Blade Runner 2

E.D. has a post at Forbes about Ridley Scott making a second Blade Runner movie. I cannot comment there because the Forbes registration system rejects my password despite my best attempts to comply with its password rules. Growing bitter, I left the Forbes site with no comment and returned here.

While E.D. is absolutely right to fear that this movie will be all effects and no story because that’s pretty much how Hollywood is doing things these days, the fear would be there anyway. The story has been told already. Part of what’s important and compelling about the story is that the big question is left unanswered: is Deckard a replicant? The worst thing I thought Ridley Scott ever did was to answer that question.

There is, so far as I know, no Philip K. Dick story following up to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and so someone else would have to pick up that banner and try to advance it. There are certainly more wrinkles to the challenge of artificial intelligence and artificial life to explore, but will a return to world of the Tyrell Corporation and a future Los Angeles reduced to a rainy global slum going to find the right territory in which to explore it?

For that matter, I’m also a little disquieted that Scott is returning to his old work — Alien and Blade Runner — as inspiration for the new stuff. Granted, not all of his new materials have been hits; Matchstick Men and Robin Hood were disappointing. But for all the hate lavished on it, Gladiator was a pretty good film, Thelma & Louise told a new sort of story, and Black Hawk Down was compelling. He can make good movies but going the franchise route strikes me as a way to make money while not doing the hard work of finding creative stories to tell and interesting ways to tell them.