‘Blade Runner 2049’ Teaser Trailer: This Time Harrison Ford Gets To Be Luke Skywalker

The first teaser trailer for Blade Runner 2049 captures the atmosphere of the 1982 classic. The Blade Runner future kinda sucks, with dark skies, brutal architecture and ominous machines. Despite all the people scurrying about, the cities of Blade Runner ’s future are inhuman places.

Blade Runner 2049 nailed that much.

But this first teaser trailer is all tone poem. And we already knew director Denis Villeneuve can give us arresting images. Arrival was proof enough of that. Teamed with legendary director of photography Roger Deakins, there’s just no way Blade Runner 2049 can go wrong from an aesthetic standpoint.

But what about the plot? So far all we’ve seen is Ryan Gosling walking around some arresting locations. The plot synopsis gives us more of a sense of what’s in store:

“Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.”

Uh, so that sounds identical to the plot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens , right? This time it’s Harrison Ford who’s been missing instead of Luke Skywalker. Still, the amount of time he appears in the trailer suggests Rick Deckard will have more to do in Blade Runner 2049 than Luke Skywalker did in The Force Awakens .

That Hampton Fancher, the original Blade Runner writer, has returned to co-write the screenplay is (hopefully) a good sign that Blade Runner 2049 will be more than just an aesthetic tribute to Blade Runner in the standard action-adventure mold. But while this first teaser trailer is arresting enough to allay some of our fears, it won’t be until Blade Runner 2049 is out in theaters on Oct. 6, 2017 that we’ll learn whether or not one of the most landmark sci-fi films in history has been besmirched or enriched.