Is it worth reading? How does it compare to the movie?

>Blade Runner
>Hollywood cliches
Thanks for telling everyone that you didn't see the film.

>The movie only looks nice
Wrong

It's very worth reading and has a bunch of interesting ideas; just don't expect the same time as the movie.

Oh, yes, Blade Runner, a standard Hollywood flick that made a lot of cash back in the day, happy, easy to digest for all audiences, with a catchy pop soundtrack.
What I actually don't comprehend is how you concluded that I don't comprehend the story of Electric Sheep.

What I actually don't comprehend is how you concluded that Hollywood cliches means it made a lot of cash.The narrative, characters and the "themes" they convey are cliche in every single way.

Not that person.

The plot of the first movie is actually only like the middle act of the book. The book is just as if not more focused on stuff that never shows up in the movie(s) like the techno-collective religion of Mercerism and the theme of what is reality (?!?). Frankly the extra themes strike me as kind of hippy, and not in a good way. Other parts are just weird and pointless. Deckard is married for some inexplicable reason despite there being a romance subplot.

Personally I think the screenwriter of the first movie recognized that the replicants, the moral ambiguity of "retirement" of replicants. and the question of Deckard's humanity were the most interesting part of the book. So it's a more concise focus on the most powerful themes.

The second movie seems like it focuses a bit on the left over elements of the first book but in a good way that is not so wacky.

>The narrative, characters and the "themes" they convey are cliche in every single way.
Give me one example

>le robots also have feels
>i cri everytiem

>>le robots also have feels
Good job at completely misunderstanding the point of the movie.

Which is?

So, nothing more to say regarding my comprehension? Moving on to other non-arguments? All right...
>The narrative
Based on the novel.
>characters
No matter how bad and cliched the characters might be (they are not but whatever), they are still vastly superior to the book's blank non-entities.
>the "themes"
Also based on the novel.

>le ebic strawman greentext argument
VERY fast noggin joggin at incredible hihg speed.tiff

>Also based on the novel.
Ha ha. Nice joke desu.

ok

The replicants are a parallel to basically anything that's outcasted.

Dick isn't a very good writer. his ideas are interesting.

bladerunner is one of the few movies that are significantly better than the book they are based on

So the robots also have feels.

No, it's that the replicants are identical to humans, practically making them humans.

Precisely what I'm talking about. I'm glad we agree.

NO

>catchy pop soundtrack

>How does it compare to the movie?
If you're asking if it is 80s noir, than it doesn't.

Because cliche makes a story more relatable, so more people will go to see it. Simple as that.

Nope! Movie hardly says anything. Just looks good.

The best parts of it are improvised, the worst were added 20 years later.

(You)

I'm not even being provocative. Blade Runner says remarkably little for being thought of as such a philosophical film. It is the classic conflict, which it may have been accomplice in making classic, the question about the validity of artificial lives. But Deckard is such a shit character, so inanimate, that ALL you can derive from the film is "damn, are they humans?" Once you decide if their lives have meaning or not for yourself (which isn't difficult to come to some conclusion on), the only thing left to chew on is the visuals and that scene where Deckard forcibly fucks Rachel. It's a great, classic film with an amazingly realized style, but that's pretty much it.

(Me again) I would love to be enlightened to something about Blade Runner to make me love it as much as everyone else seems to, but I've watched it like 4 times and I don't think I've seen the movie people talk about when they talk about Blade Runner. Throw me a bone!

>Deckard is such a shit character, so inanimate
I liked him.

What version did you watch? This is very important.

I like him, but he, or Harrison's performance, is hardly anything. I can buy the idea that he's detached because his bleak job, or that he's just dispositioned to being quiet and curt, but as a person on screen meant to convey themes and and emotions... he's kind of bad.

I have only ever seen the Final Cut.

The book is great, i just finished it, and its a very good pulp book.

>I have only ever seen the Final Cut.
The Final Cut is the worst version of the film, watch the Directors Cut instead.

What could I possibly be missing, bro? Come on, don't make me risk seeing this film for a fifth time and still get nothing out of it!! Even if watching it for three hours isn't the worst thing my eyes could occupy themselves with, but come on...

If you liked the movie, I would read the book. It's easy to read and pretty short so why not?

>not watching the workprint version

>What could I possibly be missing, bro?
There are alot of things changed for the worse in the Final Cut.

I can't comment on it in comparison the the first Blade Runner movie because I haven't seen it. I have seen Blade Runner 2049 and in reference to the book, they're different stories. Blade Runner 2049 is just placed in the world of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and uses some concepts from it like androids and blade running.

