Harrison Ford Loves the Blade Runner 2 Script

The composer's been picked.

More at the link.

I've not heard any of the guy's stuff, so I can't comment on it, but damned if the score of the original didn't make the movie in many ways.

Why not Vangelis?

Because the studio doesn't want to pay him, or he's told the studio to go fuck themselves.

My thought is that Deckard was the best Blade Runner out there, but when he came up against Batty & Co. after they first touched down, he got killed. After Holden gets killed, the authorities convince the Tyrell Corporation to transfer Deckard's memories into a new Nexus model (thus explaining how he could survive the beating that Leon gives him) and send him out after the replicants.

Interview with the director.

More at the link. From the way it reads, I'm thinking that Ford's role in the film is going to be similar to Charleton Heston's in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, where he basically bookends the film.

And we have a title: Blade Runner: 2049

At least it isn't Blade Runner: 2 Blade 2 Runner.

2049? Oh, yeah. We're living around the time of the original; Roy's incept date is January 8, 2016.

Here is some of his work.

It could work.

I think that M83 would have worked better. The soundtrack for Oblivion really reminded me of Vangelis.

Really the score is the best part of that movie.

I liked Oblivion and the music.

If you have the Blu-Ray, you can play it with just the score. It works slightly better just because the music conveys all the emotion of the scene. It's a beautiful long form music video.

I do have the blue ray, but I wasn't aware of that.

It should be under Isolated Score. It's an entirely different experience. Tron Legacy by the same director has a similar option.

I have Tron Legacy too.

Oblivion has been called derivative--and, yes, it certainly, ahem, pays homage to several prior sci-fi feature films--but the climax/resolution of that film is still immensely satisfying, and the music underscoring it is just perfect.

Sally: "I created you, Jack. I am your god."
Jack: "Fuck you, Sally."
KA-BOOM!

Loved it.

The art direction for the movie was beautiful and I love that a lot of it was actually practical. I also love the idea of Earth being conquered by an army of Tom Cruises.

Katie Holmes disagrees!

It seems as if the sequel agrees with you.

Harrison Ford likes pointing. This looked interesting though.

That's enough to get me stoked

And some of the original Vangelis score makes it in to the teaser!

It'd be interesting (though I don't think it likely) if they somehow managed to tie this in with the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle.

Rumor has it

Hasn't it been established that Deckard was a replicant. Nexus-6. And that the limited lifespan was optional?

Been thinking about this, and given the rumors about the film, what's been said about it, and some of the trends in reboots/years later sequels, I think I have an idea what they might be doing with the film.

The essential premise of Dick's book was that in a world where robots were almost indistinguishable from living creatures, how could you ever be certain that you weren't a robot? This is touched on slightly in the film, but not deeply. They may want to revisit that aspect in a larger way now. The original film implied that it was Tyrell who had the crucial knowledge about making replicants. Other people could make parts, but the only one who knew everything was Tyrell, and he died in the first film.

Now, given that the cliche in reboots/years later sequels is that they have to do some kind of "reversal" (i.e. the villain from the previous film comes back as a good guy, or an iconic line spoken by a hero is said by the villain in the reboot/sequel), I'm thinking that Ryan is a replicant, and he's trying to find Deckard/Rachel, because Rachel (if not Deckard) has the "secret" of a long life. The hope is that if Ryan finds Deckard, Deckard's either a replicant who doesn't have a short lifespan, or that he can lead them to Rachel, who doesn't have one. This will be pitched as the planet being so devastated by environmental disasters that the only hope we have of surviving by hybridizing humans and replicants, but without the secret to the longer life, this is impossible.

There's also a rumor that one of the replicants from the original film will have a cameo appearance in the sequel. It seems unlikely that it'd be Leon, since Brion James died about 20 years ago. Zhora? Pris? Not really interesting, but possible. Roy? Do we want to see grandpa Deckard going up against grandpa (or a CGI'd younger version of) Roy? Nope. Even worse would be grandpa Deckard and grandpa Roy sitting around like Sherman and Joe Johnston, reliving their "glory days." That leaves Rachel, but Sean Young has said that she's not been contacted about being in the movie. Hmm. Is the rumor false, or is someone "lying"?

So, Ryan shows up at Deckard's "Fortress of Squalidtude," after tracking down Deckard. Deckard, of course, doesn't trust Ryan, and the two have some kind of fight. Eventually, Ryan's able to win Deckard's trust, and Deckard's willing to help Ryan meet Rachel. (Deckard refuses to allow them to take a DNA sample, or whatever they need of himself, because while he suspects that he might be a replicant, he doesn't want to know the truth.) The film ends with a CGI'd sequence of Rachel walking towards Deckard and Ryan, that's a grab of her appearance in the first film. (So Sean Young wouldn't be in the film, though she might do some voice work for it.)

Fortress of Squatitude, that's what I will now name my toilet.

I guess that isn't what I got out of the book. It was explicitly stated that Deckard wasn't a replicant and that this was never in doubt. The closest they came to having that doubt was for another bounty hunter who'd been conned into working for a fake replicant police department, in part because he was so emotionally detached. If anything, the message of the book seemed to be more about what exactly it was that make replicants not human (with scenes like Priss pulling the legs off of a spider helping to illustrate this), and how people like Deckard could square the whole hunting down and killing of replicants with the major religion he participated in (Mercerism), in part because he was developing empathy for them. Actually I'd say that theme of empathy was especially important to the book, because the lack of empathy was what made the replicants so horrible, yet a lack of empathy was exactly what was needed to be a good bounty hunter in order to hunt down and kill these very human-like machines.

And everybody in the book had robotic pets because they were trying to demonstrate that they were human, because caring for animals (or rather, robotic pets), was something that replicants didn't do. Like most of Dick's work, the book is multi-layered, and trying to limit it to a single aspect does an injustice to it.

The caring for animals thing was part of the Mercerism empathy thing, which was coupled somewhat with the illegality of killing any remaining animals. Though one thing I never got about the book is that it actually seemed rather cruel to keep, for example, a horse in a pen on the roof of a highrise in the middle of a city, especially in light of how toxic the environment was supposed to be. Kind of makes me wonder how long that goat would have lasted if Rachel hadn't dumped it off the building.