Just this past Fall, Titan Comics took fans of the Blade Runner movie franchise into their past and future with the comic book series Blade Runner 2019(review here at borg). Both the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and prequel to Blade Runner 2049, the series introduced a new Blade Runner, a female engineered cyborg named Ash. Beginning next week readers will find Ash ten years later in the pages of Blade Runner 2029. With the ghosts of the Tyrell corporation always in the shadows, Ashina has a new mission, a personal one, and she decides to seek a lost target from her past.
Check out our sneak preview of artwork from Issue #1 of Blade Runner 2029, courtesy of Titan Comics:
It’s the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and prequel to Blade Runner 2049, giving fans of either or both a look into the world created by Philip K. Dick in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?Blade Runnerstories continue as Titan Comics looks to the parallel Earth future in Blade Runner 2019. The first nine issues introduced us to ex-Blade Runner Ash and Cleo, daughter of business magnate Alexander Selwyn. It’s now 2026. On returning to Los Angeles, Ash sleuthed out the location of Selwyn, but Selwyn knows Ash is after him, and has created a new Blade Runner. Of course the ghosts of Tyrell are always in the shadows.
It’s a fantastic sci-fi series with a stellar cast and a story and production values that rival the original Blade Runner and its 2017 sequel: Altered Carbon is based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel of the same name, a story about Takeshi Kovacs, a future soldier in a world where science has developed a hard drive called a “stack” that is implanted in humans’ necks, allowing our memories to be uploaded to storage and replanted over and over so they seemingly can live forever, even in new bodies. That conceit allows Kovacs and other characters to be played by any number of actors, which could allow the series to run forever much as Doctor Who’s regeneration mechanism allows replacement Doctors. Originally launched on Netflix in 2018, Altered Carbon has been extended for a second season, with filming underway last year, and viewers should expected a second season trailer and 2020 air date any day. Which means fans of the Syd Mead, Ridley Scott, and Philip K. Dick brand of futurism, and all things borg, should catch up on the first season now. What does it mean to be human, and how much can you shed away and replace with technology and still retain the “self”? Altered Carbon tackles the philosophical questions The Matrix film series tried to answer.
Kovacs, played by several actors (more on that below), is a 300-year-old soldier. As a seasoned fighter 250 years ago he was the last of a mercenary group called the Envoys, leading a rebellion against the new world order. Kovacs’s stack is shelved for the intervening 250 years until one of the wealthiest men alive, Laurens Bancroft, played by James Purefoy (an actor who has been runner up for the James Bond film roles and appeared in A Knight’s Tale and The Following), buys his stack and puts it in a new body or “sleeve,” giving Kovacs the opportunity to live anew if he agrees to find Bancroft’s killer. This is a bleak world, filled with virtual reality and virtual sex, body swapping and trafficking, and the kind of tech noir, bleak, dystopian realm seen in Strange Days, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Ready Player One, The Running Man, Brazil, Total Recall, with the violence of A Clockwork Orange, but maybe not so hopeless as in Elysium, Mad Max, Gattaca, Terminator, and Dredd.
The series, which has a slow start and doesn’t kick into high gear until the second episode, also has the John Carpenter Escape from New York vibe but with Blade Runner visuals and effects, plus the creative elements of Total Recall that made for some unexpected surprises. Altered Carbon is a close match to RoboCop as future science and technology goes, so it’s easy to see why the casting agents brought along RoboCop remake star Joel Kinnaman as Kovacs’ primary sleeve in the first season. This sleeve was last owned by a cop killed in duty named Ryker. Ryker’s partner, Kristin Ortega, played by Mexican actress Martha Higareda(McFarland USA, Royal Pains), takes on the role of the season’s co-lead, struggling as she sees her old partner’s body and acting to protect his sleeve, trying to solve the murder of Bancroft, and uncovering the bad cops in the bureau. Ortega is a badass character in a small package who gets in and out of several fights that would take down anyone else in any other story, and she is the high point of the series–at one point an incident results in a loss of an arm, soon replaced by a powerful cybernetic arm. An interesting twist is that her family are Catholics, and in this future Catholics don’t believe in the stacks, which means once they die they are dead forever. This sets up one of the more interesting plot threads. If it seems like the series has a lot going on, that’s because it does. But it all comes together in a satisfying way in the final episodes.
