>>24524410Ubik is the best.
>it's so much weaker than the movieI love Blade Runner, but the book is deeper and more profound. Like most film adaptations, it drained a lot of spiritual and Platonic themes from Dick's work.
The movie is uniquely a "film noir." That's great, but not exactly what the book is, and I think people go into the book and don't register the big plot points.
The movie gets hung up on anthropomorphism, and the android question. In the movie, the replicants seem like unrecognized humans, enslaved niggers in the future. Like most Hollywood films, it overemphasizes a more mundane open question. Are these robots people?
In the book, it's not really an open or existential question. The androids are basically soulless robots who mimic humans but don't understand them, or even life itself. By the end, we realize that Deckard was just being tricked by robotic simulacra.
In the movie, "humans" are basically inhuman who don't care and robots are the real people. it has some great stuff, but departs from what the book was doing. In the book, the humans are projecting their own humanity onto artificial things. The human soul is so powerful that it even becomes illuminated by an artificial religion.
At least, that's how I see Deckard's view of Mercerism in the end. For me, the real open question is whether Deckard actually became enlightened in a real way at the end, or if he was just being tricked yet again by another gnostic ghoul: an artificial religion.
There's so much stuff here that's in the book, but just isn't in the movie. Maybe the audience doesn't get it, or the film crew. I love RIdley Scott, but half of his films are shit, despite making some of the greatest films ever like Alien and Blade Runner.
