I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: Skyscrapers engulfed in a sickly yellow haze; Elvis Presley performing on the stage of a decadent art-deco nightclub; water rippling across the windows of a flying car, only to vanish—like tears in rain.

And I’ve seen the original blade runner himself set off running again … and again … and again.

It’s a fall morning in 2016, and on a cavernous soundstage in Budapest, Harrison Ford—wearing a gray button-down shirt, dark jeans, and a Ford-tough grimace—is shooting a crucial encounter in Blade Runner 2049. For the first time in more than three decades, Ford is reprising his role as Rick Deckard, the piano-plinking, hard-drinking cop from Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. The 75-year-old actor has endured several on-the-job injuries over the years—this is a guy who had a chunk of the Millennium Falcon fall on his leg—but he shows little sign of wear as he sprints through Deckard’s almost tomblike condo, shoulders pumping vigorously and a wolfish dog galloping by his side. In today’s scene, Deckard is being pursued by a special agent named K (Ryan Gosling), who bursts methodically—perhaps even robotically?—through Deckard’s marble wall like a slimmer, grimmer Kool-Aid Man. But every time Gosling smashes into the room, it terrifies the pooch, who scrambles out of frame before Denis Villeneuve, the film’s 49-year-old French-­Canadian director, can call, “Cut!”

Why K doesn’t just use the front door isn’t exactly clear, as the plot of Blade Runner 2049 is guarded with the kind of intensity usually reserved for Star Wars reshoots. (Even negotiating to get onto the set required more back-and-forth than a Voight-Kampff test. I’m told I’m the only US journalist who passed.) Still, there are a few confirmed details: Thirty years after audiences left Deckard bruised and battered in 2019 Los Angeles, he has disappeared, and Gosling’s LAPD officer is on the hunt (possibly at the behest of his boss, played by Robin Wright, though no one involved with the movie will say for sure). Meanwhile, there’s a new breed of replicants—the series’ term for androids—being built by a mysterious inventor named Wallace (Jared Leto), who’s aided by a devoted employee, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks). That’s pretty much all the 2049 team will tell me, no matter how politely I ask. “I’m not even sure I’m allowed to say I had a good time making it,” Gosling jokes.

As Ford dashes repeatedly across the set and Gosling continues smashing through the wall, Villeneuve stands outside of the faux condo, his short gray-black hair looking early-­morning ­tousled. When Villeneuve is satisfied with a shot, he tends to repeat his words, patternlike, in a rich Quebecois accent. (“When you hear three deeeplys—‘I deeeply, deeeply, deeeply love it’—you know you’re in the sweet spot,” Gosling says.) After the dog finally gets the timing right, Villeneuve puts his hands in his pockets and nods happily: “Greatgreatgreatgreatgreat.”

Though the director’s demeanor is calm—when he’s not talking quietly to the actors, he’s chewing gum and stoically stroking his beard—the wall-breaking moment is one he’s been worried about for a while now. He doesn’t want his 2049 action sequences to be too noisy or audacious or, as he puts it, “too Marvel.” Instead, he says, “I want to bring them down as close as possible to the original Blade Runner: more simple, more brutal.” Which would make sense if the first film had been a hit and moviegoers had flocked to its chilly (and, yes, brutal) vision of a not-too-far-off future ravaged by ecological disaster and corporate corruption. But they didn’t, and even after the subsequent decades of mainstream discovery, critical reassessment, and massive cultural influence, Blade Runner 2049 remains the rarest of Hollywood propositions: an R-rated, $150 million sequel to a movie that not a lot of people liked (or even fully understood) when it first came out.

What makes this all the more difficult to compute is that 2049—35 years in the making and arriving in theaters this month—promises an even darker vision of the future than the original, amping up the dystopic futurism-funk that bombed with moviegoers and critics back in 1982. If it took audiences years to connect with the future depicted in the original Blade Runner, how will they respond to Villeneuve’s version of how things are going to get even worse?