What did you like best? Blade Runner, Total Recall, Imposter, Paycheck, or Minority Report?

BladeRunner is still the best PKD movie adaptation though Minority Report - which I'm going to start reading soon - was very enjoyable and gets a second place node.

Yes, Blade Runner started the whole thing! What about the book, did you like it?

My second fave is Minority Report, although Total recall was great fun, and a cool Arnie experience.

Paycheck was a bust, really. Thirteenth Floor was a better PK Dick movie, even though he had nothing to do with it.

I did not see Imposter, so can't comment here yet.

I just read BladeRunner and I'd say it isn't as good as the movie but I need to read it again.

The director's cut of the movie, while missing the voice over that I liked from the theatrical release, added the key scenes that indicate that Rick Deckard is a replicant as well. You can also see this in the theatrical version but it isn't as obvious.

The book, at least on first reading, seemed to definitively say that Deckard was human. I think the added twist by the movie version enhances the story.

I need to re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the original basis of Blade Runner) - I haven't read it in a while. But I just re-read

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale
Imposter
The Minority Report
Paycheck

which were the inspirations for Total Recall/Imposter/Minority Report/Paycheck. Out of the four, Imposter as a movie was most true to the base story and in fact added extra dimension to the story while remaining true. So I think Imposter was by far the best of those four in that sense. I love all four movies in general, but the other 3 made some HUGE deviations from the base story, to the point of completely rearranging the entire theme. It would be like having a novel about Star Wars, and then doing a movie version but in the movie version the Empire wins because it was restoring order.

I put my notes here -

http://www.lisashea.com/hobbies/pkdick/

I'll add my notes on Blade Runner when I'm able to reread that story, I think my sister took that book to read it.

My memories of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was that it began with a very cool scene of Deckard's wife using a machine that chose her emotion for the moment. She chose to be sad sometimes to keep a 'full range' and Deckard didn't understand this - he figured if you could choose, why not just be happy all the time? And she thought this wasn't very healthy. Which is very intriguing given our Prozak nation status. I don't remember the exact details of the rest of the story, so I want to read it before making my comparison. My memory is that the movie varied widely from the story's plotline so I want to see if that memory is true.

BTW Thirteenth Floor wasn't based on a Philip K Dick story. It was based on Simulacron-3 which was written by Daniel F Galouye. I think it was written bacy in '64 which was before Dick wrote many of his stories.

Hey, Lisa, I was making a joke about 13th Floor. I know he didn't write it. I just think he would have liked it.

Ah, ok, yes Philip K Dick claims many inspirations for his writing and undoubtedly that was one of them. Dick was more of a philosopher than most other sci fi writers though, he would have loved the Matrix trilogy with all of its layers and layers and symbols.

I got another copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep last night from Borders, having somehow misplaced my original, and re-read it. I put my notes up on that and Blade Runner here -

http://www.lisashea.com/hobbies/pkdick/bladerunner.html

I've somehow also lost my DVD of Blade Runner (methinks I lent both to someone and forgot who) so I'll have to get a new copy of that from Amazon and rewatch it. But my general recollection seems to have been right on - that the book was fantastically layered, and the movie barely scratched the surface of what was discussed and even those few tiny parts it explored it didn't get quite right.

I love Blade Runner as a movie, with its Film Noir atmosphere. I loved all the Sam Spade movies and in essence Blade Runner is a film noir set in the future. But the actual story is about as basic as you can get, something that *any* sci-fi writer could have written. It's the tale of Data from Star Trek. Dick had SO many other layers in his story that were completely abandoned, so they lost the meaning in the translation. I'm happy at least that the movie has convinced thousands of people to go back and read the original story though, which is a story you could easily read once a year and get a new insight out of each time <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />