Philip K Dick - A Comics Biography

In PKD Territory

Philip K Dick -
A Comics Biography
by Laurent Queyssi & Mauro Marchesi
Nbm graphic novels
Isbn 9781681121918

I’ve read a couple of biographies about my favourite writer over the years (although I’ve not revisited his novels for quite a few decades now... I need to let them back into my life). This one kind of wormed its way into my field of vision as I was perusing the graphic novels and trade paperbacks at Foyles earlier this year and I thought, wow, a comic book version of his life... I’m in.

I was late when I came to Philip K. Dick. It wasn’t ‘til the release of Blade Runner at cinemas in 1982 that I read the original novel of that one, straight after the movie, at the age of 14. Over the next year I acquired and read, almost exclusively from second hand bookshops, maybe 40 or more of his novels and also his collected short stories. Sometimes his concepts were challenging... certainly to a teenager... such as, in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, the concept of Mercerism and the empathy boxes... but the ideas and moods in his books are amazing so he’s always remained my favourite over the years.

This comic book version of his life, Philip K Dick - A Comics Biography, is obviously not going to be as detailed or hang together as much as a formally written biography but it does bring together a fairly nice impression, from first and second hand anecdotal evidence, of the man. I mention my own introduction to his writing because of how this graphic novel begins, with Phil travelling to California in December 1981, to visit Ridley Scott who, after some strong misgivings from Dick (left out, the book is necessarily very subjective of how it paints its pictures, so to speak), screens a show reel of assorted parts of the film Blade Runner, around 20 minutes, for him. Two panels in this book show the Off World blimp and the scene where Deckard is running across the rooftop near the end of the movie. Whether these were actually included in that show reel is anybody’s guess but I think this is all Dick got to see of the film which would bring him, posthumously, a whole new surge of interest.

We then jump to Jan 17th 1982, when Phil collapses and is taken to hospital... it’s from this point that the book looks back at the author’s life, segueing from year to year with little and sometimes important moments that build up a picture of the man (for better and worse), every now and again returning to the hospital bed as Phil replays his life before his second, fatal stroke in that same hospital a short time after.

And it’s really nice, starting with the death of his twin sister when they were still babes in arms and showing him put into an incubator to try and save his life, his high school in Berkeley, his job at a record store, his recognition by peers when walking around a sci-fi con when he was just starting out with getting short stories published in magazines by the likes of Anthony Boucher and, later, Harlan Ellison, how he met and broke up with his five wives... and so on.

The art is simple and stunning at the same time and the writer and artist occasionally imbue the images with the same kind of blend of reality and otherwordliness (or perhaps ersatz intrusions might be the best way of describing some of these), such as when he’s reaching into his medicine cabinet to grab some more pills to fuel his writing binge (he wrote and published five novels in one year at one point) but then spraying them with a handy bottle of UBIKTM before he takes them.

And of course, we also have the problematic moments such as the “I was molested as a child” possibility, the visit from the FBI, the break in and burglary of his house and, ultimately, the pink light VALIS experience and his subsequent exegesis. The problematic issues are rendered without any judgement, also showing how he saved his sons life as a toddler due to one of his ‘visions’, accurately predicting a defect he could have no way of knowing and getting the child to a doctor in time. Alongside things such as his struggle to have his ‘serious’ non-sci-fi work published, which bothered him a lot. Frankly, I read those novels when they were finally published posthumously and I loved them as much, if not more, than his speculative fiction. I think he was definitely ahead of his time with his ‘real life’ novels too.

It’s, somewhat of a ramshackle and sad life when you see it represented in these kinds of short and wonderfully illustrated bursts that show the highlights (and lowlights) of a life which was rooted in the mundane but lived out in a realm that, perhaps, only he could see. Whether his long experiences with his visions were a real, mystical phenomenon or just another series of drug flashbacks over the years is anybodys guess and, again, not judged by the steady tone of this comic.

