There’s a new trailer for Blade Runner 2049, and while it still leaves us in the dark as to the movie’s overall plot, it does offer more tantalizing glimpses of the future, as well as a few images that defy explanation. It’s good to know, for example, that even in the middle of the 21st century, one can count on a beefy-looking lowlife like the one played by Dave Bautista to throw a guy who starts asking too many questions through a conveniently flimsy wall and that while Dennis Villeneuve’s sequel is certainly running with the junk-noir aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s hugely influential original, there will still be plenty of explostions and shots of people pointing guns at things. A fleeting shot informs us that the Nexus-6 replicants who figure so heavily in the first movie will be upgraded by at least two generations, and a further look at what seems to be the dusty landscape outside the building where Harrison Ford’s Deckard has been holed up reveals that whatever statues Ryan Gosling’s character is moving among, they preferred a stylish but sensible high-heeled shoe.
But most importantly, we learn that in the alternate future which Blade Runner 2049 inhabits, Pan Am World Airways is still very much a thing. One of the things that most precisely dates the 1982 movie is the sometimes blatant product placement for products and companies that no longer exist, including Atari and Pan Am. The new film’s first trailer showed off a logo for Atari, which in this timeline is apparently still around as well, and this one drops in a shot of a skyscraper topped with the Pan Am logo. Humanity may be an endangered quality in its dystopian future, but Pan Am is still going strong.
