‘Blade Runner 2099’ Shows the ‘Silver Linings’ of a Replicant Takeover

Title: ‘Blade Runner 2099’ Shows the ‘Silver Linings’ of a Replicant Takeover

Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner casts a long shadow. In some ways, literally. It defined what noir sci-fi would look like for years to come: the rain, the dramatic lighting, the trenchcoats. Denis Villeneuve delivered a worthy sequel in 2017 with Blade Runner 2049, but for some fans nothing will ever touch the original.

雷德利·斯科特 1982 年的电影《银翼杀手》影响深远，在某些方面甚至可以说是字面意义上的笼罩。它定义了未来多年黑色科幻电影的视觉风格：雨水、戏剧性的灯光和风衣。丹尼斯·维伦纽瓦在 2017 年推出了续作《银翼杀手 2049》，表现不俗，但对于一些影迷来说，没有任何作品能超越原作。

Silka Luisa tries not to think about these things. “If I didn’t love Blade Runner this would’ve been way too hard,” the showrunner of Prime Video’s limited series Blade Runner 2099 said Wednesday during the WIRED World Fair event in Miami.

西尔卡·路易莎（Silka Luisa）尽量不去想这些。“如果我不热爱《银翼杀手》，这工作会变得极其困难，”这位亚马逊 Prime Video 迷你剧《银翼杀手 2099》的剧集主管周三在迈阿密举行的 WIRED 世界博览会上说道。

Luisa’s show differs quite a bit from its forebears. It still has the humanoids known as replicants, but in 2099’s future, they’re the ones calling the shots, giving humans the grunt work they used to do. Set 80 years after Blade Runner and 50 years after 2049, it focuses on a replicant Blade Runner, Olwen (Michelle Yeoh), on the search for rogue agents. Along the way she gets teamed up with Cora, played by Hunter Schafer, a human pretending to be a replicant to survive. (We’d say more, but the show doesn’t premiere until November 25, and, you know, spoilers.)

路易莎的剧集与前作有很大不同。剧中依然存在被称为“复制人”的人形生物，但在 2099 年的未来，他们成为了掌权者，让人类去做他们曾经做过的苦力活。故事设定在《银翼杀手》80 年后、《银翼杀手 2049》50 年后，聚焦于一名寻找流亡特工的复制人银翼杀手奥尔文（杨紫琼饰）。在此过程中，她与亨特·莎弗（Hunter Schafer）饰演的科拉组队，后者是一名为了生存而伪装成复制人的人类。（我们本可以透露更多，但该剧要到 11 月 25 日才首播，而且，你知道的，剧透不好。）

If this vision of dystopia sounds too familiar for comfort, Luisa hears you. When asked about how she chose to tackle the franchise, she noted that in the last couple of decades, “the present caught up to the films” as megacorporations and environmental collapse became realities in ways they weren’t in 1982. The point of her Blade Runner is to show what happens in a post-revolution world and “not focus on the fears we’re living with right now.”

如果这种反乌托邦的愿景听起来让人感到不安的熟悉，路易莎表示她理解。当被问及如何处理这个系列时，她指出在过去的几十年里，“现实已经赶上了电影”，巨型企业和环境崩溃在 1982 年时还未成为现实，如今却已成真。她执导的《银翼杀手》旨在展示革命后的世界会发生什么，而不是“聚焦于我们当下所处的恐惧”。

That doesn’t mean that Blade Runner 2099 is entirely a dystopian tale. For Luisa, it’s about showing the “silver linings” of a world run by replicants. To do that, she picks up on some of the environmental themes touched on in Villeneuve’s movie, which showed how Earth had been wrecked by human activity. Blade Runner 2099 depicts a world that replicants are trying to bring back from the brink of ecological collapse using the skills they gained when they were working for humans. “They’re able to rehabilitate the planet,” Luisa says.

这并不意味着《银翼杀手 2099》完全是一个反乌托邦故事。对路易莎来说，重点在于展示一个由复制人统治的世界中的“一线希望”。为了做到这一点，她延续了维伦纽瓦电影中涉及的一些环境主题，即地球如何被人类活动破坏。《银翼杀手 2099》描绘了一个世界，复制人正试图利用他们为人类工作时获得的技能，将地球从生态崩溃的边缘拉回来。“他们有能力修复这个星球，”路易莎说。

Blade Runner 2099 also gave Schafer a chance to flex some action-hero muscles—something she’d never done before and something her costar, Yeoh, has been doing for decades. Schafer jumped right in, running and diving across the screen from the pilot onward. For the fight scenes, though, she got some help from Yeoh.

《银翼杀手 2099》也让莎弗有机会展现动作英雄的一面——这是她从未尝试过的，而她的搭档杨紫琼已经做了几十年。莎弗从试播集开始就全身心投入，在屏幕上奔跑和跳跃。不过，在打斗场面上，她得到了杨紫琼的帮助。

“It was really physically demanding,” Schafer said during WIRED’s conference. “I felt so lucky to have Michelle Yeoh, who is the fucking master, as a scene partner.”

“这在体力上要求非常高，”莎弗在 WIRED 会议上说。“我感到非常幸运能有杨紫琼作为搭档，她简直是大师级的人物。”

But back to that shadow cast by Scott’s original adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In addition to being a sci-fi classic, it also created a whole new template for what dystopian fiction could look like. It broods.

回到斯科特改编自菲利普·K·迪克小说《仿生人会梦见电子羊吗？》的原作所投下的阴影。除了作为一部科幻经典，它还为反乌托邦小说创造了一个全新的模板。它充满忧郁。

Luisa insists there’s a little more hope in hers—and hopes audiences see that, too. She also wants audiences to know that replicants aren’t the same as the AI bots humans are fixated on in 2026. “They’re more akin to us,” she said. “AI, I just don’t have that same sympathy for.” Hear that, Claude?

路易莎坚持认为她的作品中多了一丝希望，也希望观众能看到这一点。她还想让观众知道，复制人与人类在 2026 年所痴迷的 AI 机器人并不相同。“他们更像我们，”她说。“对于 AI，我实在无法产生同样的同情心。”听到了吗，Claude？