Nowadays there are so many trailers, teaser trailers, and Instagram teasers for teaser trailers that the truly memorable ones can become lost in time, like tears in the rain. Thankfully such was not the case with the first peek at Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Titled Blade Runner 2049, the film’s first trailer manages to evoke the ethereal cyberpunk mystery of the original through meticulous design and the jaw-dropping cinematography of Villeneuve’s Sicario collaborator Roger Deakins. But exactly how faithful is Blade Runner 2049 to its source material? The folks at IMDb took it upon themselves to find out by presenting the trailer for Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 side-by-side, allowing viewers to see just how closely the sequel hews to its predecessor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrNijjU-2IE&feature=youtu.be
One would like to chalk it up to coincidence that the two trailers share so much creative DNA in common, but this is clearly an intentional bit of parallelism. Villeneuve and Deakins have managed to make Blade Runner 2049‘s visual aesthetic simultaneously feel like a modern sci-fi epic while echoing the iconic images put forth by Ridley Scott and his cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, back in 1982. Whether or not the storytelling of Blade Runner 2049 matches its predecessor remains to be seen, but this is certainly an auspicious beginning.
Blade Runner 2049–which stars Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, and Jared Leto—hits theaters on October 6, 2017.
What do you think of this shot-for-shot comparison? What do you think will happen in the sequel? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Image: 20th Century Fox/IMDb
Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious).