And I think that’s all I really want to say about Philip K Dick - A Comics Biography other than it’s absolutely excellent and even if, like me, you already know a lot of the writer’s personal story, it’s a unique and enriching way of giving the reader a quick overview and I’d recommend this one to anybody who loves Dick’s work. Really glad I picked this one up.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? The Comic

Look Before You Sheep

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
The Comic - Boom Studios
24 issues 2009-2010
Art by Tony Parker, Adapted from Philip K. Dick

Wow. It’s not that often I get on board with comic book adaptations but this one is absolutely amazing in the ways it’s both faithful and unfaithful to the original source material. Hopefully when I elaborate on the various qualities of the comic, that comment will become clearer.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is probably my favourite novel. I read it maybe ten times over the decade after I first discovered it which was, I’m sure to nobody’s surprise, the week after the movie adaptation, Blade Runner (which is my favourite movie and which I reviewed here) was released in cinemas here in the UK, back in 1982. The first time I read it I had a hard time with it, in some ways (although I loved Dick’s way of expressing himself in words right off the bat). My biggest criticism of the film after first reading it was that it was nothing like the original novel. It wasn’t too long, however... and after a couple more read throughs... that I realised that, actually, the novel was only different in specific sequences of what is actually going on in a scene from moment to moment. There are literally, if you take adaptation as purely that, only two scenes from the novel translated in the movie.

However, by the time I’d finished my degree course in Graphic Design and wrote (and completed a year before deadline... I was that into it) my final major thesis on the specific ways in which the movie actually was, in spirit, a very faithful adaptation to many of the concepts inherent in the original novel, I was completely sold on both the film and the source and how well they complemented each other.

Of course, that still left me with the concept I found the hardest thing to fathom the very first time I read the book... Mercerism.

The empathic religious union which is one of the main concerns of the novel, where people grip the twin handles of their ‘empathy box’ and ‘merge with Mercer’... an old man who rises from the ‘tomb- world’ and tries to reach the top of a mountain while stones are lobbed at him... was nowhere to be found in the movie. Or was it? I think it could be argued that the Voight-Kampff test based on both empathy and the other driving force of the novel - the responsibility to look after the last surviving animals on the planet or, if you can’t afford one, then to pretend you have one by buying a cheap, electronic simulacrum of one so you don’t seem like an uncaring individual - is as much about the point of Mercerism as anything else.

I’m not going to get in to that argument here though because I’m not talking about the movie version... I’m talking about this comic book version which is, I have to say, pretty much on the nose in terms of capturing the spirit and style of the novel. Of course, half the battle is using a lot of the writer’s original words in both the speech bubbles and in the long stretches of narrative used in the comic but... this rendition really is the closest you can get to reading the original novel if, for some reason, you’ve never read it.

Now the look of some of the characters is interesting here. Many of the those in the movie are not quite the same as in the novel but what the artist, Tony Parker, has done here is to give some (by no means all) equivalent characters a very similar look to what they had in the film. So, for example, even though Deckard is married and a slightly different kind of person in the story, he’s made him look very much like the Harrison Ford version in terms of his dress and hair style etc. Similarly, although genetic designer J. F. Sebastian was originally J. R. Isidore, the low IQ ‘chickenhead’ character and humble employee of the maintenance team who service the electric animals under the disguise of a veterinarian hospital... he looks quite similar here to his movie counterpart. Other characters like Roy Batty look considerably less like those in the film but the artist has definitely gone out of his way to cross pollinate the two worlds - the world of the novel and the world of the film - as much as he possibly can, at least in terms of the visual look of the piece.

And the text is really faithful (just basically taking Dick’s words) with layouts that are simply brilliant. The way vast numbers of narrative panels will butt up against each other and also overlap with speech bubbles is ingenious and he uses the shapes created by these overlapping elements as a way of giving the reader a visual pathway to the order in which to read and decode the page, so to speak. Despite some quite cluttered and beautifully artwork which is quite complex in itself, you never really find yourself getting confused in the narrative space of the thing, even in the specific sections dealing with Mercerism.

In fact, the Mercerism stuff as the artist has chosen to render it here is, if anything, even clearer in terms of how the fusion works because you can see it happening as characters are superimposed or half drawn as Wilbur Mercer in those sequences. And this is what I mean when I say that even where the artist has been unfaithful to the concept, it still ends up retaining the spiritual levity of the original. For example, when I first read the novel back in 1982, the empathy box I visualised was some kind of large cabinet and, to be fair, there were only so many ways to imagine it in those days. In this comic book, Parker has used a TV screen to project the image of Mercer and... a stroke of genius this... where the characters go to ‘grip the twin handles’ of the empathy box, here he’s reimagined it as a kind of modern gaming controller like something you’d find connected to a Playstation console... with the twin handles being the two obvious bits you grip on those controllers. This isn’t something Dick in his time (nor I when I first read it) would have been able to predict or confidentally guess (they didn’t even have the first computer or arcade games when this was written) but it really updates the concept visually so it’s easier for audiences to buy into it. This is complementary, visual storytelling done right.

