Amazon greenlights BLADE RUNNER 2099 TV mini-series

Amazon has greenlit Blade Runner 2099, a live-action TV mini-series set in the world of the 1982 movie Blade Runner and its 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049. They initially announced the series was on the fast track to development back in February.

Ridley Scott, who directed the first movie and produced the second, is on board as executive producer and consultant. Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) is the main writer and showrunner for the project. Tom Spezialy (Watchmen, Ash vs. Evil Dead) is also on board as a writer. Alcon Productions (The Expanse) will make the show in conjunction with Scott's own production company, Scott Free.

Both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 were commercial disappointments on their original release, but have grown to be cult successes, with both movies enjoying an impressive long tail on video, DVD, Blu-Ray and now streaming. Both films have also enjoyed substantial critical acclaim.

Moving the story a full fifty years on from the events of Blade Runner 2049 suggests there will be few, if any, story or character crossovers with earlier iterations of the franchise. Amazon fast-tracking the project suggests it will film in 2023 for a likely 2024 release.

RIP Vangelis

The news has sadly broken that composer and keyboardist Vangelis has passed away at the age of 79. He is best-known for composing the soundtracks to the films Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, as well as the Carl Sagan TV show Cosmos. He also had a successful solo career.

Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassiou was born in 1943 in Greece. He started learning to play the piano at four, inspired by his father's love of music. He began scoring work early, working on three Greek movies in the mid-1960s whilst recording with the band The Forminx. In 1967 he relocated from Athens to Paris and co-founded the group Aphrodite's Child, which enjoyed moderate success and a critical hit with the 666 album in 1972. He began a solo career and continued scoring European films, as well as nature documentaries. In 1974 he auditioned to replace Rick Wakeman in the progressive rock band Yes, but ran into visa problems. Although he never joined the band formally, he did work alongside various Yes bandmembers on later projects.

In 1975 he relocated to London and continued to release solo material at an impressive clip throughout the rest of the decade, as well as continuing to work on more documentary soundtracks. His work on Opera Sauvage (1979) was particularly praised, raising his profile considerably. In 1980, Carl Sagan's hugely influential television series Cosmos used a number of Vangelis compositions from throughout his career, including an extract from "Heaven and Hell" as its main theme.

Vangelis had his biggest career breakthrough when he was asked to compose the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire (1981). His main theme tune for the film became a huge worldwide success, hitting #1 on the US Hot 100 chart. The soundtrack album sold a million copies in the USA by itself. The following year he won an Academy Award for the soundtrack, but his fear of flying meant he did not attend the ceremony.

Vangelis was flooded with offers for work, but turned most of them down, fearing becoming typecast only as a film composer. He returned to working on documentaries and only on films which he felt intellectually stimulated him, such as the Japanese film Nankyoku Monogatari (1983). Another such film was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), where his work hugely praised. However, a legal dispute meant that his soundtrack was not formally released until 1994.

Vangelis also composed the soundtracks to 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), Alexander (2004) and El Greco (2007). In 2012 he collaborated on the score for Chariots of Fire: The Play.

He continued to produce solo albums and contribute to projects that interested him, such as a soundtrack for the 2001 NASA Odyssey mission to Mars. His most recent solo album was Juno to Jupiter, released in 2021.

A titan of electronic music and the composer of two of the greatest movie scores of all time, Vangelis will be missed.

Amazon puts cyberpunk TV series BLADE RUNNER 2099 into development

Amazon Studios have fast-tracked development of Blade Runner 2099, a live-action TV series set in the world of the 1982 movie Blade Runner and its 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049.

Ridley Scott is executive producing the new series, which will be showrun and primarily written by Silka Luisa (Shining Girls, Strange Angel). Alcon Entertainment, which recently produced The Expanse for Amazon, is the production company.

Staffing up is underway, with Amazon having already greenlit multiple scripts and production dates already being considered. Apparently Amazon are courting Scott to direct the first episode.

The rapidity of the project may raise eyebrows. Blade Runner 2049 was only a modest success, making $260 million on a production budget of ~$170 million. The filmy likely only just squeaked into profitability on the basis of media and streaming sales. However, the film has had a solid long tale and its director, Denis Villeneuve, has since enjoyed a much bigger hit with Dune: Part One, which may have encouraged people to seek out his earlier work.

Although neither film has been a huge financial success, both have enjoyed immense critical acclaim, which Amazon may be hoping translates into a solid home audience for a further continuation. However, by setting the movie a full fifty years after the events of the previous film, it looks like they are not thinking of having any continuing characters.

A Potted History of Cyberpunk, Part 1

Cyberpunk 2077

Thanks to the high-profile release of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and its attendant controversies, more people are talking about cyberpunk as a genre and concept than at any time since the 1980s, and probably even more than then.

Defining the genre was tricky even thirty years ago, with the letter pages of SFnal magazines and fanzines occasionally descending into heated battles as people debated what was part of the genre and what was not, who was part of the movement proper and who were its progenitors. There was also a long-running argument – still hashed out today – about works that truly embodied the spirit of cyberpunk versus those merely borrowing its aesthetics for commercial purposes, or perhaps those who held that cyberpunk was a more tightly-defined literary genre as opposed to a setting.

 

Netflix's Altered Carbon

What’s in a Name?

