Please, Deji... you disappoint me. Solaris? Better than Blade Runner?? In the same ballpark as a true classic, a ground-breaker, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey?? That also perfectly describes Blade Runner. Solaris is an excellent SF film, but no ground-breaker, and certainly not a classic, despite starring one of my favorite actors, George Clooney. As for Phillip K. Dick's, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I read it when it came out in 1968. I had already been reading Dick's work before that. I know very well that there are very big differences between Blade Runner and Electric Sheep. I also know that one was a novel, albeit a short one, and one was a movie that used it as inspiration for the director, Ridley Scott. BR wasn't just an exercise by Scott in creating film noir in the future. It was an exercise in brilliance melding two genres... film noir and science fiction. It was far more than that, of course, but I'm not going to give a dissertation on BR and Scott, although I'd love to discuss it further, sometime, as well as other great SF movies, of which 2001 is an amazing example. I will mention that Scott showed P.K. Dick some of what he had shot of BR before Dick's tragic death weeks before BR came out. Dick had been unhappy with what he had heard and read about the direction BR was going, but was thrilled with what he was shown, becoming excited about how the film would turn out. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Paul M. Shammon, the author of "Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner", a terrific book that has been described as the Blade Runner "bible." N: In their background themes, how do you think book and film differ the most? And perhaps more significantly, despite the differences, how do you think the film eventually actually does convey some of PKD's prime themes? PS: I'm glad you mentioned the difference in background themes between Blade Runner and Sheep, too. Because, really, this was the most significant point of departure between the two works. Phil portrayed his "andys," or replicants, in Sheep as thinly disguised Nazis. Powerful humans who had absolutely no sense of empathy or emotional connection with what Lincoln called the better aspects of our nature. Therefore, Sheep's replicants were dangerous. Soulless things who were actually Phil's thinly veiled condemnation of what he perceived as an out-of-control culture drifting towards an increasingly selfish, soulless America. However, Ridley Scott viewed his replicants in a totally different light. His favorite phrase was that BR's reps were "supermen who couldn't fly," genuinely superior beings who were being ruthlessly manipulated by their genetic inferiors. That's a huge conceptual difference. And from what I recall, Phil never did agree with that divergence. What's really crazy about their differing points of view, though, was how, at the end of the day, Phil generally agreed with how Hampton and David and Ridley had adapted his book. I specifically asked Dick about this point just a few weeks before he died, in fact. Unfortunately, this was one of the few conversations I didn't tape-record. So I'm going to have to paraphrase here. But what Dick more or less told me was, "Once I saw Rutger Hauer in the test footage and saw how they'd made him look like a perfect Aryan, I realized the people behind Blade Runner knew what I was trying to get at in Sheep. I also saw a decaying metropolis that was falling apart because of humanity's arrogance, and I saw a society where the very nature of the human soul was imperiled because of that arrogance. That's pretty close to what I was saying in Sheep." http://www.brmovie.com/Articles/Sammon_Interview_06.htm