It’s what Blade Runner fans have been waiting for, and if your appetite was whetted by the movie Blade Runner 2049, then you’re going to want to check our the next era of Blade Runnerstories as Titan Comics goes back to a parallel Earth future in Blade Runner 2019. The future is now. It’s been worth the wait, as the new story looks and feels like we’re back inside Philip K. Dick’s original vision in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In the neo-noir city of Los Angeles, 2019, Ash, a veteran Blade Runner, is working the kidnapping of a billionaire’s wife and child. Is the CEO of the new Canaan Corporation any better than those behind the Tyrell Corporation? Written by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Michael Green(Logan, Blade Runner 2049), with co-writer Mike Johnson(Supergirl, Star Trek), get ready for Blade Runner to experience the treatment we’ve seen in recent years for franchises like Firefly, Planet of the Apes, and Alien, as another new world of science fiction storytelling opens up. Green and Johnson have written a perfect first chapter.
This very first original, in-canon story set in the Blade Runner universe is illustrated by Andres Guinaldo(Justice League Dark, Captain America) with brilliant color work by Marco Lesko. You’re going to see something surprising in Guinaldo’s artwork–not only is this the world of Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, and Syd Mead′s neo-noir future, readers will see influences from cyberpunk and tech-noir classics like John Carpenter′s Escape from New York, Luc Besson′s The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Neill Blomkamp′s Elysium,James Cameron′s The Terminator and Aliens, Robert Rodriguez′s Alita: Battle Angel, and the other futureworlds adapted to film from Philip K. Dick′s stories. It all probably comes down to the versatility, breadth, and influence of concept artist Syd Mead, but the creators do give due credit to Dick, Scott, Hampton Fancher, David Peoples, Michael Deeley–and Mead–for the look and feel of their new story.
The first issue arrives next Wednesday, and you can pick from four cover options, from Stanley “Artgerm” Lau, Andreas Guinaldo, John Royle, and an original concept piece by Syd Mead.
Check out our sneak preview of the first issue of Blade Runner 2019, courtesy of Titan Comics, plus a new trailer for the series released just today:
A behind the scenes book for a 2019 movie, which consists of a third or more of its images from 2005? As fascinating as the special effects developed for the film, the history of the movie merits its own book, and it gets it in Abbie Bernstein‘sAlita: Battle Angel–The Art and Making of the Movie, now out from Titan Books. It turns out executive producer James Cameron and artists were working on the pre-production of Alita: Battle Angel during the development of his film Avatar. According to interviews with Cameron and Alita director Robert Rodriguez, in the early 2000s the technology was not yet advanced to deliver what they wanted for their adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s manga novel. But now that it’s arrived, fans of the film can trace its development over the past 15 years.
Alita: Battle Angel–The Art and Making of the Movie is filled with concept art, split between 2005 digital ideas in advance of knowing what actors might be cast and final characters developed, and a renewed look at the project as it began to get fully underway only a few years ago. Key interviews with Rodriguez, Cameron, producer Jon Landau, production designers Caylah Eddleblute and Steve Joyner, art director Todd Holland, visual effects supervisors Richard Hollander and Eric Saindon, costume designer Nina Proctor, Weta Digital’s Joe Letteri, and others tell the story–a marriage of practical effects and CGI. In fact the commenters almost seem to have a battle between those responsible between the practical effects and CGI–all with an eye toward realism. The most interesting aspects of the discussion are the incorporation of Alita star Rosa Salazar’s motion capture (or per Rodriguez, “performance capture” since motion doesn’t include the “emotion” element required to make a story come together) with Proctor’s real-world costumes, and the CGI layering that ends up as the final image that made it to the screen.
No doubt a highlight of the film and of the book are detailed images of Alita’s cyborg body shell, as created by the character of Dr. Ido in the film. In real life it looks incredibly porcelain, but the artists discuss how the body and all the components of the film were actually fabricated. The commenters don’t reference their inspirations for the look of the Iron City in the film or its cyborg inhabitants, but fans of the genre will no doubt see the influences–from the borg designs to story elements–from films including Chappie, Elysium, District 9, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell, Mad Max: Fury Road, Cameron’s The Terminator, and even the light cycles of Tron. Readers will learn more about the science behind the cyborgs in the film–how Cameron and others estimated weights of body parts, including Alita’s removable metal heart, as an example–all needed for 3D and CGI work and viewer believability.