At its simplest, cyberpunk is a portmanteau of two works: cyber – referring to computers – and punk – referring to anti-authoritarianism and rebelling against the established order. In his Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995), SF critic John Clute offers a bald summary of the term: “stories set in a computer-dominated environment with a streetwise, anti-Establishment culture.” In Burning Chrome (1986), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson (two of the genre’s most notable figures) defined it as “low-life and high tech.” In the titular short story from that collection, originally published in 1983, Gibson coined the phrase “the street finds its own uses for things,” which has become a widely-quoted aphorism for the street-level use of advanced technology.

However, when the term “cyberpunk” is mentioned, it also brings up certain images. Usually a vast, futuristic city, sometimes a future version of an existing location like Tokyo or Los Angeles or a completely new conurbation, such as California’s custom-built Night City, or a new urban mass that amalgamated out of previous cities, such as Mega-City One or the Sprawl, two separate ultra-cities which both formed out of existing US cities along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. A lot of people wear sunglasses, even at night. Chrome is everywhere, and is cool. Virtually everyone is a cyborg, from extreme techno-fetishists who have replaced limbs with weaponry or techno-enhanced prosthetics to the everyday people who look just like we do, but might have bionic eyes or a computer interface port behind their ears.

A key complaint and criticism of cyberpunk is that whilst “cyber” shows up in almost all examples of the genre, the “punk” element may or may not be present. Punk usually refers to low-level, “street” kids and people who are non-conformist, anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate, who work for themselves and despise the idea of selling out. In cyberpunk works, the protagonists are often idealistic, seeking to bring down the supercorporations who now wield unfettered power, or sometimes the government which has become enhanced by corporate power.

Cyberpunk is also generally held to be Earth-based, or at least planet-bound. Space travel is often available in a cyberpunk setting but is not a key part of the genre; offworld colonies are sometimes used as a place of escape or refuge for the ultra-rich, leaving the poor masses behind. Sometimes space operas visit Earth or other planets to find vast, semi-dystopian cities and people integrated with technology, such as Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy with its vast, cyberpunk-ish arcologies on Earth or even those instalments of Star Wars which dwell on events on the city-planet of Coruscant, but generally these are held to be space operas first and foremost, with cyberpunk elements of secondary interest.

The genre is often held to be inherently a dystopian vision of the future where technology has run amok and been used to solidify the power of corrupt governments, corporations and other elites at the expense of the masses, who use what technology they can to fight back. Utopian cyberpunk is an oxymoron, with some holding that the closest would be something like Star Trek, in which advanced technology is available to everyone and is genuinely used to improve the lifestyles of all humanity, which in this setting has abandoned capitalism and the acquisition of wealth and power as personal motivations.

Cyberpunk is also often said to be a direct successor to the noir thriller genre, often employing a detective – either a traditional gumshoe, a police officer or a hacker analogue – as the main character or in a supporting role. If the main character is a police officer, they frequently become disillusioned by the corruption exposed during their investigation and quit in disgust, or come into conflict with the system and go rogue. Director James Cameron in fact proposed “technoir” as an alternative name for the genre in his 1984 film The Terminator, but it never really caught on.

 

Doctor Who's Cybermen in their 1966 debut appearance, in The Tenth Planet.

Protocyberpunk

Antecedents of cyberpunk are numerous and arguable. A key early ancestor is Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! (1956), better-known under its revised title of The Stars My Destination. The novel predicted a world where corporations would become more powerful than governments and that the human body would be enhanced by machine implants. The protagonist is, unusually for science fiction of the era, an antihero, a ruthless man named Gully Foyle who is driven arguably sociopathic after he is left to die, marooned in space. His unwavering commitment to destroying his enemies leads him to commit numerous crimes under the justification of his own righteousness; his faith wavers at key moments but at the end of the story he has become a religious icon for his commitment and his revelations about the nature of reality. Foyle is not a laudable figure – he is a rapist and murderer – but his status as an antihero and one-man force of destruction has made him something of a progenitor of later cyberpunk protagonists (or antagonists).

Other works contain elements of later cyberpunk without perhaps fully committing to them: William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine (1961) features cyberspace-like rationalised hallucinations, albeit achieved through drugs and biological means (a theme revisited in Jeff Noon’s popular 1993 quasi-cyberpunk work Vurt). Isaac Asimov’s Robots saga, beginning with I, Robot (1950), asks hard questions about the morality of creating artificial intelligence and what limitations should be put on them, whilst Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968) features cyborgs hanging out on the street. British SF TV series Doctor Who several times addressed the issue of merging biological and machine life, with first the Daleks (debuting in the serial The Dead Planet in 1963) and then, more relevantly, the Cybermen (The Tenth Planet, 1966) addressing what happens when man becomes more machine than biological.

 

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), a key cyberpunk progentior.

Early and Semi-Cyberpunk

The first work which is often cited as cyberpunk is Philip K. Dick’s 1968 short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel revolves around a bounty hunter named Deckard who is contracted to terminate six androids who have escaped from the offworld colonies and fled to Earth to live normal lives among the population. Deckard pursues them across a post-apocalyptic, semi-dystopian North America where the populace huddles in futuristic cities such as San Francisco and Seattle. A common pastime is using “empathy boxes” to link to a communal virtual reality centred around suffering and martyrdom. It is also revealed that almost all animals have been wiped out in a nuclear war, leading to people acquiring robotic animals as pets, with only the ultra-rich able to afford real animals.