Similarly, there’s a lot of imagination in the way the worlds, characters and situations are rendered. For example, when the androids in the book are talking about the thriving, black market trade, off-world for pre-colonial fiction, you could only really guess at the kind of thing this could be. Here though, it’s lovingly rendered in allusions to science fiction tales across a range of media from our own past in close parodies showing, for instance, the stratosled rockets from the Flash Gordon serials, a scene from the movie version of The Day The Earth Stood Still and a typical pin-up illustration inspired by Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars novels. Which is a really nice touch and the whole comic is full of these lovely little shout outs.

The artist also comes to a certain kind of compromise as to the make up of the androids. They are kind of a cross between the flesh and blood of the movie versions of the replicants but, again, cross-pollinated with the hard, synthetically wired mechanical Andys of the novel. At first I was a little annoyed about this but then I realised that, while Dick was talking about some quite specific machines here... he was also talking about having to give them bone marrow tests as an alternative way to tell if they were androids so, if anything, the artist has tried to clarify Dick’s thoughts into one, stylistic vision. So, in reflection, I don’t really have a problem with it here.

All in all, then, an absolutely brilliant comic book adaptation and a reading experience which was, almost, as moving as the original novel. Okay, so the other bounty hunter from the completely unknown police department, Phil Resch, was envisaged much harder nosed than I recall him from the book but that’s fine... the points he makes and the ideas that he or Deckard or both may actually be androids (something which is definitively disproven in the novel and this comic because, after all it’s about empathising with them, not becoming them) are all here and the androids, unlike the film, never ultimately come off as superior in their ability to empathise with other beings (or rather, their inability). Arguably, this is one of the elements that makes the film great, the fact that the replicants seem to be morally superior to the majority of the humans that populate the movie but Dick’s original intent... the 'absence of appropriate affect' which he was inspired to write about as this novel after reading an excerpt of a journal of a Nazi prison officer complaining that the noisy screams of the people in his concentration camp were keeping him up nights... is equally as powerful and it’s been faithfully adhered to here.

If you like the original novel, you won’t be disappointed with the comic book version of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? If you’ve never read it and are only familiar with the movie version, I think you’ll find this is a fascinating read which will probably make you want to explore the concept further in the book. Either way, this is an excellent attempt at depicting the world of a novel with some pretty hard to adapt sections. Give it a go if you have some time.

A Life Of Philip K. Dick - The Man Who Remembered The Future

VALIS In Wonderland

A Life Of Philip K. Dick - 
The Man Who Remembered The Future
by Anthony Peake
Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 978-1782122425

“It is sometimes an appropriate 
response to reality to go insane.”

“Reality is that which, when you 
stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

Two famous quotes from Philip K. Dick.

I’ve always had no problem with the attitude of the first statement... even before I'd ever read it I’d kinda twigged that this is as good a way as any to deal with so called life. The second quote, though, has never really been that convincing to me. Reality is really a non-starter of a term for me. It’s not something that I’ve ever really found any credible definition for and I certainly choose not to live in what my senses perceive to be some kind of reality half the time... it’s just not a nice or interesting place to live, if it exists at all, from what I can make out.

That being said, Philip K. Dick has always been my favourite writer since I first discovered him at the tender age of 14 years old. The year was 1982 and, as anyone into science fiction films would be able to tell you, this was the year the first movie of a Philip K. Dick novel had been made and released into the world (although a TV adaptation of one of his short stories had appeared twenty years prior to this). The film, of course, was Blade Runner (reviewed here) and Dick himself, never got to see more than a few excerpts from it... or so I’m informed. He died fairly young, of a heart attack, earlier the same year and there’s an “In memory” credit to him right at the end of the final credit roll of that movie.

