Luisa\u2019s show differs quite a bit from its forebears. It still has the humanoids known as replicants, but in 2099\u2019s future, they\u2019re the ones calling the shots, giving humans the grunt work they used to do. Set 80 years after Blade Runner and 50 years after 2049, it focuses on a replicant Blade Runner, Olwen (Michelle Yeoh), on the search for rogue agents. Along the way she gets teamed up with Cora, played by Hunter Schafer, a human pretending to be a replicant to survive. (We\u2019d say more, but the show doesn\u2019t premiere until November 25, and, you know, spoilers.)<\/p>\n
If this vision of dystopia sounds too familiar for comfort, Luisa hears you. When asked about how she chose to tackle the franchise, she noted that in the last couple of decades, \u201cthe present caught up to the films\u201d as megacorporations and environmental collapse became realities in ways they weren\u2019t in 1982. The point of her Blade Runner is to show what happens in a post-revolution world and \u201cnot focus on the fears we\u2019re living with right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean that Blade Runner 2099 is entirely a dystopian tale. For Luisa, it\u2019s about showing the \u201csilver linings\u201d of a world run by replicants. To do that, she picks up on some of the environmental themes touched on in Villeneuve\u2019s movie, which showed how Earth had been wrecked by human activity. Blade Runner 2099 depicts a world that replicants are trying to bring back from the brink of ecological collapse using the skills they gained when they were working for humans. \u201cThey\u2019re able to rehabilitate the planet,\u201d Luisa says.<\/p>\n
Blade Runner 2099 also gave Schafer a chance to flex some action-hero muscles\u2014something she\u2019d never done before and something her costar, Yeoh, has been doing for decades. Schafer jumped right in, running and diving across the screen from the pilot onward. For the fight scenes, though, she got some help from Yeoh.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really physically demanding,\u201d Schafer said during WIRED\u2019s conference. \u201cI felt so lucky to have Michelle Yeoh, who is the fucking master, as a scene partner.\u201d<\/p>\n
But back to that shadow cast by Scott\u2019s original adaptation of Philip K. Dick\u2019s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In addition to being a sci-fi classic, it also created a whole new template for what dystopian fiction could look like. It broods.<\/p>\n
Luisa insists there\u2019s a little more hope in hers\u2014and hopes audiences see that, too. She also wants audiences to know that replicants aren\u2019t the same as the AI bots humans are fixated on in 2026. \u201cThey\u2019re more akin to us,\u201d she said. \u201cAI, I just don\u2019t have that same sympathy for.\u201d Hear that, Claude?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luisa\u2019s show differs quite a bit from its forebears. It still has the humanoids known as replicants, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":958576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[54071,353,49,48,75,337,5131,348,327354],"class_list":["post-958575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-blade-runner","tag-books","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-streaming","tag-tv","tag-wired-world-fair-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=958575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/958576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=958575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=958575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=958575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}