The world painted in Ridley Scott’s original classic Blade Runner is impossible to forget – dank and rain-drenched, vast and awe-inspiring, futuristic but recognisable. And it served for the backdrop to an existential odyssey for Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, a ‘Blade Runner’ who’s assigned to hunt down a rogue group of ‘replicants’, artificial humans who are running loose in the film’s then-future 2019 Los Angeles. Then, in 2017 we got an evolution of the world in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. And now, in Prime Video’s limited series Blade Runner 2099 – set, you guessed it, 80 years after the original – the status quo of the world has entirely changed.
The new show, set in the continuity of both Scott and Villeneuve’s films, follows the timeline to a moment where the original premise is flipped. The replicants have taken over. Michelle Yeoh’s Blade Runner Olwen is a replicant, whose job it is to hunt down rogue humans. And LA is warming back up. “The idea here is that we’re doing sunshine noir,” showrunner Silka Luisa tells Empire. “The show is really about a city coming back to life, a rebirth. So it’s hot and sticky and chaotic.” Her pitch for the show was all about this inversion of the first film: “Everyone, globally, has been very aware of this palpable fear of the end of our species. Climate change, pandemics. A sense of our own mortality. Blade Runner is about imagining even beyond that. What does the world look like when it’s no longer ours?”
Yeoh relished playing a replicant, despite Olwen facing the end of her lifespan. “They have a much longer lifespan,” she explains. “Stronger, faster, they definitely have improvements. That’s why they won the war. They learned how to adapt, how to move forward.” She finds herself in the orbit of Hunter Schafer’s Cora – a human who’s disguised herself as a replicant to infiltrate the LAPD. “Cora is very raw,” Schafer tells Empire. Expect a new identity-probing double act to sit alongside Blade Runner’s Deckard and Rachael, and 2049’s K and Joi. “I think there’s a lot of beauty in even the small moments of humanity,” says Schafer of the pairing. “Despite Olwen being a replicant.” Unicorn origami, anyone?
Read Empire’s full Blade Runner 2099 feature in the Dune: Part Three issue – on sale Thursday October 22. Pre-order a copy online here. Blade Runner 2099 comes to Prime Video from November 25.