The veteran director’s 1982 future noir left enough unanswered questions to spawn a sequel. But do we really need multiple movies to find out whether Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard is a replicant?

When Ridley Scott announced plans to return to the Alien saga (with what eventually turned out to be his thrilling but bamboozling space thriller Prometheus) five years ago, the internet was pretty receptive to the idea. After all, Twentieth Century Fox had squeezed every last drop of acid blood from the waning franchise via a series of progressively weaker sequels (not counting James Cameron’s excellent Aliens) before topping off the misery with a brace of utterly pointless Alien vs Predator movies. What more could possibly go wrong, especially with Scott returning to the genre that made him famous for the first time in 30 years?

Ridley Scott: Ryan Gosling will 'probably' lead Blade Runner sequel Read more

Now that the veteran film-maker has informed us we’ll have to sit through up to three further movies before finally getting to see how and why the homo sapiens-like Engineers created the nightmarish Xenomorphs – and hopefully some indication as to what they were doing apparently giving life to humanity, please – I wonder if feelings might have changed. But still, the forthcoming Alien: Paradise Lost has the distinct advantage of arriving at a time when the veteran film-maker’s star is on the rise once again, thanks to critical acclaim for new space thriller The Martian, and even more importantly will not this time feature a screenplay by Damon “plot hole” Lindelof.

Blade Runner, though, should surely be a different kettle of electric fish. Granted, we already know that a belated sequel, starring a returning Harrison Ford alongside newcomer Ryan Gosling in an unspecified role, is headed to multiplexes. But there’s something about the 1982 film’s untouchable, crystallised status as a brooding, pathos-drenched vision of stark future existence that makes the very concept of stretching it out into a fully-fledged franchise strangely inconceivable.

And yet Scott, according to a new interview, clearly does now see franchise potential in his beloved dystopian noir about a bounty hunter charged with bringing down a gang of escaped artificial humanoids named replicants. “Everyone else is, so why not? I love to work,” he told Yahoo! cheerfully when asked this week if Blade Runner might follow Alien and Prometheus into multiple-movie territory. “The French say, ‘Work to live,’ and I live to work. I’m very lucky to have a job that I adore.”

Blade Runner: The Final Cut review – a timeless sci-fi classic Read more

Even though its 30-year absence has done nothing to damage its predecessor’s ever-expanding reputation – likewise, the joy of rewatching the original film is hardly diminished by its open-ended denouement – Blade Runner leaves enough important questions unanswered that most fans of the original will at least be intrigued by the prospect of a sequel. But I suspect interest might rather be running on empty by the time Blade Runner 7 rolls around.

All of a sudden we’re looking at the Hampton Fancher-scripted, Denis Villeneuve-directed sequel as a prism for continued exploration of the original film’s main themes – the nature of humanity, the transience of sentient existence, the paradox of living in a time with vastly improved technology but ravaged natural resources – rather than a simple vessel to offer resolution to all those who just wanted to know if Ford’s Rick Deckard really was a replicant – and what that might mean. In fact, Scott, who in fairness has been clear on this issue for some time, volunteers: “Of course he’s a bloody replicant! He’s going to have to admit it” in his Yahoo! interview.

Tears in rain? Why Blade Runner is timeless Read more

Scott also told Den of Geek this week that Gosling would be the central character in Blade Runner 2, with Ford “definitely in it. In an important way”. The film-maker told Yahoo! the franchise would then be handed over to Gosling, who will presumably hunt Deckard in the sequel and take over his main role as chief Blade Runner in future films.

In fairness, the Canadian actor has the perfect air of inscrutable, insouciant cool to light up the dizzying, hypnagogic future noir backdrop created by Scott in 1982. But I’m still not entirely sure I want to see him hunting replicants every two years for the next decade, especially as future instalments might not always benefit from such an accomplished film-making team as Fancher and Villeneuve. We’ll never lose Blade Runner’s brilliance, no matter how many more movies are made, but there might be more than a few tears shed in rain if part two turns out to be the first of endless Terminator-like follow-ups.