Prime Video's biggest sci-fi show of the year redefines a cyberpunk icon

“We already fought a war, we lost.” The first official trailer for Blade Runner 2099 starts with a bang, revealing how much has changed in the world first brought to life by director Ridley Scott since his trailblazing 1982 movie Blade Runner. That film, itself an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, imagined a neon-soaked noir dystopia of 2019 — and popularized the cyberpunk genre in cinema along the way.

In 2017, director Denis Villeneuve moved that story forward with Blade Runner 2049, but his film still took place in a world where humanity controls the Earth despite the threat of bioengineered “replicants” designed to look and act just like regular humans. By 2099, when Prime Video’s continuation of the Blade Runner saga takes place, that power balance has shifted dramatically.

“Replicants, they keep taking it all away,” continues Hunter Schafer, who plays Cora, a human disguising herself as a replicant to survive. “How much longer, until we have nothing, until we are nothing?”

The trailer, revealed at San Diego Comic-Con, doesn’t explain a lot about how human-replicant relations got to this point, but in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Silka Luisa reveals the premise of Blade Runner 2099.

“There’s been a replicant uprising that feels like it’s been bubbling up,” Luisa explains. “And between 2049 and 2099, that’s happened. So the war has happened and the humans have lost. Our worst fears imagined… The replicants are now the power brokers of the city. And humans are the second-class citizens.”

Alongside Schafer, the show’s other star is Michelle Yeoh, who plays a replicant Blade Runner hunting down a gang of rogue replicants.

“Humans want what was taken from them,” Yeoh’s character, Olwen, says in the trailer, “but it’s our time now.”

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

Like Blade Runner before it, 2099 takes place in a dystopian version of Los Angeles, but don’t expect a return to Scott’s dark and rainy neon cityscape. Instead, Luisa describes the visual style as “sunshine noir,” which she says reflects the themes of the show.

“You’re still very much in the Blade Runner world, but the show is about a birth,” she explains. “It’s about a birth of a city. It’s about a birth of a replicant era. These characters are discovering who they really are. And so the climate is hot, it’s sticky, it’s sunny. We’re on the coast a lot. We’re in Santa Monica a lot. So it’s like you’re seeing Ridley’s texture, but you’re seeing it in the sunshine noir filter.”

While the story certainly seems intriguing, visually, the trailer for Blade Runner 2099 raises some red flags for Ridley Scott devotees. If you fell in love with Scott’s cyberpunk vision of the future, Luisa’s show might be a disappointment. Then again, this is just the first trailer. Hopefully, the series can deliver something on par with the iconic imagery that both Scott and Villeneuve brought to what is arguably the most influential sci-fi story ever told.

Blade Runner 2099 premieres Nov. 25 on Prime Video.