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Harrison Ford To Return In Blade Runner Sequel
An anonymous reader sends news that Harrison Ford is now confirmed to be returning as Rick Deckard in the upcoming sequel to Blade Runner. Ridley Scott is now officially an executive producer for the film as well, and Denis Villeneuve will direct. It's set to begin production in the summer of 2016.
I was a big fan of the Deckard-as-replicant conspiracy theory, but it was confirmed in an interview not too many years ago that that was not the case. Deckard is a human, as dull as that may be.
Scott himself confirmed that Deckard WAS a replicant, also in an interview.
For me, Blade Runner is an awesome cinematic and intellectual experience, and I did read the "short" story by PK Dick, and loved that also in slightly different ways.
The original Blade Runner was made in a decade when this kind of intellectualism in cinema was still going strong. After the 90s, it all but disappeared. There is NO WAY they can make a decent sequen of an 80s intellectual sci-fi movie today. Maybe they never could have.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Prometheus would have been great had they stuck to the original script and kept it explicitly an Alien prequel like it was meant to be. So much wasted potential.
No. I've read the original script and it would have felt like a copy of Alien/Aliens. It would have been much worse than what we actually got. A stale film.
Prometheus suffers from the same disease that afflicts The Phantom Menace. The theatrical cut is horrid. I saw one of the fan edits where the film starts with a presentation of Wayland himself. It was much much better than the theatrical cut. Same problem with Kingdom of Heaven. The theatrical cut was shit, the director's cut was excellent. I think that if Scott wanted to do a real director's cut with the material he already filmed (and left out of the theatrical cut) it would be great.
And, unless they somehow account for how Deckard the replicant has grown old ... I just don't see how they get there at all. He's not just a hunter of them, he is one.
So either they start this one in which Deckard isn't a replicant, and they'll piss off the fans of the movie. Or they'll have to treat very carefully to explain it.
There are some movies and stories which do not invite sequels. This is one of them.
Cynically, this sounds like someone looking to make some more money, not someone with a good follow up story for Blade Runner.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I liked Prometheus and have never understood the hate for it. Now 2001: A Space Odyssey, that's a movie you can bash for having a poor / incoherent story line.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Replican'ts don't age because they only live 4 years.
And since Harrison Ford is significantly visibly older, how the hell is Scott going to rectify THAT?
CGI?
Make him NOT a replicant?
How about no.
I'm going to stay the hell away from this movie.
--
BMO
The film is going into production in 2016, which means that it won't see theaters until at least 2017 == THE YEAR THE ORIGINAL MOVIE TAKES PLACE IN.
That means this is no longer a sequel to a sci-fi movie, it's a straight up drama taking place in contemporary times.
And while Blade Runner got a lot right, Deckard makes a video-phone call from a phone booth because in 1980 no-one imagined a smart phone. Will they be using cell-phones in this sequel or will they keep to cannon?
And, having just seen the 2014 Robocop movie; I can honestly say that this upcoming film won't get anything right, as Robocop was a dull, i repeat dull action movie, missing everything that made the original one of the finest films of all time. There was no satire, no pathos, no snarky jabs at the media and American consumerism, and no humor. It was terrible. All it was, was a reminder of how utterly brilliant the original was.
My guess is that after this sequel comes out, we'll be trying to 'unsee it' and waxing poetic about how original and thought provoking the original was, and how flat, and full of fail this film is.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Philip never wrote a sequel to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but K.W. Jeter (a friend of his) did write several.
Blade_Runner_2:_The_Edge_of_Human among others. I have never read any of them despite being a fan of both writers.
The unicorn dream is obviously the strongest bit of evidence that Deckard is a replicant.
A unicorn is a symbol of a mythical (i.e. man-made) creature of beauty and purity - so it's heavily symbolic for Rachael. The dream is symbolic of Deckard falling in love with Rachael. Gaff's unicorn at the end is also symbolic of Rachael. Also, Gaff's other uses of origami/similar throughout the film are all heavily symbolic of the scene it's placed in - why would this one use be the only one not symbolic?
There's also the little hint when Rachael asks him if he's ever taken the VK test himself.
More a reference to the book, where the same question comes up, and he has.
When the police first hire him, he's told that SIX replicants hijacked the shuttle and one got fried running through a force field. He then gets info about Leon, Roy, Pris and Zora ... so where's #6?
Production error. They were originally going to have six (and even had the part cast), but had to cut one for budget reasons, and forgot to change it in the dialogue. This has been fixed in the Final Cut, as they changed the dialogue to having two replicants fried by Tyrel's security grid.
Deckard always seems to be physically out-classed by the replicants, which is evidence that he's not one of them, but he also takes a hell of a beating, which indicates that he might be.
I'd put this evidence more to him not being one. He even gets his ass kicked by Pris "a pleasure model", and while he takes a hell of a beating it's not past the realm of believability for humans. Also, he doesn't display the ability to ignore pain that the replicants do.
Gaff tells Deckard "You've done a man's job."
This is a colloquialism that means about the same as "you've done a good day's/hard day's work". It's not meant to imply that anything about the listener not being a man.
Also, every single writer on the project has said that Deckard was never meant to be a replicant. Plus, there are multiple literary themes that lose their impact if Deckard is a replicant, too.