Of course, even at that age, I was quick to recognise that Blade Runner was the greatest science fiction film ever made... and there’s nothing else in the intervening decades that have challenged the fact that it’s also the greatest movie ever made, period, for that matter. I immediately wanted to read something by the original author and, of course, the obvious thing was to read the source novel for the movie, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? One concept in that, Mercerism, is a little challenging on a first read but I persevered and then read it again. Many people will recognise that the source material and the movie are worlds apart but, saying that, I spent some time when I was doing my degree in Graphic Design writing a thesis to demonstrate that most of the ideas in the book had, in fact, made it into Ridley Scott’s 'homage' to the original material... but that’s another story. I spent the next couple of years picking up mostly second hand copies of PKDs works and ploughing through almost his entire back catalogue.

Anthony Peake’s relatively new biography of Philip K. Dick was a surprise present given to me by someone for Christmas who knows me well enough to know I loved PKD's work. I wasn’t aware of this one but I had read, many years ago, biographies of Dick by both Gregg Rickman and Lawrence Sutin, if memory serves me correctly. I can’t remember much about them but this new addition both reminded me of some stuff I’d forgotten and, also, made me aware of not just the good things about Dick but, also, the slightly worse sides of his character. Which is something I appreciate as it gives me a more rounded view of him.

Of course, there’s still no getting around the fact that, in the last ten or so years of his life, Philip K. Dick was having regular ‘astral visitations’ following visions of a pink light and talking with something which he referred to as different things throughout his experience but were maybe an expression of God or a God-like being. He wrote about these things in a 'never intended for publication' ongoing work of many thousands of pages which he called his Exegesis (which I tried to read some of decades ago and, well... all I can say about that is that I found it extremely challenging on lots of levels... I should maybe revisit it one of these days).

Or... to put all that another way and to paraphrase Brian Aldiss quoted on Dick in an interview on a documentary I saw about PKD many years ago... he went completely mad.

Now the thing is, you have to remember that, while Dick was no stranger to 'exaggeration' or the 'well decorated half truth', it seems to be quite obvious to anyone who was in his presence at the time that he 'absolutely believed' the things he said were happening to him... which runs the gamut from religious visions, off world knowledge received directly in the brain, premonitions and pre-cognitive states, altered and multiple existing timelines (what he called “orthogonal time”) and into the realm of modern alien abduction theory. Personally I don’t subscribe to this stuff until I see proof other than certain kinds of less solid evidence to back up his claims but, that’s my personal belief based on not knowing the person. I know that he did lie for certain reasons sometimes... although not maliciously, from what I can tell. I also know he took various quantities of psychedelic drugs throughout the years and once made a half hearted attempt at committing suicide.

However, I also know he’s one of the most inventive writers who ever lived and that a lot of the things he 'predicted' in his novels have come to pass in the years since his death. This is not exactly an abnormal phenomenon for science fiction writers but in Dick’s case, someone who wrote about the science of ideas, the mind, the attitudes of those in power and the society we live in... I think it’s quite exceptional as the world is fast becoming the corporate dystopia that he foresaw and it’s often in the details that these things emerge. Details which he highlighted in many of his stories.

Now, the thing is, the biographer Anthony Peake seems to be someone who is qualified to have a more open mind than me when it comes to Dick’s claims about what is sometimes called his VALIS period (Vast Active Living Intelligence System and the name of one of his novels)... which is actually unusual when it comes down to this kind of stuff because, frankly, I believe in ghosts and aliens and related phenomena a lot, as it happens. What impressed me the most about this, though, is that the author will not just push his own agendas and beliefs in his work and, frankly, that’s one of the things I look for a lot and one of the signs of a good writer. You treat everything fairly and indifferently with this kind of project and Peake certainly does that.

For example, in addition to taking Dick at this word, the writer also looks at the various other explanations which could have come into play to make Phil Dick believe these things were going on and there are various ideas around these and some of these were even educational to me personally... I now know I have to look into the fact that each hemisphere of the brain fires neurons at different rates and are unaware of the actions of the other etc. I think this kind of stuff is really fascinating, especially since it means, when certain things come into mental alignment, from what I can make out without looking into it myself, a person can hear himself talking about things which he a) wasn’t aware of knowing and b) isn’t aware of it being him saying them. So he hears voices and, perhaps, many years ago, people who had visions or said they can hear God or an angel speaking to them, may have just been listening in on a conversation they could hear from within themselves... so to speak.