Syd Mead, the famed “artist who illustrates the future,” is an icon of visionary design and illustration. No other creator has shown the world a utopian vision of a possible future in so many ways. In the time he created a world we want to see develop that lies ahead, we have seen his future begin to be realized. His aerodynamic designs have influenced auto design in recent decades from car makers including Chrysler, Ford, and GM. He has created the look of space technology that we all accept as believable thanks to his concept art–art that has influenced the art direction of films for four decades. A new book published this month provides an in-depth intellectual review of Mead’s style, influences, and impact on the history of design. The Movie Art of Syd Mead: Visual Futurist is a college level, art design course book of sorts that takes movie concept art to an entirely new level, a serious look at his style that will appeal to serious artists in any field, and a popular work for fans of the films he has inspired.
“What makes Syd’s vision so compelling,” says the book’s author, architect/designer and professor Craig Hodgetts, “is not only the means he employs to convey it, but the acute physical and environmental awareness: the endless curiosity about how the world works; the precise level of detail and the practical engineering knowledge that he brings to even the most fantastic devices.” Beginning with the look of the both geometric and organic mechanical villain V’ger from the year 2273 in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture to a mid-21st century casino and hotel in this year’s Blade Runner 2049, Mead’s sketches, drawings, illustrations, and paintings have inspired and influenced the art design of dozens of movie productions.
Mead’s most groundbreaking and memorable cinematic visionary creations came in the 1980s with four films. Returning to our theme of celebrating 1982 films, for Ridley Scott’s Blade RunnerMead was influenced by Edward Hopper’s desolate cityscapes. To translate author Philip K. Dick’s writings into visual form, Mead and Scott took an idea of sculpture artists Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Stankewicz and author William Gibson. The filmmakers lay claim to be the first to use their ideas of “retro-fitting” on film–the process of creating a unique object by means of a strategic assemblage of allied components; by harvesting parts from abandoned or obsolescent “donors” and re-assembling them, a new entity is created. In the same year as Blade Runner, Mead saw his designs realized in the very different world of Tron, modeling a convincing digital world by extrapolating from the patterns of computer motherboards and other now obsolete technology of the era. The giant screen-filling image of Master Control, the labyrinthine pathways for the lightcycles, and Sark’s hefty transport vessel all hailed from the mind and pen of Mead. Taking the look of James Cameron’s original Alien film and modifying it significantly, Mead skipped the “slick shapes of Star Trek” and the “greeblies of Star Wars” to create what he envisioned as a “highly-engineered, purposeful vessel” where each feature could have a function, for the 1986 sequel Aliens. In the same year, Mead created what would become an iconic image of the 1980s, Number Five the robot, the friendly star of the film Short Circuit.
For more than six years we at borg.com have been covering entertainment memorabilia auctions–sales of not merely replicas or mass-produced collectibles, but the real objects seen on film–rare or even one-of-a-kind costumes created by award-winning Hollywood costume designers, detailed props created by production crew, model vehicles created by special effects departments like Industrial Light and Magic, prosthetics created by famous makeup artists, set decoration, concept art, and much more. Amassing a wide variety of artifacts from classic and more recent film and television history, London and Los Angeles-based Prop Store is hosting its annual auction later this month. Known for its consignment of some of the most well-known and iconic screen-used props and costumes, Prop Store’s ultimate museum collectibles auction will be open for bidding from anyone, and items will be available at estimates for both beginning collectors and those with deeper pockets.
The Prop Store Live Auction: Treasures from Film and Television will be auctioning off approximately 600 items. You’ll find the following movies and TV shows represented and more: 3:10 to Yuma (2007), 300,Aliens, Back to the Future films, Blade Runner, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Chronicles of Narnia films, Elysium, Enemy Mine, Excalibur, The Fifth Element, Gladiator, The Goonies, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Jason and the Argonauts, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the Indiana Jones films, Iron Man, the James Bond films, Judge Dredd (1995), the Jurassic Park films, Kick-Ass 2, Kingsman: the Secret Service, Lifeforce, Looper, The Lost Boys, The Martian, The Matrix, Men in Black III, Mission: Impossible (1996), The Mummy (1999), Patton, Pirates of the Caribbean series, Predators, the Rocky films, Saving Private Ryan, Scarface, Serenity, Shaun of the Dead, Shawshank Redemption, Sherlock Holmes (2009), Star Trek franchise, Star Wars franchise, Starship Troopers,Superman films, Terminator films, The Three Musketeers (1993), Tropic Thunder, Troy, True Grit, Underworld: Evolution, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Willow, The Wolfman (2010), World War Z, and the X-Men films.
