Caly, Mithala's first priest

my design for king deshret

I've watched it two or three times. First time I thought it was awesome, later I watched it for my science fiction film class in uni after previously reading Electric Sheep for a lit class, and I was shocked at how much I disliked it. I think the plot point of Deckard wanting an animal was brought up briefly in the film? But for book Deckard it's his entire driving motivation and reason for being in his line of work! Not just that but it's missing a key part of the worldbuilding: there are no animals left, only artificial copies. This is so essential to the Themes And Such that cutting it effectively guts the novel's entire message. At its core Electric Sheep is a rumination on the world of the cold war and the fear of nuclear war. It's the idea of nuclear weapons taking our humanity, and beyond that the destruction they wreak permakilling every ecosystem on Earth. Deckard's journey then is about acceptance that artifical life is in its own way life, and even in the abscence of humanity once its taken away thanks to technology we can still hang on to ourselves, even in a world where the notion of the self has changed entirely. Once you figure out he's a replicant it completely recontextualizes his desire to find an animal, and adds a tragic irony to the fact he's never able to do so!

Like all good science fiction Electric Sheep is about its present, yet speaks to universal themes that continue to resonate for readers in the future. Blade Runner on the other hand suffers from the issue many other sci fi films do, it presents a decaying and decadent megacity while also being obsessed with the spectacle and grandeur of it. The dystopia is centered not on the mass death of nuclear weapons but on much more 80s fears: the city as a corrupting force, urban crime and the infection of alien oriental values on the American cityscape. As an adaptation it fails because it half-heartedly speaks to the novel's themes while in actuality being about wholly different themes that are much less interesting by virtue of the fact it is juggling both at once.

I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion but Blade Runner 2049 is a much better movie. Villeneuve represents the ecological aspect of Electric Sheep better through the many scenes of gray barren landscape and clear demonstrations of how awful their agricultural yields are. It's lacking the animals but this is fine since it's an original story and not an adaptation. We know from the start K is a replicant, and the question instead becomes could he actually be human? Not literally but through the idea of him experiencing a human birth from the womb of another replicant, thereby granting all of them life free of any human-built artificiality. It's in conversation with the novel's conclusion, not only do the electric things have their lives as paltry as they are but they can fight for the right to those lives, they can assert their equality and even superiority over their creators. This is also in Blade Runner through Roy, who if you can't tell is IMO the only redeeming part of that movie. It would have been 100x better with him as the lead. 2049 does it better because K gets a similar tragically ironic conclusion. He's not the special chosen replicant who grants them the right to life, only a cog in the machine even once he betrays his creators. His purpose is to be a side character in the stories of others, to follow orders, to fulfill an ordained purpose until his time is up. He's a great audience surrogate then because he fails to really fit in among either humans or replicants. 2049 continues the conversation by saying the electric things have individual lives than can differ and conflict with other electric things. He's an everyman in the truest sense of the word. That's why Ryan Gosling is such a perfect casting, and he's certainly remained in our hearts as Mr. Literally Me because of it.

They’re so unserious. I thought it was going to be news about Reuenthal’s rebellion…

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