Rick, the protagonist of the book, is trying to attain self actualisation. Ultimately he fails. However he goes through an existential crisis when he realises that he feels empathy for the androids. He overcomes this when he kills all the androids he had been charged with retiring.
The conversation here is what constitutes empathy: putting yourself into the shoes of people who are already very similar to you and your circumstances or being able to put yourself into the shoes of people who exist in circumstances very dissimilar to your own. This contrast is shown very starkly when we compare Rick with the Blade Runner from the fake precinct who experiences no discomfort when killing the android from the theatre as soon as it is obvious that she is not human.
We then realise the the Voigt-Kampff test does test empathy generally but rather whether you have empathy for humans and their needs. The androids may well have empathy for their fellow androids after all they are able to form friendships among themselves and work together. They also have some theory of mind of the other androids and even other people because they can anticipate the movements of people and androids around them.

K wants to be real. He too goes through an existential crisis when he realises that he has real childhood memories and thinks that he was the android who was born rather than created in a lab. He is already a real person and proves this when he dies for what he believes in. I think the question here is, "What makes us real or human?"
If it is simply that androids are not real because they are programmed and operate within that programming, then real humans are hardly better. We react to our environment within the bounds of our biology. The only division is that android programming is more controlled while human biology is subject to chance at inception to a greater extent.

A question to the other posters: are you comparing the book to the first or the second movie?

Should this, or A Scanner Darkly be my next PKD book? I have read Ubik and The Three Stigmata... and don't want to read Valis yet.

>are you comparing the book to the first or the second movie?
The first, why the fuck would you compare it to the second one?

I've never read ASD, probably can't go wrong with either.

I might read Pale Fire next because of 2049.

Whichever is fine. As for film adaptations, A Scanner Darkly is very faithful to the book.

I really loved the movie. Excited to read it and have the full context of the book make that closing statement hurt even more.

Because I've only watched that one and OP never specified.

Pleb alert! Pleb alert!

wow Lit is a fucking shithole, some of the comments here are pure elitist bullshit

like WHAT buddy?

Waring, I am very bad at literary/film analysis and have some very weird ideas about blade runner so I might be very wrong.

While I don't find anything wrong at all with the theme that the robots are people too (you can make anything sound stupid if you state it point blank. A lot happens in the execution) I don't think that's quite the story in Blade Runner/Androids. It's little more difficult than that. The thing about the replicants in the book and first movie is that they are in an uncanny valley of near humanity but they lack certain fundamental characteristics of what we would usually think of as human, like feelings love and empathy. They have sentience, and other feelings like hope, wonder, a desire for freedom, but objectively they are also repugnant and monstrous.

I once thought I read somewhere the the genesis for Androids was partly PKD thinking to himself what made a person participate in the Holocaust. Don't know if that's true at all, but I've internalized it. And therefore I speculate that Blade Runner propose, thought the magic of weird speculative sci-fi, a world with an inverted bizarro Auschwitz. In the bizarro death camp, the victims being mercilessly gassed are all monstrous SS guards, and the concentration camp guards are the jews. Then the story asks you, "so do you still have a problem with dehumanization and industrialized death camps or was it just used on the wrong type of people?"

The replicants are not good people like you or me who just need a little love and understanding. Here I disagree with the other poster a bit, but one of the interesting things about the movie and book is that Deckard is never really shown as wrong or particularly regretful for "retiring" replicants. He really does seem to regard it as taking out the trash. The series doesn't end with him learning that robots are just like him. He never thinks that. Maybe they're worthwhile, maybe he is one, but they are never the same thing as human. Nor is society shown as wrong for killing/destroying renegade repilcants. They are dangerous sociopaths and they actually do nothing good throughout the movie, though they are potentially sympathetic in their passion. The one naive human they meet that wants to be their friend out of sheer good will and admiration is merely callously used.

To me the point isn't about universal humanity but that what seems like clear considerations of humanity and good moral living are actually quite murky and unsure.

Movie skips the religion subplot which is the best part. PKD is one of my favorite authors and I consider this possibly the best thing he has ever written. Its worth picking up, and if you are a sci-fi fan it's a must read. The reason his writing can feel janky at points was because PKD was literally crazy and on drugs; makes for top notch sci-fi.

...

Neither of those things you wrote about are in the movie at all.
Your interpretation is closer to the novel but still pretty one-sided.

I know he was into Gnosticism later in his life but how much was he influenced by German idealism?
I know he knew German and was pretty into their culture. A lot of the concepts he deals with in his work are as incomprehensibly abstract as the concepts German idealists dealt with.