Last night I finally sat down with my friend Paul and watched Blade Runner, which I had picked up at Walmart for something like $3 on some random night of spending money in corporate America.

Ridley Scott has attempted to take the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and turn it into a blockbuster, but in my opinion, it lacks a lot of things from the original novel.

First, I was very surprised at the darkness of the film — the entire environment was very dark; although, when I thought about it, it reminds me of almost every single film around that time period (1982 is the date of the movie) that deals with futuristic times. Dark times have fallen on the Earth and it can’t reach its beer.

Secondly, it was very, very slow. There were huge parts of just scenery shots and not much else. The dialog was pretty sparse, given that the novel has a goodly portion of speaking and much that lends to the story, I’m not sure of Scott’s motivation on this one. Harrison Ford plays Decker, the main character, but I was unimpressed. While Decker in the book is a clever, forward-thinking, alert fellow, always watching his back and suspicious of anyone and anything, Ford played the character like a guy who just woke up from an afternoon nap and had to give a history exam to a bunch of squealing cheerleaders. The role was hurting him, I believe, which is rather unlike him and certainly not like the original Dick character.

Ford also fudged the dichotomy of the man whose job it was to kill the Replicants and the guy who started to have feelings for them (in particular, the girl who was cute). The scene where he holds her and tells her to beg him to kiss her was just —– forced. That’s the best word for it. I’ve seen more passion in a grapefruit.

Rutger Hauer played the Replicant Roy, supposedly a military-issue combat-ready robot. While he played the part lovely throughout the movie, there were points at which he showed emotion that was, frankly, shocking. I wouldn’t have expected it out of his particular character, as it was painfully cold in the worst of times but suddenly he got emotional about killing his maker and about dying himself. I’m still not sure whether to cheer for the interesting twist on the story or to boo at the interpretation of the character itself. Undecided.

One last criticism — there wasn’t nearly enough philosophy in it. I’m a guy who loves it when the director takes the pending philosophical angles of a situation in a movie and exploits them for all the mind-twisting he can, and Scott just didn’t. Dick comes up with all sorts of questions in the novel, but Scott doesn’t hit many. Some he touches but only barely, not really scraping their surface until they bleed nicely. A pity; it was like Matrix II and III — the first one hit the issues nicely, the others just died into a heap of kung fu and other action shitola.

Now, after all this, you would probably think that I hated the movie, but that isn’t true. I liked it quite a bit, but for reasons other than what I stated above. First, although the extreme darkness went against what I feel Dick was going for in the novel, I loved it nonetheless. The oppressive depth of despair that everything seems to be shoved into it just glittering in its own, sadistic sort of way. Secondly, as Paul iterated, the scenery is very, very detailed. Scott spent an awful lot of time getting everything in this futuristic world to line up and look great, and that is much appreciated.

So, in the end, a classic movie to be enjoyed by hackers and other people of that sort, but falls short of the novel IMHO. Recommend you watch the movie first so you don’t get too disappointed in the end.