Blade Runner 2049 is less than a month away. So, it’s time for the marketing machine to kick into high gear. At this point, there are probably going to be a few pieces of promotional material that reveal a little more than you may want.
That’s true for this very first clip that Warner Bros. has decided to release. If you want to stay completely SPOILER-free, you might want to turn back now. But, this clip does have a lot of interesting tidbits that give us a few hints as to what’s in store.
The Future Is Not Bright
We get to see Agent K (Ryan Gosling) visiting some kind of child labor force and investigating an ongoing mystery. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like this footage reveals a lot. But, dig a little deeper and you find a number of intriguing leads.
Right off the bat, we can see that the future is looking incredibly run down. The last time we saw the world of Blade Runner, things were grim but not so incredibly barren. The Earth has clearly been ravaged by environmental change. There is a desolateness to this that tells us a lot about the state of civilization in 2049. It looks like humanity is on its last legs.
Is Agent K Human?
The big takeaway from this clip is Lennie James’s character saying that bigger men than Agent K have tried to shut him down. “And they were men,” is the line that will start plenty of theorizing. Is Agent K a replicant?
The reverence the children seem to have for him is eerie. Could they be replicants that recognize their own kind? And that leads into the biggest clue of the film…
Are Replicants Reproducing?
I’ve mentioned this possible plot point before and this clip is definitely feeding that fire. Now, I don’t think these children are naturally born replicants, but introducing the imagery of children into the film with a scene like this will make the eventual reveal hit harder on a thematic level. I firmly believe that the grave marker we’ve seen in previous trailers is not for Rachael but her and Rick Deckard‘s child.
Plus, replicants have always been used for massive manual labor. Instead of having to manufacture tons of replicants, wouldn’t it be more cost-efficient to have them create new workers biologically?
It’s clear that Blade Runner 2049 is not going to be your typical blockbuster bash. This is going to be a calculated and cold movie by design. As a fan of the original film, that has me all the more excited. We’ll get to unravel the mystery when Blade Runner 2049 opens on October 6.
