Prime Video dropped the final trailer for Blade Runner 2099 yesterday, putting Yeoh's Replicant Olwen and Hunter Schafer's fugitive Cora on the hunt for a runaway in a Los Angeles that humans no longer control. Check out the official post down below:
Cora is a fugitive who wants to stop running and takes on "one last identity: a Blade Runner." She is forced to work with Olwen, "a Replicant days from dying," and together they hunt "a runaway hiding a truth that could collapse a fragile city," according to Prime Video.
A Partnership Built On A Lie
Yeoh's Olwen is the one with the badge and the authority. During the show's New York Comic Con panel, showrunner Silka Luisa said Olwen is "supposed to be looking for human insurgents, humans that continue to fight back. But... she's actually here looking for a Blade Runner who's gone missing, Merrick, one of her colleagues."
That puts Schafer's Cora, a human posing as a Blade Runner, right next to a Replicant whose job is hunting people like her. In the trailer, Olwen says: "Humans are always the same. Desperate. Volatile." The trailer opens on the question "Are you a good human? Or a bad one?"
The rest of the footage moves from crowded back rooms to towering industrial skylines under an orange haze, and to a lone figure in a red wasteland beside a single beam of light. Prime Video's post quotes the trailer's closing line: "Whatever you can build, you can destroy."
50 Years After Blade Runner 2049
Blade Runner 2099 is set 50 years after Blade Runner 2049, and Luisa has been clear that the future did not go well for humanity. "The worst has happened. The replicant uprising that has been bubbling up in the films has taken place, and humans have lost," she said at the panel. In Prime Video's words, Los Angeles "has been reborn, just not by humanity."
Luisa also described the series as a bigger version of the original film's question about mortality. Where Roy Batty and the Replicants of 1982 were "fighting for more life," the series asks the same thing about all of humanity: "Mankind, what happens when we realize our time is running out? Are we going to accept that loss?"
Who Is Behind It
Jonathan van Tulleken, who worked on Shōgun, directed the first 2 episodes and is an executive producer. Luisa is the showrunner and creator, and the executive producers include Ridley Scott, Alcon Entertainment co-founders Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, Alcon's President of Television Ben Roberts, Michael Green and Isa Dick Hackett, along with Steven Johnson, David W. Zucker and Clayton Krueger of Scott Free Productions.
Yeoh, who starred in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Schafer, from Euphoria, lead a cast that also includes series regulars Dimitri Abold and Lewis Gribben. Johnny Harris, Sheila Atim, Tom Burke, Matthew Needham, Daniel Rigby, Amy Lennox, Katelyn Rose Downey and Maurizio Lombardi are recurring guest stars. Alcon also produced Blade Runner 2049, which won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects.
Alcon's other credits include The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, and Prisoners, the 2013 thriller Denis Villeneuve directed before 2049. Blade Runner 2049 starred Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford and picked up 5 Academy Award nominations in total.
Blade Runner 2099 is an 8-episode limited series, and every episode arrives on November 25 in more than 240 countries and territories. It joins a Prime Video lineup that already has The Terminal List, as covered in The Terminal List Season 2 Is Now Streaming As Chris Pratt's James Reece Goes Global On Prime Video.
Does Michelle Yeoh as a dying Replicant hunting alongside a fake Blade Runner have you sold on Blade Runner 2099?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.