Get a Glimpse of the Future in the New ‘Blade Runner’ Trailer
Fun fact: Did you know it’s almost September? The summer passed in the blink of an eye, and all of a sudden, the fall went from an amorphous blob of future to being a mere handful of weeks away. This is to say that Blade Runner 2049’s release date of October 6, a remote point in the distance when it was first announced last year, is very nearly upon us. For me, for the first time since its announcement, this movie feels real. You can almost smell the fuel oil and sulfur.
Today brings another fraction of a peek at Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film with an international TV spot that mostly reconfigures pre-introduced footage, but also grants us a few new images. As replicant hunter K, Ryan Gosling has been having one of those days. Not even coming home to the warm, slightly-off face of his wife Joi (Ana de Armas) can shake the suspicion that something foul is afoot in the distant future and it’s going to entangle him. His instincts are dead-on, too; a robot creator (a milky-eyed Jared Leto) has a nefarious plot brewing to manufacture an army of automatons and do ... something. We know not what, but people don’t make robot armies unless they‘ve got something sinister in the works. Unless he just wants to recreate the video where all those prisoners did the “Thriller” dance.
Apart from that wispiest suggestion of a plot, this trailer is business as usual: Flashes of action color-graded to within an inch of their life, some serious talking about how K will need Deckard (Harrison Ford) to help him if they want to take down their mysterious enemy, a surprise bombing attack. We’re coming down the home stretch now — all we need to do is hold out for one more month.