The status of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – and its later loose film adaptation, Blade Runner (1982) – as cyberpunk remains contentious as many elements of the genre are missing, such as the role of ultra-powerful corporations. Deckard is also very much not a punk hero, lacking idealism at all and in fact suffering existential ennui which he hopes to assuage by acquiring a real goat to replace his robot sheep. He later has an affair with an android, and experiences doubt over whether he himself is an android or a real human. The novel has a somewhat surreal ending where he finds himself performing the same tasks as the martyr in the empathy boxes’ virtual reality and finds a wild toad, which later turns out to be a robot.

Some of Dick’s later work also employs cyberpunk tropes, perhaps most notably Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Set in a dystopian near-future where the US democratic system has collapsed after a second civil war, it concerns a protagonist, Taverner, who status as a genetically-engineered TV star is abruptly lost when his identity is somehow erased from existence. Trying to desperately avoid being identified as a non-entity, which would reduce him to one of the near-starving, poverty-inflicted majority whose rebellious instincts are only kept in check by television and vacuous entertainment, he goes on the run and eventually is able to restore his identity. The story and background themes, particularly the student-led revolution which is gathering against the technologically superior elite, are at least cyberpunk-adjacent.

Alice Sheldon explored themes which would later be labelled as cyberpunk in her 1973 novel The Girl Who Was Plugged In, published under her pen name of James Tiptree, Jr. The novel takes place in a dystopian future where powerful corporations create genetically-engineered celebrities, who are controlled by operators via a neural interface. These celebrities engage in elaborate games of product placement to get around strict laws on corporate advertising. The book delves deeply into the idea of identity and the idea that the face a person wears is not necessarily their true one, here taken to extremes through technology.

J.G. Ballard explored societal alienation – a common theme in cyberpunk – in numerous works, but a particularly interesting take was in Concrete Island (1974), where a car accident leaves the protagonist stranded on a median strip, the titular concrete island, between several motorway intersections where traffic is constantly moving at dangerous speeds. Unable to leave without being killed, the protagonist joins the subculture of the concrete island, where other rejects from society have gathered, which soon devolves into conflict. The book recalls the spaces outside the city or between the lines of civilisation in cyberpunk, where characters fall and it is questionable if they will emerge again. More directly evoking cyberpunk is Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), where the main character Robert moves into a high-rise apartment block on the outskirts of London. The apartment is a self-contained city in itself, with its own bank, supermarket, shopping mall, gym and school. The high-rise provides so many amenities that its inhabitants can choose to never leave. Some, fearful of reports of crime outside the block, take up that option. Power failures and social and class stratification soon set in, with the richer inhabitants of the upper floors hoarding their wealth against the poorer (but more numerous) inhabitants of the lower levels, leading to a highly localised civil war and revolution (of which the outer world proceeds in apparent ignorance). The novel foreshadows the arrival of the mini-arcology or self-contained “megablock” that becomes a key feature of many cyberpunk stories, whilst thematically the idea of an “ideal society” rapidly devolving in class warfare is pure cyberpunk, with technological warfare (in this case, exemplified by the building’s lifts becoming strategic chokepoints) being a key part of the struggle. The novel was filmed in 2015 by Ben Wheatley with Tom Hiddleston in the title role, to great effect.

In 1976, Doctor Who tackled a key cyberpunk theme in the serial The Deadly Assassin, when it had the Doctor return to his homeworld of Gallifrey to do battle with his arch-nemesis, the Master. At a key point in the narrative, the Doctor has to seek information in the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, the Matrix (a not-uncommon name for such a database). Because the repository is so vast and complex, the best way to use it is via a neural interface to generate a virtual reality through which the Doctor can move in an illusion of the computer system being an actual place. This is one of the earliest examples of such a conflation of computer systems, virtual reality and brain interfaces being used in a manner that would later become extremely common in cyberpunk.

An interesting take on the genre appeared in 1977, when Christopher Priest published A Dream of Wessex. Much of Priest’s work is concerned with layers of reality, doubles, shifting or blurred existences and identity surviving across universes. Given this interest, it is remarkable that only once, in Wessex, he used technology to explore the idea. In this novel an elite group of thinkers create a virtual reality interface which can transport the collective unconscious of some of Britain’s greatest minds into an illusory world where their intelligence and experience can be mined for ideas on how to ensure humanity’s long-term survival. The idea of forcibly transporting people into a cyberspace against their will as a way of extracting information is a common cyberpunk trope, but the idea of doing it stealthily so the target is unaware of what is happening is intriguing.

In 1978, the BBC launched a new science fiction TV show, Blake’s 7. Blake’s 7 is primarily a space opera about a band of plucky rebels trying to bring down the dystopian Terran Federation, but some cyberpunk themes do proliferate. The rebels are a mixture of genuine idealists, profit-driven criminals and career sociopaths (reflecting the often-mixed band of protagonists encounter in cyberpunk fiction). The population on Earth (apparently reduced by atomic war) are kept under constant surveillance and control in domed mega-cities, made docile by drugs and ruled over by corrupt officials. The war with the Federation often takes the form of a game of technological one-upmanship, with Blake’s early advantage of finding an advanced alien starship swiftly matched by the Federation’s improving spacecraft and weapons technology, particularly in the field of AI where many of Blake’s victories are helped by his securing of the ORAC supercomputer. Memory and personality alteration through technology, drugs and brain implants abound. Blake’s 7 is notable for its mature exploration of such themes (as compared to its American contemporary, Star Wars, and its much more superficial and heroic struggles) and also its nihilism: in the final episode the much-reduced crew are betrayed and brutally gunned down by the enemy after their erstwhile leader, the cynical Avon, had effectively had a personality breakdown.

