God, Blade Runner 2049 looks so good. Can we just stop for a second and acknowledge that? Even if it falls apart on every storytelling level, the thing looks amazing. A moment of silence for this movie's beauty, if you please.
… Okay, enough of that. Let's watch the new trailer.
There are lots of little clues to pull apart here, and I'm sure some of the more dedicated out there will be tearing this apart frame by frame. But I want to address three big things I notice, and you chime in with what you see in the comments.
Jared Leto is looking more and more like a villain
Jared Leto's character, Neander Wallace, seemed like an ominous fellow in the first Blade Runner 2049 trailer, whispering about a "disposable workforce" and apparently sending someone to capture and retrieve Ryan Gosling's character, known only as "Officer K". But really, he was more strange and foreboding than villainous. In the second trailer he's more outright menacing, with lines like "You do not know what pain is yet. You will learn."
Is that a Replicant commune / internment camp?
We see K traveling outside the city (presumably in search of Harrison Ford's character, Rick Deckard) when he comes across a large group of people living in squalor among ruins. There's a brief moment where we see dozens of these people stand up from tables littered with electronics, which suggests there's some connection between the makeshift town and the Replicants. K doesn't seem to get along with them, so either they're a population of Replicants hiding away from society, or they're humans who just don't like K butting in where he's not wanted.
Deckard is definitely a Replicant. Probably. Maybe.
At one point, K asks Deckard what happened. Deckard responds that he "covered his tracks, scrambled the records." So clearly something happened after Deckard took down Roy and the other Replicants in the first movie that was worth covering up. But it's what Deckard says next that's really interesting: "We were being hunted," he tells K. Now, this would seem to imply that Deckard is a Replicant, since we know Replicants are often hunted down. Hell, that was Deckard's whole job. But perhaps the "we" he's referring to is simply himself and Rachael, his Replicant love interest that he left with at the end of the first movie. Or maybe it's some other group. Trailers use editing to trick audiences all the time, so it'll be interesting to see how this line plays in context.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Dave Bautista, Jared Leto, Mackenzie Davis, Barkhad Abdi, and Harrison Ford, Blade Runner 2049 will be released in cinemas on October 6, 2017.
Images: Warner Bros.
