Going back to the well is all the rage these days and Ridley Scott has embraced it as his personal philosophy. Scott is re-touring the world of Alien in next year’s Prometheus is unnecessary, but might prove interesting. At the very least, it can’t harm the Alien franchise any worse than Alien vs Predator. So on this one I’ll give Scott a pass.
However, Scott now plans to re-enter the world of Blade Runner. I expect he shall return to the world of Thelma and Louise soon afterwards. At best, this has the reek of an old man too tired to imagine new worlds. At worst, it’s a crass money grab wrapped in brand-name marketing. Either way, as I see it, going back to Blade Runner is a no-win situation for Scott.
Filmmakers have aped Blade Runner‘s style for 30 years. Yet, no one has replicated its vibe, that eerie, cold metal in the mouth taste. The film is singularly unique. A frigid, oddball vision of hell without humanity. If Scott stays with the original’s visuals, how could it feel fresh in light of all the copycats? How can he re-capture that weird texture so engrained in “the world of Blade Runner” when the overall feel of the original was rooted not just in the film’s achievements but also in its fascinating flaws, ’80s visual trappings and behind-the-scenes madness? He cannot. There’s only one Blade Runner and there will only ever be one Blade Runner. It is the perfect stand-alone film. Scott will compete with his middle-aged self and lose.
Regardless, unless Scott is distracted by one of the 2,000 projects attached to him at this moment, this folly is inevitable. Prequel or sequel? Who knows other than those few truly in the fold? If it’s a prequel, I will find it interesting how the film rectifies itself with the 2019 setting of the original. Thankfully, the future of Blade Runner has not arrived on Scott’s timetable. However, a prequel could not proclaim itself as Scott’s vision of the future, but rather it’s Scott’s vision of the… present. Sure, science-fiction lends itself to flexible settings. Yet, most moviegoers are becoming more literal-minded these days. Expect annoying Internet memes revolving around reality versus a Blade Runner prequel to invade your email and Facebook walls.
A Blade Runner prequel could tread the invention and uprising of Replicants. Call it Rise of the Off-World Colonies of the Replicants. Scott has stated his interest in exploring these worlds in previous interviews. Prequel or sequel, my money is on this being the setting of Scott’s film. Perhaps we will finally see the “things you people wouldn’t believe” that Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty mentioned before expiring.
However, I don’t want to. Batty’s words have more power precisely because we haven’t seen those things. What’s the point of taking Blade Runner to space? The soul of Blade Runner is grounded to its vision of Earth. Launching it to space seems like a sure-fire way to make a film indistinguishable from the hundreds of space films before it.
If Harrison Ford and Sean Young had been cryogenically frozen three decades ago, we would expect a straight prequel or sequel answering all of the “Is Deckard a Replicant or isn’t he?” nonsense Yet, a prequel exploring that story would prove a tortured mess since Scott’s Deckard-is-a-replicant retconning has never made sense in the context of the plot. Of course, the age of the actors and the “bullshitty” nature of Scott’s take on Deckard’s biology won’t stop the fanboys asking the director to address these threads in his new film. Sure, 2010 was a fun film, but I couldn’t care less for an explanation of why HAL went murder-death-kill in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If Scott gets happy with the exposition in a new Blade Runner film, I simply won’t waste my time with it.
Moving beyond the story, one could argue the world of Blade Runner offers fertile grounds to explore all the themes the original touched upon when you tell a story about machines that look and emote like humans. Fair enough. But we’ve seen this topic explored ad nauseam. If you want to watch something that pushes all of the major themes of Blade Runner to their logical ends, watch the reboot of the Battlestar Galactica series.
Blade Runner is the springboard for much of the science fiction of the last 30 years. We’ve seen it in everything from The Terminator to Batman Begins. Filming another installment so long after the original’s influence has entrenched itself in pop culture is masturbatory, not groundbreaking. Don’t waste our time.