Anyway, whether my interpretation of that stuff is correct or not, Peake is outstanding because he doesn’t take sides as such and presents all the evidence for and against... and there’s not a hell of a lot of it I guess... without pushing the reader into believing any one specific theory about Dick’s experiences. Experiences which came to dominate PKDs later stories and novels to the point that he was sometimes in them as a character, such as a cypher character like Horselover Fat, and sometimes even more than one character having a conversation with another version of himself, if you see what I mean. So novels like VALIS, The Transformation of Timothy Archer and Radio Free Albemuth, for example, are manifestations of the writer trying to deal with whatever he thought was happening to him at any one time... including manifestations of the same stuff which appeared in works much earlier than his actual conscious experience of this whole funny business... which fits into his theories on orthogonal time quite well, I guess, if you want to go down that path.

At the end of the biography, Peake gives an assessment of a personality test which Phil Dick took sometime in the 1950s (I think it was) and, since he is qualified to interpret such things, he does so to give as much of an indication of the man Philip Kendred Dick was as he is able. He also states why someone who may have been obviously trying to rig the test, such as Dick might have been, say as much about themselves from their answers as someone who is answering honestly... so that was quite an eye opener of an idea for me, although I would probably have worked that out myself if I’d thought about that idea for long enough.

Again, in conclusion, Peake point blank states that we will never know for 100% sure what was happening to PKD and how it affected him but, when all is said and done, I found that quite reassuring because, frankly, anybody who claimed differently would probably have lost my respect for them as a biographer. So what I can personally conclude from all this data is that Anthony Peake’s A Life Of Philip K. Dick - The Man Who Remembered The Future is a real corker of a biography and, though I don’t think it stands alone- I think I would recommend that people who are interested in PKD should read a couple of the various biographies available - it’s certainly one I would include on the list as an essential read on the life and works of Philip K. Dick. And that’s probably the finest recognition I could give to a book of this nature, to be honest. Seek it out if the subject matter interests you... you won’t find too many better than this.

Blade Runner

Errors In Replication

Blade Runner
1982 USA/China
Directed by Ridley Scott
Warner Brothers Blu Ray A/B/C

Warning: I doubt if anyone reading this has not seen this masterpiece... but I’m putting this here spoiler warning on, just in case. Also... fair warning, if you’re unfamiliar with the film you may be a bit left out in this article. I’m not going to provide a synopsis... this article is going to be long enough as it is. See one of the cuts of the movie first, then please revisit and read this article again if you have the time.

“They don’t advertise for killers in a newspaper...”

I remember hearing those words for the first time in a cinema in Enfield back in 1982.

Watching the original cut of Blade Runner now, 30 years on, those words still bring a special thrill to me and maybe it’s why the movie in the majority of its subsequent recuts and remixes doesn’t really fill me with the same enthusiasm as this initial version did.. although I’m not at all sure, to be honest, the US theatrical release was the one I actually saw in the cinema that day... my memory tells a slightly different story. But I’ll get to that soon.

I guess it’s hard for people to understand the effect that Blade Runner had on the general population of the movie going planet when it first came out that year, if they weren’t around to see it for themselves... especially now that the movie has become enshrined and recognised as the major artistic work it always was. Some people seemed stunned when you tell them just how badly it was received... or to be more precise... just how indifferently.

Here’s what happened back in 1982...

I was at school (school is something you should never subject children to, for the record) and I used to buy, whenever I could find them, two magazines which kept me fairly up to date with what was my version of the news... the British magazine called Starburst, which I’d been buying on and off (mostly off, as I never had any money) since its first issue, and the classier and slightly bulkier American equivalent of this magazine which had been going for a lot longer, known as Starlog. Now Starlog always used to get the inside dope on movies long before they ever arrived in Great Britain, and sometimes you were left in the cold waiting forever for a film to come out that you read about in Starlog but which, it turned out years later, never got any kind of general release in this country at all (and such was the fate, and why I’ve never seen, a movie I was looking forward to at the time called Heartbeeps... but that’s another story). So for months I was waiting for Blade Runner... but another kid got enthused when his Cinefex magazine arrived and covered the movie, so at least I had someone to talk to about it... although I don’t believe he actually got to see it on its initial release in the end. It didn’t actually stay at the cinema for very long, as far as I can remember.