You can flip through the auction house’s hefty 360-page catalog, or start with a look at what we selected as the best 50 of the lots–what we predict as the most sought-after by collectors and those that represent some of fandom’s favorite sci-fi and fantasy classics and modern favorites.
Industrial Light and Magic 17 3/4-inch Rebel Y-Wing filming model from Return of the Jedi
Sark (David Warner) Grid costume from the original Tron (1982)
Julie Newmar’s Catwoman costume and Burgess Meredith Penguin hat from the classic Batman TV series
Buttercup (Robin Wright) Fire Swamp red dress from The Princess Bride
Chekov (Walter Koenig) “nuclear wessels” costume, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) costume, and Sulu (George Takei) double shirt from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Full crew set of costumes (Malcolm, Zoe, Wash, Jayne, Inara, Kaylee, River, Book, and Simon) from Serenity(sold as individual costume lots)
Jack Nicholson purple Joker costume, plus separate coat and hat, from Batman (1989)
Enterprise-D 48-inch “pyro” model from Star Trek: The Next Generation
Will Munny (Clint Eastwood) stunt shotgun from Unforgiven
Star-lord helmet from Guardians of the Galaxy
Thor (Chris Hemsworth) Mjolnir hammer from Thor
Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II jumpsuits made for Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venkman
Witch-king of Angmar crown from The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
Val Kilmer Batman suit and cowl from Batman Forever
Maverick (Tom Cruise) flight suit from Top Gun
Geoffrey Rush Captain Barbossa costume from the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Curse of the Black Pearl
First we saw CNN’s Anderson Cooper reporting in the Black Widow comic book series, now he’s leading up the latest trailer for Neill Blomkamp’s 2015 release Chappie. Columbia Pictures has switched gears since the original trailer was released, from a quirky preview about a Pinocchio-esque robot trying to be real to a story that looks a lot like RoboCop.
It gets better–this trailer actually may bring in more moviegoers. It reveals more action, the kind of action that Blomkamp showed us he could provide in his Academy Award-nominated geopolitical sci-fi thrill ride District 9. And where the first trailer sidelined stars Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver, now they’re front and center.
It still looks to be more light-hearted like Blomkamp’s District 9 and certainly less dark than his Elysium, but that might be a good thing, too. Elysium sorely lacked any heart, and this may be an attempt to re-balance Blomkamp’s movies for a wider audience.
See for yourself–check out this new trailer for Chappie, after the break:
Writer/director Neill Blomkamp has a unique vision for his sci-fi films. His first foray, District 9, resulted in a rare nomination for the genre for an Academy Award. District 9 looked at the social upheaval caused by a future immigration of aliens from a doomed spaceship. Last year, he turned Matt Damon into a cyborg making an escape to a Utopian world in Elysium.
Now Blomkamp again looks at human society and culture but this time in the context of a robot with artificial intelligence in Chappie. Chappie is a fish-out-of-water story about a robot experiencing what it means to be alive.
This modern take on the 1980s robot movie Short Circuit and update to Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial intelligence stars Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel as an inventor who creates the robot that thinks and feels. His creator role is like that of Geppetto from Pinocchio, and Chappie experiences his own growth like the puppet that wanted to be a real boy.
As with Blomkamp’s prior sci-fi films, the special effects look to be superb. The robot moves freely like a human, and it’s easy to predict that moviegoers will fall for this new creation.
Antonio Banderas is not someone you might think of as star of sci-fi or futuristic tales, but evidently this is one he’s had in play for a while. He’s producing and starring in his next feature film–taking inspiration from Isaac Asimov short stories his new Automata looks a bit like Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence meets Elysium or District 9.
Something about the variety of low-end tech robots and independent film vibe might show some promise, but it also may reflect a low production quality film, too. It’s hard to say whether this is a poorly conceived trailer or reflective of what we’re going to see in the theaters. We’ll be waiting for early reviews before jumping in to see this one.
Automata also stars Dylan McDermott, Melanie Griffith, and the great Robert Forster. Gabe Ibáñez directs.
