In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.
First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats. This plague, however, had descended from above. After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
One of the major themes in the story are animals; most species have been wiped out and people own artificial versions instead. Decker himself is motivated by a desire to own a "real" animal. Interesting that they mostly left this out of the film version (Blade Runner) and only vaguely mentioned it. In general, the book is very different, but discussion of animals takes up at least 1/4 of the narrative.
“What we are facing now is a person whose crime dwarfs all of the crimes ever committed in human history. We were unable to find a single law applicable to his crime. So we recommend that the crime of Extinction of Life on Earth be added to international law ...”
I think that'll be a pretty hard book to adapt. The story goes off the rails in the later books. Especially the 3rd, it's just a random tour of interesting scifi ideas.
I'm also wondering if the de-emphasis of individual will make it harder to make a show. There is no through line of character.
While the book has some great ideas, I personally wasn't a huge fan of how they were strung together. First book was great detective noir book. Second book had the great concept of the wallfacers and one amazing badass. And then you can just see disaster coming with the change of the guard, the story is just as bad as the end of the rama series from there.
Or to say it another way, if it makes it to the screen it will be heavily altered imho, but that's par for the course, and I've come to enjoy other people's interpretations on things I've already read when they bring new stuff.
I think about this aspect of the book all the time when I see kids (and increasingly adults) invested in games like Pokémon during our ongoing mass extinctions. The book doesn’t cover the intermediary steps between its barren world and our own, but it’s a pretty easy to draw a through line between the digital ecosystems we’ve built in the past 40 or so years and the synthetic life of Blade Runner.
You sound like someone who's never played or watched Pokemon. It regularly hits on these themes. One Pokemon's whole shtick is wearing its dead parent's skull. It evolves by growing past that trauma.
Ecology is a huge theme through the whole thing. It is not a happy-go-lucky franchise isolated from the troubles of the world.
I grew up playing Pokémon. It was the second Gameboy game I ever owned. I think I played every one through the DS era.
What I think you miss is that individual works can be contrary to certain negative trends or values, without posing any real opposition to them. A Pokémon game can embrace a pro-environmental narrative, while the material reality of the franchise in the context of Capitalist exchange involves all kinds of ecological destruction. Just think of all of the Pokémon tchotchkes, bought and discarded, since the series began.
I’m not trying to single out Pokémon as some especially bad actor, but indicative of how the widespread fetishization of these imagined ecosystems might result in a future not dissimilar from the one described in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? PKD wrote that book in the 70s, contemplating trends in the world he inhabited. It makes sense that we do the same in engaging with it.
I read the book first and was deeply disappointed in the movie. They could have done so much more. Instead they spent like half an hour on dumb fight scenes which are only a couple pages in the book. I can't enjoy it just because of how much they cut out. For those that haven't read the book, here's an example:
When Deckard Cain meets Rachael for the first time, she has an owl, and she claims it's real. He says "I thought they were extinct." She says no, you just can't buy them on the open market. He then tests his humanity detector on her, which she fails. They explain that she grew isolated on a spaceship leaving Earth which turned around and came home after the war, so she grew up without a sense of empathy. He is horrified to learn his detector may be flawed, and he may have killed real humans thinking they were androids. They then offer him the owl to cover it up. He finally realizes that they're lying and she's an android after all. He then says "And the owl?" "It's robotic, of course. Owls are extinct."
In the movie? He shows up and says "Nice owl, is it robotic?" Rachael goes "Yup, and so am I". Welp, there goes like 50 of the best pages of the book.
Another example, which really shows just how unnecessarily shallow the movie is: in the book, Rachael and Pris are identical model androids, and sex with androids is forbidden. The whole conflict Deckard experiences is based on the fact that he becomes infatuated with Rachael: not only is it extremely taboo, but his feelings start to interfere with his mission of killing her identical twin Pris. In the movie? Completely different replicants, and Pris is a standard-issue sex-bot. There's just no internal conflict at all.
Seriously people, read this book. It is fantastic.
Woah. That’s not what happens in the movie. Rachael does indeed say the owl is fake. However she has no idea she is a replicant. If I remember correctly she’s a “different kind of replicants” more human like because she was given pre-canned memories.
I do agree that the removal of the extinction of animals theme, the removal of Deckard's wife, and to some extent the removal of mercerism detracts from the movie (or at least with the second two significantly alters bits), however not sure if the removal of the "it's difficult to kill someone when you've had sex with their double"-theme is really detrimental.
the whole fake police precinct full of androids thing was probably also better removed from a cinematic standpoint.
It's an interesting case of literature-movie adaptation. The film is one of my favorites, but mostly for the atmosphere and cinematography, not the story itself.
Yet, after recently re-reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I came away thinking that the movie could have been so much better. They left a lot of the interesting details and Phillip K. Dick weirdness out.
> It's an interesting case of literature-movie adaptation.
