Blade Runner: Book vs. Movie
Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner adapts Philip K. Dick's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Harrison Ford plays a hunter of fugitive replicants in a future Los Angeles.
From Books Adapted
What changed from the book
The android hunt loses much of Deckard's everyday world
The movie takes the novel's hunt for escaped androids through its conclusion, but changes the world around it. The story moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Deckard's marriage is left out, along with the religion of Mercerism and its shared experiences of empathy.
Animals also matter much more in the book. Extinction has made living creatures expensive possessions, with artificial animals available to people who cannot afford them. Dick noticed that this theme was missing when he read the screenplay.
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Roy saves Deckard in an ending the book does not have
The novel's confrontation with Roy Baty is much shorter than the movie's pursuit through the building and onto the roof. It does not give him the role of saving Deckard's life.
The movie's Roy Batty chooses to rescue the man hunting him, despite his own approaching death. The book follows the hunt with Deckard's continuing questions about empathy and Mercerism.
About the book and the movie
- Author
- Philip K. Dick
- Year
- 1968
- Pages
- 241Buy book
- Audiobook length
- 9 hr 12 minGet audiobook
- Narrator
- Scott Brick
On an Earth depleted by nuclear war, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hopes his next assignment will earn enough money to replace his electric sheep with a living animal. He must track down escaped androids whose outward resemblance to humans makes them difficult to identify. As the hunt proceeds, the empathy tests that distinguish hunter from hunted offer less reassurance than he expects.
- Director
- Ridley Scott
- Writer
- Hampton Fancher, David Peoples
- Year
- 1982
- Runtime
- 1 hr 52 minWatch on Amazon
- Cast
- Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
- Genre
- action, Crime, crime drama, crime thriller, cyberpunk, Drama, dystopian, film noir, neo-noir, science fiction, tech noir, Thriller
- IMDb
- View on IMDb
In a rain-soaked Los Angeles, former blade runner Rick Deckard is brought back to hunt escaped replicants, artificial people forbidden on Earth. Their leader, Roy Batty, is searching for a way beyond the lifespan built into his body. An encounter with Rachael, a woman whose memories conceal her origins, complicates Deckard's work of deciding who is human and who must be killed.
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