 

John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1975), arguably the first novel to fully embody the key themes of cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk’s Forgotten Visionary: John Brunner

In 1968, British SF author John Brunner published the first of three thematically-linked novels which would effectively set the stage for cyberpunk. The first of these novels is the best-known, Stand on Zanzibar, set in an overpopulated world which is threatened with ecological catastrophe by population pressure. Overpopulation is a key plot point in cyberpunk (often explaining the vast cities where the action tends to unfold), but beyond that Brunner engages with other ideas: a powerful supercomputer forms an important part of the plot, whilst television has become interactive, with viewers becoming part of the programme itself. Genetically-engineered bioweapons proliferate, and nightmarish supercorporations dominate the world.

The Sheep Look Up (1972) explores further the notion of the Earth becoming uninhabitable due to toxic waste, pollution and climate change. The declining quality of the environment sparks societal collapse and war. Attempts to regulate ecological damage are watered down for economic reasons. Ecological protestors turn to violence when their peaceful protests are ignored, eventually sparking a terrorist campaign against the US government. The "cyber" is missing from the argument, but the "punk" is very much present, and the novel's depiction of ecological catastrophe would become a familiar cyberpunk trope.

The third of the three works is The Shockwave Rider (1975), a novel which is less proto or early cyberpunk, but actually just proper cyberpunk. The book takes place in a near future dystopian city where the protagonist uses his computer hacking skills to escape detection and avoid pursuit. The term "worm," for a computer virus, was first coined in this novel. The book's story is pure cyberpunk, where the protagonist, Nick, is a computer programmer who becomes aware that an education program reported as educating children is in fact indoctrinating them to further the interests of the state (effectively a criminal oligarchy), as well as genetically-engineering children to their own ends. Nick rebels and goes up against the state in an escalating battle that ends with them trying to drop a nuke on him; his response is a powerful computer virus that exposes their schemes and plans and blows open the government's duplicity. The novel, unusually for Brunner and for a lot of cyberpunk, ends optimistically.

 

Judge Dredd (1977-present), a key satire of cyberpunk tropes told from the POV of the fascist enforcers of the corrupt government's laws.

The Anti-Cyberpunk

A strong early example of cyberpunk, or at least an example of anti-cyberpunk (or even a satire of the genre), is the British comic book character Judge Dredd. Debuting in the pages of the 2000AD anthology comic in 1977, Judge Dredd is a law enforcement officer on the streets of Mega-City One, a vast super-metropolis stretching along the Eastern Seaboard of the former United States. The Judges are judge, jury and sometimes executioner all in one, able to dispense summary justice to the half-billion inhabitants of the crowded streets of the city, sometimes getting it right and sometimes (in the case of some Judges, maybe almost always) getting it wrong. Dredd and his fellow Judges are, effectively, the fascist enforcers of a totalitarian, unelected state who are not above using corporations and their latest gizmos and entertainment products to keep the population quiescent. Revolutionary fervour intermittently burns but is expertly redirected by a form of ultra-local nationalism: people are extremely loyal to the mega-blocks they live in, and rather than directing violence against the police state which keeps them cooped up all day (the unemployment rate runs at something between 92% and 98%, due to robots, AI and automation running almost all services), they instead tend to declare war on neighbouring blocks, resulting in psychotic “block wars” which act as pressure valves on the city’s malcontents. Dredd is unusual in that he believes absolutely the propaganda of being an unwavering avatar of the law, sometimes leading to him siding with the people against their oft-corrupt rulers, but more often than not unquestioningly following their orders.

If Joe Dredd is not a cyberpunk protagonist, he at least illuminates cyberpunk themes, and in fact arguably has done so more consistently and more frequently than any other character: the comic and Dredd himself continue to run today, with the timeline advancing in realtime, so forty-four years have passed in the story and for the character. Dredd himself experiments with rebelling against the system, at one point betraying his fellow Judges to support a pro-democracy call for election…which formally elects for the oppressive status quo to continue. Judge Dredd’s relentless cynicism and satire makes for one of the most interesting explorations of the genre, if one that too many readers seem to take on face value as a mindless action story.

Ridley Scott's seminal 1982 film, Blade Runner, which gave cyberpunk both its key visual and musical identities.

Visualising the Genre

In 1982, two major works were released which had a profound impact on the nascent genre, particularly its visuals. Most notable was the film Blade Runner, a very loose adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Like the novel, the film features a bounty hunter named Deckard (here played by a taciturn Harrison Ford, keen to shed the wisecracking image of Han Solo and Indiana Jones) who is commissioned to track down a band of rogue androids. Unlike the novel, the action does not criss-cross the western United States, instead being restricted to just one location, Los Angeles in 2019. Blade Runner’s Los Angeles would become perhaps the most definitive visual take on a cyberpunk city ever: a sprawling urban landscape of endless industrial complexes surrounding a conglomeration of vast skyscrapers emblazoned with familiar logos, whilst the techno-pyramid of a monstrously powerful super-corporation squats menacingly above the poor masses just trying to get by on the streets.

The film’s status in cyberpunk is sometimes disputed. There’s nary a brain/AI interface in sight and if Deckard becomes a rebel against the system, it’s something of a reluctant one. But so much cyberpunk draws on Blade Runner’s aesthetics, and its central question of what it means to be human in the midst of so much existentially-overloading technology is so core to the genre, that such arguments feel forced. Blade Runner is almost the last word in the visual imagery – if only superficially – of cyberpunk. It also had a strong impact on the audio perception of the genre: Vangelis's synth-heavy soundtrack inextricably bound cyberpunk to the sound of synthesisers and any cyberpunk work which suggests that maybe people in the future won't be in love with a 1980s musical fad faces an uphill struggle gaining acceptance with some fans (particularly Cyberpunk 2077 and its apparently controversial idea that people might have a more eclectic and wide-ranging musical taste by the late 21st Century).

