Blade Runner 2099’s final trailer shows a Replicant-ruled Los Angeles

Amazon Prime Video’s first live-action Blade Runner series stars Hunter Schafer and Michelle Yeoh, and arrives later this month.

The final trailer for Blade Runner 2099 is out, and it shows how much future Los Angeles has changed since our last visit. It has basically gone very ‘Night City’ (from Cyberpunk 2077).

The eight-part limited series takes place 50 years after the events of Blade Runner 2049. By 2099, the long-running struggle between humans and Replicants appears to have reached a fairly decisive conclusion.

The Replicants won. It was pretty inevitable.

Humans have been pushed to the margins, while the artificial beings they created are now the dominant force in Los Angeles. According to showrunner Silka Luisa, the Replicant uprising that had been building throughout the films has finally taken place, leaving the series to explore what happens when humanity is no longer the dominant species.

I think it’s a pretty interesting, and logical, direction to take the franchise. Others will disagree.

Hunter Schafer plays Cora, a fugitive who assumes a new identity as a Blade Runner. She ends up working alongside Olwen, a Replicant played by Michelle Yeoh who has only days left to live. Together, they are ordered to hunt down a runaway who apparently knows something capable of bringing down the fragile society around them.

The new trailer gives us a lot more of the story than the earlier teasers. Cora appears to be operating undercover, even having to make her way past the sort of technology designed to identify exactly what she is hiding. It would make sense that the Replicants will have developed a kind of reverse Voight-Kampff test, but it might not be up to scratch.

Whatever is going on, it’s clear humans are being hunted rather than doing the hunting. I think that sounds cool.

Blade Runner finally comes to live-action television

It’s a bit surprising that Blade Runner 2099 will be the first live-action television series in the franchise.

Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner appeared back in 1982, followed 35 years later by Denis Villeneuve’s excellent Blade Runner 2049. There has since been the animated series Blade Runner: Black Lotus, along with comics, novels and shorts, but the franchise has generally avoided the relentless expansion experienced by most successful science-fiction properties.

So, Amazon is finally going to cash in. At least I hope so, because if they make profit, it’s hopefully because it’s good. Everyone is rightfully wary of Prime Video, due to the Lord of the Rings show. (I stopped watching after season one.) But they also made the last seasons of The Expanse, and that was awesome.

Silka Luisa, who created Apple TV’s Shining Girls, serves as showrunner, while original Blade Runner director Ridley Scott is among the executive producers. Michael Green, who co-wrote Blade Runner 2049, is also involved as an executive producer. Jonathan van Tulleken, whose recent work includes Shōgun, directed the first two episodes.

So there’s some pretty decent talent involved.

The new trailer looks like Blade Runner. There is a lot of CGI, but hopefully it will work without being too glaring. There are gigantic futuristic cityscapes, gloomy interiors, unsettling technology, neon, rain and plenty of people wondering exactly what separates a human being from something humanity created. And probably some moody synth.

Flipping the balance of power between humans and Replicants gives the series somewhere genuinely new to go. Where they actually go with it, remains to be seen. I’m intrigued though.

Rather than simply recreating Deckard or K’s stories with different actors, Blade Runner 2099 appears to be taking one of the central ideas behind Blade Runner and following it to its logical conclusion.

We will not have long to find out whether it works. Lots of angry online types already hate it, and as a fan of the franchise, I hope they are all wrong. We’ll see.

All eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 arrive on Prime Video on November 25. You can watch it here.

Here’s the trailer:

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