BTW, as a kind of "expanded universe" take on the film's esthetic, I have to ask :
What do you think the future cities of the East Block countries look like ? Do the Soviets, Poles, East Germans, etc. also have rundown slums made up of former showcase panelhouse estates, with lower-quality spinners vrooming past the peculiar geometric concrete monstrosities of public buildings and bureaus ?
Tensions arising between the melting pot of old-settled populace and the newer generations of "immigrant citizens" from Cuba, central Asia and "brotherly socialist countries" like Vietnam, Angola, etc. ?
Not too many neon advertisements, though - perestroika and market liberalization is still a no-no on this side of the curtain.
Also, the environment is maybe even more of a mess than westward, due to the even weaker regulations in all walks of industry. Electric sheep (
or owls) are the only sheep (or owls) left, and even they can only be afforded by well-off Party members.
Personally, I'd be intrigued to see a
Blade Runner sequel set in a "futuristic communist" country, with all the early 80s Zeerust that would entail.
You wouldn't even have to drop the whole plot concerning the Replicants - they could be handled in-story as an allegory for people persecuted by the regimes, with the East Block Blade Runner equivalents having vibes of the KGB/Stasi/STB, etc. Having the East Block ersatz-Deckard being a semi-villain - in the vein of the main character from
The Lives of the Others or
Walking Too Fast - could be an interesting touch.
The Replicant allegory would actually work pretty well: Formerly created as an experimental next step in the future of the "true socialist man", Replicants became rebellious and soon even hated by the regimes that originally praised them. Unable to find happiness in the notion of working hard and tirelessly for the benefit of communist society, they were reduced by governmental decrees to little more than forced labour convicts, alongside fully human ones - mining for minerals and uranium in Siberia, the Czech and Polish industrial zone and at the Martian colonies of the Warsaw Pact Space Command. Despite their once-touted function of a role model for society and employees, the East Block replicants became as despised as samizdat writers, Western popculture and goods smugglers or people unwilling to enter conscript service or work in a state-owned enterprise. They became the inversion of the uptight and loyal "new socialist man" that they were supposed to be, and their bad treatment by the authorities started to expose the denied flaws and contradictions of communist society. That is not to say the replicants are purely victims. As in the Los Angeles version, some of them are killers or de facto criminals, making them sympathetic antagonists at best. This would mirror the occassional armed/violent outbursts of East Block citizens againt their governments - with all the controversy that would entail, as in, e.g. the OTL case of the
Mašín brothers. Heroic anti-regime resistance to some, petty killers and crooks to others. Moral ambiguity and all that.
