, roles. They had breakout auteur Denis Villeneuve — director of Arrival and Sicario — adapting a script from Blade Runner scribe Hampton Fancher. And still history warned us to be cautious.
The first trailer for Blade Runner 2049 undoubtedly went a long way to putting those nervous about the highly-anticipated project at ease. Running for less than two minutes, the brief preview to the upcoming sci-fi film never-the-less boasts more intrigue and artistic merit than most of the films that came out over the last twelve months.
Opening on an unkempt city street that easily could have been used for the original 1982 film, we here Deckard’s grizzled voice give us all the introduction we need to the near-future world of rogue androids and the Humans who hunt them: “Replicants are like any other machine: they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.”
The scene shifts to a silhouetted figure — Gosling’s Blade Runner — cast against a hazy red-orange desert: wandering the shattered ruins of long-forgotten monuments to Human industry. He steps toward a monolithic library buried in the sand and opens it to a weathered-looking Dekard, gun in hand, telling Gosling that he “did your job once.” But things were simpler then.”
For as little as we actually see in this teaser trailer, there is enough here to convince me that Blade Runner 2049 will be one of the must-see films from 2017. It’s striking visuals, quiet camera work and immensely talented creative team in front of and behind the camera are promising to deliver the kind of sequel we never see in theaters: a film that is equal parts crowd-pleasing blockbuster and arthouse masterpiece.
Keep your eyes peeled for more substantive looks into the upcoming film in the days and weeks to come. This proof-of-concept trailer has everybody ravenous for more.
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