Ryan Gosling's K meets shady child trafficker Lennie James in a new clip highlighting the dystopian backdrop of Blade Runner 2049. Thirty-five years after the first Blade Runner, director Denis Villeneuve picks up the story from original auteur Ridley Scott, returning to explore the film's bleak future of weary cops, artificial humans and sinister corporate goings-on.
In Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling plays officer K, a new blade runner who uncovers a mystery that leads him to the door of Harrison Ford's Deckard, who has been missing ever since the events of the first film three decades before. Plot details have been kept under wraps, but the story roughly involves Jared Leto as a blind villain whose mad scheme involves building an army of replicants.
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A new clip from the film has arrived, showcasing the dystopian setting of 2049 and giving another taste of Ryan Gosling's minimalist acting in the role of K. The clip begins with K surveying a very bleak, post-apocalyptic junkyard wasteland, something more out of Mad Max than Blade Runner. K then enters a rusty, slapped-together building and is immediately surrounded by a group of seemingly feral children who lead him further into the mysterious edifice.
The big reveal comes when K enters a huge room filled with children toiling away at tables laden with electronic bric-a-brac. The place is a bizarre mashup of Dickens and Beyond Thunderdome, a dystopian sweatshop where instead of making clothes, the kids build electronic components. The sweatshop proprietor is played by Lennie James of The Walking Dead, and he explains to Gosling that the kids are building electronics for "colonial ships," that their work is "the closest any of them will ever get to that grand life off-world." K whips out his LAPD badge which upsets the sweatshop master, who insists that there are bigger men than K trying to shut him down. An unimpressed K merely stares blankly (as in nearly every other clip of Gosling's character from the film so far).
The clip doesn't give much away in terms of plot, but it does give a taste of the film's impressive dystopian art direction, which takes things in a much more ramshackle direction than the art-deco high-tech of the original Blade Runner. Lennie James' monologue also fleshes out the socio-economic reality of the movie's world, where the rich head to "the grand life off-world" on the backs of child laborers. The clip suggests that the story's stakes may be higher than just K solving an old mystery and taking on a replicant manufacturer with delusions of grandeur.
Visually, Blade Runner 2049 looks nothing less than stunning. As bleak as the original Blade Runner was, the new film appears to be even more depressing and brutal in its depiction of a future where the gulf between the rich and poor has widened and the very fabric of society appears to be breaking down. The film also stars Robin Wright, Dave Bautista, Ana de Armas and Barkhad Abdi.
Next: What Happened Between Blade Runner & Blade Runner 2049?
Source: Warner Bros.