So anyway, the movie gets quickly released and I go and see it with my parents after school one evening and I really enjoy it. It doesn’t stay for long, as I said, and that’s pretty much the last I hear of it until it comes out on the early VHS sell-through market, a few years later. That’s when I rediscover it again and it really hits me, the second time, just how special it was and why I’d loved it so much the first time around... although one of the things I notice about the VHS version is that it isn’t as violent as when I saw it at the cinema. The scene where Roy Batty squashes Dr. Eldon Tyrell’s eyes back into their sockets seems to cut away (quite poetically, I might add) to an owl looking away from the scene... and another sequence where Deckard “retires” Pris seems to be much less “in your face” too... I remembered a lot more thrashing around and shooting than on that early VHS release and, a few years later, when I get an NTSC US cassette edition of the Criterion edition of the movie, with reinstated violence (this movie had a lot of trouble with the US censors at the time, along with Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan), I realised that this version, known as the international cut, is the one I saw back at the cinema when it first came out. Now I don’t know how that happened because, I’m guessing, the UK would have supposed to have been showing the US theatrical cut... but I’m pretty sure my cinema was somehow showing this slightly longer version... I don’t know how that could have been, it’s just what I remember (it wouldn’t have been the first time my local cinema at the time had been sent the wrong print of a film though, to be sure).

So anyway, from about 1986 onwards, there was a time when me and one of my best mates went a bit Blade Runner crazy. I’d watched and rewatched the old PAL VHS version to death and knew the film and dialogue by heart by that point... but what you have to remember is that in those days, a commercial release of a movie in it’s correct theatrical aspect ratio was the exception rather than the rule... and the initial releases of Blade Runner on tape were, well, no exception. I finally figured out I needed to be seeing the thing in its full 2.35:1 aspect ratio again and I noticed one day in my local paper, that a cinema in Barnet was showing a midnight screening of the film. So me and my friend went and we got hooked all over again. I started scouring the local papers for one-off showings, when they really were one-off showings, and lots more screenings followed. Many of them didn’t finish until 2am in the morning but that was okay, we were pretty dedicated to this movie.

After a while, we realised that a small following of people, many of the same ones, were turning up to these screenings and that it was becoming quite popular as a film in a way in which it never was on it’s actual theatrical release all those years ago (this, of course, contradicts the use of the term cult when used in conjunction with film... popularity rules that clichéd notion right out). I even went to a screening at Hampstead where it screened as the second half of a double bill with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, with Rutger Haur in attendance (he was nice enough to sign my storyboard illustrated screenplay for me, which was good of him).

And then something happened in the USA which put Blade Runner back on the map for the bigwigs in the studio marketing departments who can make a difference... and things changed. The midnight movie and repertory screenings of Blade Runner, which had been quite popular for a few years in the UK, had started to happen in the USA and, quite by accident, an LA theatre accidentally showed Ridley Scott’s original workprint, which he’d used to test screen the movies on audiences prior to recutting and releasing the movie in 1982. It was a big hit... it’s a very “different” Blade Runner experience with vast differences to the original release prints and, in some ways, almost like watching a different movie. My understanding is that, when it caught on that this was a different version of the movie playing, all the fans came out of the woodwork for it and it played to packed theatres for weeks, if not months. The film that was a huge flop on its initial release suddenly seemed to have grown some potent, biomechanically engineered legs for the audience of that particular theatre.

Warner Brothers saw dollar signs and got Ridley Scott to put a directors cut out but, sensing the timing was a “now” thing, the deadline was very tight. All Ridley really had time to do, in my understanding of events, is take off the voice over, add a dopey memory flashback of a unicorn (culled from outtakes of his later film Legend, most likely) and remove the entire original ending coda (half assembled from outtakes of the opening of Stanley Kubrik’s opening sequence for The Shining, as it turns out) and that was that. None of the extra footage and shot alterations etc from the workprint edition made it into this new 1991 “director’s cut”, which Warners managed to turn into a win anyway because, as it happens, the film was really well loved by people after all. A lot of fans of the original cut, myself included, were left a little disappointed, though. Here are the five main reasons why:

1. We liked the voice over... which we do understand was added post-preview, much against Harrison  Ford’s wishes but, whatever you think of it, it does give the original cut a certain hard-boiled film noir quality which really helps it along.