The other work would come from Japan. Katsuhiro Otomo had already been playing with cyberpunk forms in his debut manga, Fireball (1979-81). Set in a future city secretly ruled by the ATOM supercomputer though human proxies, the story follows a band of rebels who are trying to expose the truth and inspire a revolution. Otomo quickly realised that the setup was too simplistic and hurriedly wrapped the story up to explore another idea. This resulted in Domu (1980-81), a more contemporary story exploring the psychic link between an old man and a child. Although more satisfied by this story, Otomo realised that there was scope for a much, much more ambitious story combining the two elements into one.

On 6 December 1982, Otomo published the first issue of a new serial in Young Magazine. The story appeared under a very simple, short name: Akira.

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RIP Rutger Hauer

Dutch actor and writer Rutger Hauer has sadly passed away at the age of 74.

Born in Breukelen in the Netherlands in 1944 (when the country was still under Nazi occupation), Hauer grew up in Amsterdam. A restless teenager, he literally ran away to sea at the age of 15 and spent a year working on a freighter. He also served as a combat medic in the Netherlands army before taking acting lessons.

Hauer spent several years in an acting troupe where he caught the eye of renowned Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, who cast him as the lead role in the medieval drama series Floris (1969). Verhoeven was concerned about Hauer's lack of experience, but thought he looked good on a horse and wielding a sword, and the production saved some money because Hauer was eager to do all his own stunts.

Verhoeven and Hauer soon became a team, working together on Soldier of Orange (1977) and Spetters (1980). Hauer could speak English and made his debut in that language in The Wilby Conspiracy (1975), a film about apartheid in South Africa. The film was not successful, so he had to wait several years until he got his second chance at an English-speaking role, in Nighthawks (1981), where he appeared alongside Sylvester Stallone.

The following year, Hauer was cast by Ridley Scott in his science fiction film Blade Runner (1982). Hauer played the renegade android Roy Batty, the ostensible villain of the film, but his sympathetic performance contributed greatly to the character's ambiguity. For his death scene, Hauer took the existing dialogue and ad-libbed new material around it to create one of the most famous monologues in cinematic history.

Additional roles followed in Eureka (1983), The Osterman Weekend (1983), Flesh & Blood (1985, again with Verhoeven), Ladyhawke (1985) and The Hitcher (1986). Paul Verhoeven, who was also blowing up in Hollywood at this point, wanted Hauer for the title role in RoboCop (1987) but the role went instead to Peter Weller after it was discovered that Hauer couldn't fit inside the mechanical suit.

By the start of the 1990s, Hauer's career appeared to be in decline with less prominent Hollywood roles being offered. However, things picked up when he was picked to star in a long-running series of adverts for Guinness, which made him a familiar face on television. He secured the role of the villain in the original movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), where he was extensively praised by scriptwriter Joss Whedon for his professionalism and conduct on set (in stark contrast to co-star Donald Sutherland). In 1994 he played the lead role in HBO's adaptation of Robert Harris' alternate-history novel Fatherland, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe.

By the 2000s, Hauer had become a cult favourite, especially for his appearances in science fiction and fantasy projects. He was cast in roles on television series such as Smallville, Alias and Merlin. He also appeared in the lead role of Hobo with a Shotgun (2011) and guest-starred in the sixth season of True Blood (2013). In 2015 he appeared in the opening episode of The Last Kingdom.

Hauer passed away on 19 July 2019 - the same year that Blade Runner takes place in, coincidentally - after a short illness. An intense, versatile and memorable actor with many great appearances, he will be missed.

BLADE RUNNER TV series in development

A Hollywood gossip column has suggested that a Blade Runner TV series is currently in the works, although it lists no studio or creative talent as being involved.

According to the column, the producers of Blade Runner 2049 were disappointed by the film's poor box office performance, but were buoyed by the blanket critical acclaim so are moving ahead with a continuation on the small screen, apparently focused on the characters of Deckard, Ana Stelline and K escaping the situation at the end of 2049.

The creative team behind Blade Runner 2049 are unlikely to return: Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford will be too expensive and director Denis Villeneuve is currently prepping his two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune.

With no creative talent or studio attached and the movie not being a huge success financially, I think this project sounds very unlikely to come off, but you never know.

SF&F Questions: What is Tannhauser Gate?

In the first of an occasional series, we address long-standing questions and mysteries from different science fiction and fantasy franchises. First up is a long-standing question from Ridley Scott's 1982 proto-cyberpunk movie Blade Runner.

What is Tannhauser Gate?
At the end of Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer's character, Roy Batty, saves our antihero Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) from certain death, despite Deckard trying to kill him. Batty realises he is about to die, his mandated four-year life-cycle about to expire, and chooses to end his life with a moment of mercy. Before he passes he gives a memorable speech about the nature of death:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

As is well-known, Hauer improvised these lines on set on the day of filming, with Ridley Scott's approval. As is less well-known, Hauer didn't actually create them from scratch: instead he adapted lines from the original script which he felt were quite clunky. The shooting script (the draft dated 23 February 1981) is similar:

I've seen things...
(long pause)
seen things you little people
wouldn't believe... Attack ships
on fire off the shoulder of Orion
bright as magnesium... I rode on
the back decks of a blinker and
watched c-beams glitter in the dark
near the Tanhauser Gate.
(pause)
all those moments... they'll be gone.

