14 thoughts on “Blade Runner”

  1. I liked the book better.

    I always felt like they left to much of Decker’s ‘book character’ out of the ‘movie character’ in the flick. I like HF fine in the role, he does a great job.

    But for me, THE best actor in that flick is Edward James Olmos.

    He’s got about 9 lines in the whole, bloody, flick. And when he is up there, he drags you around the scene. You never quite know WTH he’s going to do.

    HF’s characterization reluctant off and on in the movie about killing any more ‘andys’. In the book, he was ALL about the money.

    I liked the book better.

    1. That’s because EJO is an amazing actor. I’m assuming you’ve seen BSG where he plays an aging, long-suffering starship…

    2. More or less agreed – in that while I think BR is a fine, fine film, I’d love to see Do Androids Dream remade faithfully, without editing out Mercerism.

      Wouldn’t sell as well as “cops vs. androids”, so I don’t blame them for the decision, though.

  2. Great movie, but I’m still p.o.’d that they used a totally irrelevant title just because it sounded cool. Four decades after the fact, not many people know that Alan E. Nourse wrote “Bladerunner” in 1974, a sci-fi novel about black market medicine. The Dick novel was “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

  3. I confess that overall, I like the movie quite a bit better than the book. DADOES seems to me to have all of the PKDick pros and cons: interesting idea, somewhat incoherently written. I felt that the movie simplified the book’s mishmash of ideas mostly down to the core set: what makes us human? There’s only a smidgeon of Mercerism left in the movie, and it would have been fine with me if it had disappeared altogether.

    The movie has definite flaws; in particular I detest the killer gymnast routine of the android / replicant Priss. But the look has aged very well, and the last sequence between Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford is definitely one for the ages. And the only other movie in which Sean Young was remotely as appealing was No Way Out

  4. Was science fiction inbred, derivative and stale? Did DADOES change that?

    We now know what PKD thought. I loved Blade Runner, but it didn’t change my world. Of course, I’ve been living on a different world from the rest of humanity since I was about five.

    1. Well, DADOES dates from 1968. That was a time of some upheaval in the world of SF, best known from the Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison (himself one of the leading lights of SF’s New Wave). PKD’s comments seem to date more from that era than from Blade Runner‘s release in 1982. The contribution made by PKD and/or DADOES to the expansion of SF from the mid-’60 through the ’70s is certainly significant, although I would give more credit to Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and Fred Pohl’s Heechee trilogy as exemplars for where written SF was going in 1982. PKD has certainly become supreme for cinematic SF, but that is not necessarily a good thing…

  5. I’ve never understood the fascination some people have for the works of PKD. Every story of his is about self-identity. “Who the hell are you and how can you tell?” is the only question that seems to motivate him. Given that Dick spent much of his life wrestling serious chemicals and losing, one can perhaps appreciate the origins of his apparent obsession. But however fascinating the self-inflicted lacunae in one’s own continuity of memory may be to oneself, it’s a hobbyhorse that is wearyingly dull to the rest of us after the third or fourth obsessive iteration. Cthulhu puts a finger on why Blade Runner is far better than its nominal source material; it’s about what the essence of humanity is, not what the essence of identity is.

    1. And in Blade Runner, the replicants were fundamentally human. In DADOES, the androids weren’t.

  6. Unfortunately, few if any will ever see the full movie as it was intended by Ridley Scott. The studio panicked at the soaring cost and decided it was too byzantine a plot to engage a mass audience. Production was halted, scenes were cut and edited, and a HF’s voice-over was put in to help the audience understand what was going on.

    Even the recent release of the “director’s cut” leaves a ton of material out, scenes which have been lost forever on the cutting room floor. A friend of mine has connections in Hollywood, and was invited to view the entire film back in the day. Whenever the topic comes up, he just smiles and says, “you’ve never seen Blade Runner.”

    1. Good. Ridley Scott threw out large parts of the script and wrote his own treatment.. in doing so he overstepped his role as director, and considering that I find the guy as boring and self-obsessed as George Lucas, I’m glad at least some of the artistic contributions of others made it to the screen – because if they had given him all the creative control he wanted, he would have made it even worse than he did.

  7. I have been a PKD fan since I was a kid. I have read this letter before and Dick is actually referring to the visual treatment of the film. He expands on this in interviews published in “What if Our World Is Their Heaven”.

    Blade Runner was the screen adaptation that was the least true to the original work. Except for the names of the protagonists and the general plot of cop chasing replicants; there is little of the novel or what the novel intended in the film. Dick overlooked this for a couple reasons: It was his first real break into mainstream Hollywood after years of optioning his books off with no payback. And he was also completely mentally ill for the prior seven years. His best works were actually produced during this period of mental illness, with the number one, IMHO, being Valis.

Comments are closed.