2. It’s been widely reported that the revelation that the Rachel replicant has no built-in four year life span in the end sequence was contradictory to everything we’ve known about the replicants up to that point... not true, actually. This flimsy connection only works if you interpret Harrison Ford’s reluctance to tell Rachel about her files as the knowledge that she will only live for four years... but that’s really not acknowledged. What we do know, from the rest of the dialogue in the film regarding Rachel’s origins, is that she’s a special version, possibly pre-Nexus Six or at least an early version, and quite possibly the first to have false memory implants. The main replicants in the film cannot be fixed because the four year life span engineered into them by the Tyrell Corporation is already in place... to quote Tyrell himself, it “cannot be altered in any way”... nobody says anything about not being able to make them last longer from scratch if they wanted to. In fact, the very necessity of them actually having to be rebuilt with a four year life span implies that they already have done so and then seen the need to add that feature in to iron out certain problems. And so on... I could go on all day (and will if you let me).

3. The awful, awful, badly dubbed and completely out of synch sequence where Deckard interrogates the artifical snake manufacturer wasn’t cleaned up in the slightest.

4. We all love the scene where Deckard shoots Zhora in the back a few times and she smashes through all those windows to her death. Especially when the voice-overs are present. It makes you realise just how human (yeah, human, I said it) Deckard is and helps give you a moral viewpoint of the character in much the same way that the “man with a sack” sequence in Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria gives the character of Cabiria a massive insight into herself. But the thing is, even in this version, that darned stuntwoman who looks nothing like actress Joanne Cassidy, appears to be totally ridiculous and mismatched... especially in that dodgy wig! A hard thing to fix (back then) and we certainly wouldn’t have expected him to be able to fix that one post-release... but then again, who does?

5. Reason number five is the dumb unicorn...

A lot of people who compare the movie to Philip K. Dick’s original source novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? say that the movie is nothing like the book. Well... yes and no. Although the “mission brief” is virtually identical, as is at least one scene, the movie goes its own way and lots of stuff is changed. Deckard is no longer living with his wife, and his motivation for hunting down the andies (short for androids) in the book is because he needs the money to be able to afford to replace his electric sheep with a real, live sheep. Animals are scarce in the future and expensive. It’s a social embarrassment not to be owning a real one though... that would be bad. But most people can’t afford to own a real animal so there’s a thriving trade in fake electric animals which look like the real thing. This is what Deckard desires and it is this kinda stuff which drives humanity. That and their bizarre “religious coupling” with a shared vision of a figure called Mercer, who is about to be debunked on the Buster Friendly vid show any day now. This is the background milieu of the novel... and it’s very potent (if a little hard to grasp, first read around, when it comes to the concept of Mercer) and you can’t fail to be moved by the novel... like a lot of Dick’s writing. The bit where Deckard has finally earned enough money to buy/save a sheep only to have it thrown off the rooftop of his building by one of the androids is absolutely soul crushing and brilliant.

For the movie, Scott loses all the references to Mercerism (which are pretty important in the book) and most of the stuff about the animals. What he retains, however, is the empathy and moral values of the novel... and the importance of the animals The animals are all over the film in the form of references to artificial animals... and I’ve had so many people ask me why all these animal references are in the film. There’s no context to this stuff if you’re an audience unfamiliar with the original novel, you see. You have no way of knowing just how important these things are to the main characters... and so it kinda gets lost in translation... but it’s still there, etched into the celluloid in a way that would be very difficult to eradicate, even if one chose to do so.

The book also has a sequence where Deckard is forced to confront the issue of whether he is an android or not. This is a plot by the androids themselves and, it turns out, Deckard definitely isn’t... as he wasn’t in the original cut of the movie. I believe that the idea that Deckard is a replicant in the movie was never supposed to have been in the final version of the film (contrary to what Scott says about it now) and here’s why:

a. If Deckard was a much earlier model of replicant, he wouldn’t have fake memories and, although he wouldn’t be a match for a Nexus 6, he certainly would be a stronger character against the other humans (none of whom are in any way as human as the artificial replicants in the movie... who are pretty much morally superior when compared against all the “real” people in this movie). And you wouldn’t send out an inferior model of replicant to hunt down Nexus 6 models anyway, would you? Logically.

b. Getting back to the “Rachel is an experimental version” notion, the origami unicorn that gaff leaves at the end of the movie makes perfect sense. He’s basically telling Deckard that he should enjoy his time together with Rachel, because she’s a mythical creature, a soulless machine with the overt appearance of a warm-blooded human. If Deckard believes he can have a life with her, then he’s living a fairy tale... and so he’s welcome to it. That’s Gaff’s take on it anyway and hence, the origami symbolism of the unicorn. A mythical, fairytale creature.