More than one person has wondered what the heck the Tannhauser Gate is since then. It's been referenced by bands and in songs, and the iconic video game Homeworld has a mission set in a region of space called "Tannhauser Gate" in tribute to Blade Runner.

The Blade Runner script was originally written by Hampton Fancher, based on Philip K. Dick's short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Fancher's original drafts do not feature any mention of Tannhauser Gate. This was added in rewrites undertaken by David Peoples. Fancher, annoyed, left the project but later returned at Scott's request to undertake rewrites of Peoples' rewrites. He later co-wrote Blade Runner 2049 along with Michael Green (David Peoples, who has effectively retired, was not involved with the sequel).

David Peoples, then, is the one who came up with the term. Intriguingly, he reused it in his script for the 1998 action movie Soldier, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Peoples hit on the idea of Soldier being set in the same universe as Blade Runner, with Kurt Russell playing a soldier fighting on one of the offworld colonies (Arcadia 234) who is made redundant by a replicant soldier. Although Warner Brothers produced both movies and a Spinner (flying car) from Blade Runner can be seen in some scenes in Soldier, the term "replicant" was removed from the script and the idea of the two movies coexisting in the same setting was restricted to some comments made by Peoples during marketing for the movie.

This decision also saw references to Tannhauser Gate and even a special effects recreation of the "Battle of Tannhauser Gate" cut and removed to the special features section of the DVD release. This sequence indicated that Tannhauster Gate was a "warp station", a space station which facilitates FTL travel between Earth and its out-system colonies.

It had been assumed, given the near-future setting of Blade Runner, that the "off-world colonies" were other worlds in the Solar system: Mars, Europa, Titan etc. However, Blade Runner 2049 confirms that the off-world colonies are actually around other stars. Wallace says that the extended lifespans of the Nexus-8 replicants has opened up nine new colony worlds for humanity and the planet Calantha is mentioned as the site of a major war.

As a result, it now appears we have an answer to the question from the person who invented the original term, although the answer is not necessarily canonical for future instalments of the Blade Runner series.

Answer: Tannhauser Gate is a "warp station" which facilitates faster-than-light travel between Earth and some of the offworld colonies.

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On the Edge of Blade Runner

Back in 2000, British film critic Mark Kermode made a BBC documentary called On the Edge of Blade Runner, in which he investigated the cultural impact of the movie and its torturous filming process. Harrison Ford and Sean Young declined to take part, but director Ridley Scott, the writers, producers and most of the rest of the cast participate, for an insightful look at what was a very difficult movie to make. You can watch the whole thing below:

On the Edge of Blade Runner from Ace Iver Punc on Vimeo.

Blade Runner 2049

California, 2049. Blade Runner "K" retires an old-model replicant who is pursuing a life of peace on a remote farm. In the process he unearths a secret, something that has remained buried since before the epoch-changing event known as The Blackout. Charged by his superiors with investigating this mystery, he follows a trail that leads him from the tech-canyons of Los Angeles to the dumps of San Diego to the radioactive wastes of Las Vegas. It's also a journey into his own heart and forces him to confront the question of who he is, and what it is he lives for.

Blade Runner 2049 is a movie that should not work. Blade Runner - a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - was a movie rooted in ambiguity, in which far more was left unsaid than spoken out loud and where the still-astonishing visuals masked a strong vein of character and thematic subtlety. The film's ending seems to explicitly reject further exploration of that world, and three disappointing sequel novels (by K.W. Jeter, a friend of Philip K. Dick's and fellow traveller in SF dystopian fiction) only reinforced that idea. The announcement that Ridley Scott was helming a sequel to do to Blade Runner what Prometheus did to Alien was enough to make movie fans break out in a cold sweat, only moderately alleviated when Scott bailed and a director no-one had heard of was announced in his stead.

That director, Denis Villeneuve, had already some intriguing form in movies like Sicario, but it was last year's Arrival that made people really sit up and take notice. A beautifully-shot movie with a pace that was relaxed but intense, stand-out performances and a phenomenal sense of atmosphere, Arrival was a stand-out work, a piece of art that also worked as a strong science fiction piece. And Blade Runner 2049 is the same, but even moreso. It is a virtuoso triumph that on absolutely no level should work, but on almost every level it does.

Blade Runner took us deep into the streets of a future (and now - in two notable moments - explicitly alternate history) Los Angeles, with neon-lit grime and rain-soaked futurism. Blade Runner 2049 revisits the city - which is now larger, even more imposing and less human - but relatively briefly. Instead we spend a lot of time on the outskirts of the city, in the grey-soiled remnants of California, in a San Diego turned into an vast industrial wasteland and a Las Vegas slowly being swallowed by the desert. When you think of Blade Runner you think of those towering tech-pyramids, and for Villeneuve to minimise that imagery in the movie's sequel is a brave move, but one that exemplifies his goal with this film: to craft a successor to Blade Runner, not a retread. And it's a successor on every level, with the core question of the original movie, what does it mean to be human, taken to an even higher and more ambiguous level.

