— Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest
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.
https://twitter.com/terrythethunder/status/13038804594498969...
Ecology is a huge theme through the whole thing. It is not a happy-go-lucky franchise isolated from the troubles of the world.
It is if you consume it on a surface level, as (I would argue) most people do.
Folks who are into Pokemon Go have no idea of the ecological messages in the other games/media.
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.
Isidore. Religion vs TV. Shared experiences. The movie is cut down, probably so it didn't turn a Novella into a trilogy.
Dial 800, the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on.
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.
the whole fake police precinct full of androids thing was probably also better removed from a cinematic standpoint.
on edit: at any rate we should probably take into account that Phil Dick seemed to appreciate the movie https://screencrush.com/philip-k-dick-blade-runner/
Imagine how I feel!?
http://web.archive.org/web/20120610184707im_/http://www.phil...
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.
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?
Sometime it takes a while to grasp the significance of a poem.
But I need to give the book a chance if it's quite different to the film.
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.
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.
So changing this term gets massive thumbs down from me.
Have you been in a coma since 1984?
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”...
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.
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.
[0] http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=9...
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.