For my money, the worst thing about Blade Runner is how it created a franchise based on its own adaptation. The net negative outcome is we’re now categorically unlikely to ever see a cinematic portrayal of Rachael Rosen throwing a goat off a roof.
The best stuff in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is not in Blade Runner. The animal worship is tricky. It’s a source of dark humor that takes time to blend in with the rest of the world; while it lampoons the insanity of industrialized passions, it runs the risk of making the world goofy, and thus also the characters. I understand why Scott and company evaded it. It’s the chess that I love and miss.
There are multiple scenes in which opposing characters attempt to outmaneuver each other so subtly that the reader isn’t immediately aware it’s happening. The experience I loved so much was going back to reread the last few pages armed with the knowledge that these characters are actively trying to kill each other without letting on. I can’t think of anything else that gives me those particular tingles, and it’s a shame that the theme was unintentionally scraped out of the visual media franchise. I would love to see a different take on the source, but I also love the secret knowledge of this ultimate game of cat and mouse. Regardless, Electric Sheep remains an excellent example of a book with so much going on that thirty million dollars couldn’t capture it all.
On a barely related note, I’d love to see a feature film adaptation of Eye in the Sky.
My favourite is Electric Sheep because… wait, what! What black magic fuckery is this?
Alright, it probably is, although my favourite anything can change with my mood, I am a big Blade Runner fan which I think was my entry point to Dickworld (although I’d need to check my books - I was hoovering up a tonne of sci-fi and fantasy as a kid, just grabbing what took my fancy from secondhand shops).
That said, I do have a penchant for the big collections of his short stories - I have one packed in my emergency hospital bag as it will keep me entertained for a while.
It’s one of the things that struck me about a lot of the adaptations of his work - they can vary quite widely from the source material, especially when Dick gets… whimsical. I don’t think the ending of “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” would have gone down as well with movie-going audiences.
Meanwhile Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly” was actually quite faithful to the source material, discounting the merging of the Charles Frick character. Now THAT was a fun film!
Oh, and wasn’t 2012’s “Total Recall” pointless? Why??
It was from the period of pointless (and worse, awful) remakes. See also: RoboCop.
I presume studio executives thought remaking a beloved cult movie would make a tonne of money, no matter the quality, so they skimped on the quality. We are now in the period of: making franchise movies will make a tonne of money because they help build the franchise, so they don’t have to make the individual films work as standalone movies in their own right.
Oh, I could go on and on all night like this! 🤣
I’ll give you the “period of pointless remakes,” which incidentally never went away but we need to define a few terms here. “Awful” isn’t the correct term for either film: both remakes were of high quality and of a certain production standard. The problem is that the only common ground they both had with their original sources was not much more than the titles. If both were not remakes/reboots/retools/whatever, we would be having a different conversation about them. But I doubt we’d ever be talking about remakes of these films.
And if I’m not mistaken, both remakes did make a “tonne of money.” But I’m willing to bet they also killed their respective franchises.
Okay, this is sounding more like stuff from my turf! Back to trying to convince us that “Electric Sheep” is everybody’s favorite PKD! 🤣