Blade Runner 2049 very quickly identifies its protagonist as a replicant and one who seems to be relatively content with his lot, complete with an AI girlfriend and a good working relationship with his boss, but a few key moments of revelation see him going down a path of self-discovery that is a reflection of Rachael (and Deckard if you subscribe to that theory, a theory that this movie cheerfully does nothing to confirm or deny) in the first film. What are the replicants? Unthinking, soulless machines or a new type of human, one that is stronger, faster and smarter than the originals? Is using them a slaves even remotely morally justifiable? The fact that human civilisation on Earth and in the offworld colonies would collapse without them makes it very easy for the "real" humans to ignore the question, and the introduction of a new breed of replicant that is 100% loyal and obedient seems to render the question moot. Enslaving a race that seems to have no qualms about being enslaved makes it easy to pretend it's not slavery at all. At least, until one very small secret is learned and turns the entire world on its head.

Blade Runner 2049 understands that the simplicity of the original Blade Runner was a key part of its success: the plot was pretty bare bones and the sequel follows suit, the main plot being a simple (ish) missing persons case. But K's following of the clues becomes unexpectedly harrowing, revealing greater depths to this world and the existence of his own kind. Villeneuve and writers Hampton Fancher and Michael Green have taken the set-up from the first movie and extrapolated a storyline that follows it up perfectly, without damaging the integrity of the first movie in any way. The film even pays homage to some of the futuristic dystopian movies that have come in its way, with several brief nods to the numerous anime (but most famously Akira and Ghost in the Shell) that have borrowed the original Blade Runner's visual stylings. The film also gives us the weirdest love scene since Ghost, although one that is also altogether healthier and more positive than the original movie's rather debatable relationship between Rachael and Deckard.

This film works tremendously well. The cast is excellent, Ryan Gosling in particular doing a lot of work with his eyes and his reactions to the revelations he encounters. Robin Wright as his boss is perfect, the steely resolve we've come to expect of her mixed with several unexpected, and all the more effective, moments of real human vulnerability. Sylvia Hoeks as replicant enforcer Luv is terrifying, blank-eyed and emotionless when carrying out violence, but she also occasionally shows what she really thinks of what's going on through flashes of honest emotion. Jared Leto is okay as new tech-king Wallace, but he does get the lion's share of ripe dialogue in the film. He's only in two scenes of consequence and they're both the more interminable scenes of the movie. The film's biggest revelation is Ana de Armas, a young Cuban actress who is given a very difficult role as Joi and carries the role with charisma, sweetness and resolve (even if her storyline may make fans of the animated series Archer do a double take).

Harrison Ford shows up again as Deckard and is perfectly fine, showing charisma and cynical humour in his role. This is actually a bit distracting - Deckard was very much an un-Harrison Ford-ish role, reserved and cold and undemonstrative compared to Indiana Jones or Han Solo - since Ford plays the older Deckard more as a subdued version of Han Solo in The Force Awakens. I enjoyed his performance, but I didn't really believe I was seeing the same Deckard as in Blade Runner, just thirty years older. This would be a bigger blow to the film if Ford was actually in it for any substantial amount of time, or if his role was integral to the movie. Although Ford's presence allows for some excellent moments of reflection and soul-searching (including what may be the greatest special effect in film history, to the point where I eagerly await learning how the hell they did it), the same story could easily have been told without him.

Another negative is the score. It's certainly not bad, but it lacks a theme as memorable as anything in Arrival. Johan Johansson began composing this movie but was ousted in favour of Hans Zimmer, who then hands in a completely unmemorable Johan Johansson cover work, which is one of the more bizarre scoring decisions I've seen in recent years. I appreciate that no-one was trying to out-Vangelis Vangelis, but the decision to go in a different, more traditional direction and then make a hash of it is disappointing.

Blade Runner 2049 (*****) does the impossible: it crafts a sequel, a successor and a subversion which respects the original whilst not being afraid to be different from it, that knows what made the original film work without slavishly copying it and which raises many of the same questions in a different way. The combination of story and visuals has profound thematic and character consequences which will drive as much discussion about this story as it did the original, as will the somewhat open ending. If this film does well expect a third trip to the Blade Runner universe, and we'll probably not have to wait another thirty-five years for it. Part of me hopes the movie doesn't do well: the story wraps up well enough and the only place the story can go in a third film is a very familiar one.

Blade Runner 2049 is on general release now. Villeneuve's next movie will be the holy grail of SFF adaptations, Dune. Right now, I think he can actually do it justice.

Wertzone Classics: Blade Runner

Los Angeles, 2019. The Earth is grimy and grim, covered with vast cities of towering skyscrapers. Most animal life has been wiped out, replaced by expensive synthetic counterfeits. Counterfeit humans - replicants - also exist, carrying out dangerous, dirty work in the offworld colonies. For security their lifespans are limited to just four years. Four replicants have come back home, seeking to extend their lives. A replicant-hunter, a blade runner, is sent to stop them.

Blade Runner was released in 1982, a movie by Ridley Scott based (loosely) on Philip K. Dick's short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film had an initially mixed critical reception, but this improved with the release of the 1991 Director's Cut, which restored a subplot raising the question of if the central character of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is himself a replicant. This cut also removed a series of unnecessary voiceovers and a studio-mandated "happy ending" that Scott had hated. In 2007 this version was superseded by the Final Cut edition, which restores some more scenes and tweaks others whilst completely digitally remastering the film in proper high definition (with eye-popping results).