Indeed. It's one of my favorite films as well, and consider that I'm a PKD fan: I don't think it's even a companion piece to the book. It hits some of the same themes, but Blade Runner is more neo-noir with smoke-filled rooms, and Do Androids is more PKD exploration of ideas, religion, anxieties, etc. PKD loved what he managed to see of the movie before dying, mind you.
I think what makes Blade Runner engaging is that it's not trying to be a direct translation of the book. It even reverses some of the book's characterizations: "Rachael" is in the book manipulative and a liar, but in the movie she's naive and the one being lied to. The androids from the book are cold and callous, almost completely unempathetic even for their own kind. The replicants from the movie are way more empathic -- Roy Batty is arguably an antihero rather than a villain. I've watched Blade Runner many times, being one of my favorites, and there are times I consider Roy the true protagonist of the movie.
It does hit some of the same themes of PKD's works: what is real and what is fake? What is human, and what deserves to live?
The best works of art leave space between the ideas, words and images. Blade Runner is a bit more like a poem than a novel and that's why it works so well and why it was rejected so soundly at the time of release.
Sometime it takes a while to grasp the significance of a poem.
I've had this book on my shelf for a couple of years. I was put off it because I finally saw the film (and the remake) and didn't like them. Especially the remake, fell asleep trying to get through that film on three seperate occasions before giving up on it.
But I need to give the book a chance if it's quite different to the film.
I think instead of "remake" you meant sequel, because there is no remake.
If it's any consolation: I'm an absolute fan of Blade Runner but hated the sequel. In my opinion, it fails to capture the neo-noir feel of the original, has no interesting characters, Jared Leto's acting is distracting, and the villains/antiheroes... compare Roy Batty's "tears in rain" dying speech with Luv's "I'm the best!". It makes me cringe.
I, for one, think that the sequel is as good as the original. Cinematography was stunning and the world was a believable evolution of the world from the previous movie.
As a die-hard Dune (1984) and book fan, I'm not really ecstatic yet. Old movie had some unique qualities, and would be a great movie if it was 7 hours long.
Also, why on earth they changed jihad to crusade in new movie?!
> Also, why on earth they changed jihad to crusade in new movie?!
Do you really have to ask or do you not believe words have associations that aren't their exact dictionary definitions?
Dune was written well before the word was associated with religious extremism in modern times, the word didn't have the associations of terrorism and caliphates and 9/11.
Aren't they describing the attack by Harkonnen and Imperial forces on the Atreides rather than the later jihad by the Fremen - the latter presumably being in the next movie?
One of the biggest cinematographic disappointments I’ve ever witnessed.
Harrison Ford’s involvement in the movie was tragic. He acted lazily, his character had very little to add to the storyline. Inexplicably he was into Elvis can you imagine your grand children, when old, being huge Elvis fans? It was all so lazy.
The only saving grace was the concept that creation of life is a continuous, inescapable circle, that creates a hierarchy alongside the risk of oppression and servitude.
God created men, men is subservient and inferior. Men create replicants, same thing. Now replicants have “holograms”...
The plodding and limp segment in the ruins of Las Vegas really killed the pace and punch of that whole film. Even assuming there was any point in having Deckard in it all, 15 minutes of that could have easily been cut out with almost no impact to the story.
There was a point in having him: he fathered a replicant-born child (while possibly being a replicant himself), aka the central theme of the movie. Execution could have been better, though. And at least the Vegas section had great cinematography ad times: I take much more issues with the final fight, which I thought was anticlimactic both visually and story-wise.
I know but even there they lacked imagination, finesse, esprit. How much better would it have been for Ryan G’s character to find remnants of Deckard proving he lived there but had been long gone. Some indication that he may or may not have been a replicant. Maybe the replicant child is a cross between humans and replicants. But nooo, Deckard had to be a replicant, obviously given his longevity and strength, and a “tough” guy who wants to have a biff with Ryan G. No nuance, no deeper meaning.
I thought the first half was magnificent. The scene with Ryan Gosling having the intimate moment with the hologram made me weep, it was so sad because that’s all he could get.
The movie became terrible once Harrison Ford was introduced and kept diving. Everything about it was horrible. The scene in the water looked like a sound stage. Absolutely terrible.
Everything with Deckard was awful. I also felt the Rachael clone was both a "fanservice" moment and at the same time terribly disrespectful to the character of Rachael. I hated it, a "we did this with CGI because we can" moment.
In my opinion, Deckard and Rachael's story was over at the end of the first film. Let them have their moment, be happy for an instant, and forget them.
If the sequel was even necessary at all, it should have moved on without sullying old characters.
First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats. This plague, however, had descended from above. After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
One of the major themes in the story are animals; most species have been wiped out and people own artificial versions instead. Decker himself is motivated by a desire to own a "real" animal. Interesting that they mostly left this out of the film version (Blade Runner) and only vaguely mentioned it. In general, the book is very different, but discussion of animals takes up at least 1/4 of the narrative.