Blade Runner Costume Design (2020)

I always remember Rachel with it first dress. I almost forgotted the fur coat.

One aspect of it is that the sci-fi future is not really a future in general, it's a future how it was imagined at the time. In the 80s we had maximalist fashion - bright colors, shoulder pads, big hair. So the future from that time looked even more so like that.

If we look at the future as imagined in the 40s and 50s we might laugh at the silly looking robots. We'd never put robots like in a current sci-fi movie, unless as a joke. But, at the time they were not made for laughs, people thought that's what robots would really look like.

An even deeper part of this is that the future from 80s from movies that became popular also adds to how we might see the future now. Aethetics from popular movies are immortalized. Like say, you're lamenting why doesn't current sci-fi look like Blade Runner, but imagine if Blade Runner had terrible characters and bad acting. You wouldn't want that aesthetic in sci movies today. It would be associated with crap.

A beautiful sentiment you observed, thank you. Bringing life back to what no one else values.

While that's true to some extent, as I noted in my sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46775053), it's partly because 2049 lives in a world where, for over 30 years, most other sci-fi visions of urban environments were strongly influenced by OG Blade Runner. It's hard to appreciate how much the 1982 original visually impacted everything that came after.

Denis Villeneuve faced an almost impossible challenge in balancing faithfulness to the original production design while evolving the original's vision of 2019 forward 30 years to its own related but visually distinct descendant. Almost every visual choice risked either being "nearly a copy of the original" or "hardly related to the original".

I'm a huge fan of the original - so much so, in 1992 I bought a plane ticket to fly across the country for one evening just to see the limited run of the original "lost workprint" in Westwood. In 2017, I was so concerned any attempt at a sequel to such a seminal classic was doomed to fail that I didn't even go see 2049 until I heard reviews from fans I trust. I mean, for decades "Blade Runner Sequel" was a project no competent director would ever consider touching. I assumed anyone who would take the job was either incredibly arrogant, greedy or stupid. But Denis didn't need Blade Runner, being a huge fan, he wanted it.

I was pleasantly surprised that, given the near-impossible task, 2049 was a reasonable success on its own terms. Despite the limited budget, Denis managed to not only avoid tarnishing a classic, he did it credit by not camping on its coattails. And Roger Deacon's cinematography definitely deserved the Oscar he won. My only regret on 2049 is that Denis didn't get the budget he wanted. Another $5M and three weeks shooting would have gone a long way. But, like the original 2049 is remarkable, in part, because it's as good as it is despite being starved of adequate resources.