The power of Blade Runner does not lie in its story - which is slight - but in its visuals, atmosphere and in its thematic exploration of the nature of what it is to be human. The replicants appear to be intelligent, sentient and capable of emotion, so the decision to use them as slaves is morally dubious; on the other hand they are also capricious, child-like and do not have an innate value for human life, killing those who oppose them with ease and ruthlessness. Deckard starts the film as a man of apparent moral certainty, willing to execute replicants. His meeting and association with Rachael, a cutting-edge replicant with much more human characteristics, raises doubts in him about his certainty that the replicants are soulless machines that need to be put down.

This is mirrored in the story of Sebastian (William Sanderson), who has a terminal disease and is spending his dying days creating new replicant technology for the Tyrell Corporation. This gives him tremendous empathy with the replicants, who are likewise doomed to die far before their time, and explains why he wants to help them (a decision he later comes to regret). This storyline is not as explored in as much depth in the novel - where a character named Isidore plays the same function and has a bigger role - but it does give some humanity to the replicants.

These themes of using artificial life to question what it means to be human would be revisited just a few years later in the character of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but much more powerfully in the 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica (which also inherits Edward James Olmos as an actor and the term "skinjobs" for its replicant-like artificial lifeforms).

The movie's most enduring quality is its startling visuals: the vast, towering blocks of Los Angeles, the flames roaring into the sky from towers, police cars flying in front of colossal advertising hoardings. Disregarding realism (even in 1982, the idea of earthquake-prone Los Angeles looking like this just thirty-seven years later was a stretch), these visuals have lost none of their power and have even gained new power through their high definition remastering. Backed by Vangelis' haunting score, the sweeping effects shots of the city remain powerful and arresting in a way that the disposable CG cityscapes of modern SF movies cannot match. But beyond the effects footage is the minimalist way Scott shoots his futuristic, dystopian city, with dusty offices, bustling street markets and sparse apartments all looking amazing.

Performances are stripped-back, honest and raw: Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer all give career-best performances, whilst Edward James Olmos does a huge amount with a small amount of screen time. The film is sparsely-written, sparing with dialogue but making sure almost every conversation is important and memorable. This culminates in the movie's ambiguous and much-debated final confrontation between Deckard and Batty (Rutger Hauer), and Batty's soliloquy on his impending death and the loss of his memories, although he tries to impart some of these to Deckard through his "tears in the rain" speech.

For those who like their movies to be clear and unambiguous, Blade Runner will likely frustrate. This is a film designed to raise questions, engage in philosophical debates and have viewers revel in its slow-burn atmosphere and visuals. There are action sequences, but they are awkward, ugly and brutal rather than visceral and exciting. The so-called love story element is strange and questionable. The ending is ambiguous and, for some viewers, abrupt. But it's also a supremely assured film that is confident in its own ambition and executes it perfectly.

Blade Runner (*****) is strange, haunting and utterly compelling. There are numerous versions available, but arguably the Final Cut - DVD (US,UK), Blu-Ray (US, UK) - is the strongest, representing the director's clearest vision of the story.

A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, will be released on 5 October 2017 in the UK and a day later in the US. There are also three sequels in book form, written by K.W. Jeter, but these have been superseded by the new film.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 trailer released

A new trailer has been released for Blade Runner 2049, the upcoming sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner.

Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), will be released on 6 October this year.

Trailer for BLADE RUNNER 2049

Warner Brothers have released the first trailer for their upcoming Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049.

The new film is set thirty years after the original Blade Runner (released in 1982) and will see Harrison Ford return to the role of Rick Deckard, a "blade runner", a cop who tracks down and exposes replicants, genetically-engineered entities with pre-programmed memories who are designed to pass as human. Ryan Gosling is playing a new character, a Los Angeles cop named "K" who has to track down the missing Deckard. Robin Wright and Jared Leto will also star.

Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Arrival) is directing from a script by original Blade Runner co-writer Hampton Fancher and Gotham and Heroes scriptwriter Michael Green. Acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins (The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall) is also on board. Johann Johannsson (Arrival) will be scoring the film.

The need or necessity for a Blade Runner sequel has been fiercely debated by fans over the years. However, the decision by Ridley Scott to step back to only produce the movie and hire Denis Villeneuve as director instead has raised interest in the sequel, due to the latter's excellent work on Arrival.

The appearance of Harrison Ford in an aged state has caused confusion in some quarters, as repeated public statements and interviews with Ridley Scott over the years have confirmed that Deckard is a replicant and thus should either be dead or un-aged. However, the original film itself did not confirm this, only heavily indicated it (with cop Gaff revealing he knows what Deckard has been dreaming about, which would only be possible if he could access Deckard's memories, which can only be done to replicants). It is possible that Scott's view has been altered by the need for a sequel storyline, or that Deckard is some advanced form of replicant capable of ageing.

Blade Runner 2049 will be released on 6 October 2017.

New BLADE RUNNER movie in the works

A new Blade Runner movie is in the works. The good news is that it's not a remake, but will be either a sequel or prequel to the original 1982 movie.


The reason for the indecision is that the production company who have picked up the rights don't have a specific story in mind, but feel that with modern technology they can realise Philip K. Dick's world on-screen in a fresh and interesting way, and are talking to producers and directors about ideas. They even disclose (whilst admitting that it likely won't happen) that they'd kill to get Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott involved in some fashion.

Colour me sceptical. Another story set in the same world of replicants yet unrelated to the original film could work, but a direct sequel or prequel to Blade Runner - a movie where so much of its power is based on its ambiguity and question-raising ending - seems unnecessary and redundant. Interesting to see what becomes of this project.