When Ridley Scott adds the “memory” of an actual unicorn to Deckard’s dreams in the later cuts, then this kinda makes those elements I’ve mentioned above look ridiculous, flawed and, basically, as poorly thought out as anything in Scott’s Prometheus. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ridley Scott’s artistic sensibilities and Blade Runner is my favourite movie, but I think the notion that this frail, human being who even, in my favourite moment, drops his apartment key card because Rachel accidentally frightened him in the elevator, is actually a replicant is... more flawed in concept than a poor, genetically hobbled Nexus 6 model’s lifespan. If this is Scott’s choice now, well, all I can say is... Morphology? Longevity? Incept Dates? He don’t know such stuff!*

And then, for the movies 25th year anniversary, five years ago, we have the big box set in variant versions with five cuts in it, including a new, 2007 Final Cut, which is (or was, apparently) his last word on it.

There’s some extra footage in it but, to be honest, not a heck of a lot. The good things about the new cut are that he’s finally fixed the interrogation dialogue with the snake manufacturer and he’s also got Joanne Cassidy back for reshoots which he somehow manages to blend in seamlessly to replace the dodgy wigged stunt girl of all the previous versions. However, as far as the bad stuff goes, all the other complaints I had about the 1991 directors cut asides from these two fixes, still stands. This may be Ridley’s latest Blade Runner... but it’s not mine.

So onto the film itself then... if you really have never seen it and you’ve made it this far into this review, well you need to see it quick. It’s astonishing. The world Scott and his crew of artists and effects teams create is absolutely beautiful. It’s a real, lived in city of the future which, although harkening back to the Fritz Lang classic Metropolis, along with the comic-book art of Meobius, is itself a dazzling achievement and there’s no way that films like The Fifth Element and a whole plethora of science fiction movies right up to the present day would have happened in quite the same way without the influence of this amazing film.

The lighting and design of the shots and the placement of both people and elements within those shots are amazing. The vulnerability of Deckard, the very man sent to take out these super-human beings called replicants, is absolutely an untypical, of the time, character and did a lot, I believe, to relax Hollywood ideas about how emotionally and physically imperfect the main protagonist of your movie is allowed to be.

Vangelis’ score, shamefully unreleased in a proper version (and there have been numerous attempts, believe me), is absolutely sublime and weaves in and out of your mind like an earworm 20 plus years before the term was even invented. The grime and sleaze of the streets and the dregs of humanity who are still living on earth and not in one of the “off world colonies” are all given a poetic and somewhat epic feel by the mise-en-scene in general and it’s lifted to a point where it often feels like you are watching a moving version of a precious painting which should be hung in an art gallery. The poetry of the images matched note by note by the beauty of the scoring and sound design. It’s the film where the term “designer grime” originated.

There are things you’ll notice, too, if you are a fan of movie history. The “Environ Purge” screen that Ridley included in the destruction of “Mother” in Alien is recycled here, as is the Sydney Greenstreet character of The Fat Man from The Maltese Falcon, in the toys in the character, J. F. Sebastian’s apartment (Ridley loves recycling stuff... he even recycles future moments of dialogue from later on in the movie and puts it in as a sound sample in Deckard and Rachel’s Voight-Kampff scene). Loads of little details, some intentional, some not expecting to be caught years later by obsessive watchers of the movie... all of it forms a potent cocktail that will have you reaching to the back of your mouth to rid yourself of the little maggot that was lurking at the bottom of the grimy, cinematic bottle. There aren't many movies since this one which have had all their elements, perfect and imperfect, come together to create such a brilliant and awe inspiring artistic blend as this one.

The new Blu Ray edition has a replica spinner which is a lot different from the version which was released with the American briefcase edition from 5 years ago, but the digital content of the Blu Ray seems to me to be exactly the same. You have the five most important cuts: the Final Cut, the Original Theatrical Cut (which is the one which was regularly shown on its UK midnight movie revival), The International Cut (which is the old Criterion version and the one I believe I actually saw at the cinema in 1982), the Director’s Cut from 1991 (now rendered redundant for so many reasons, as far as I’m concerned) and the original preview Work Print, which is the one that caused all the fuss when it was shown by accident and which is, to say the least, a very valuable edition, featuring longer and alternate versions of some of the scenes and some of the original musical temp tracks, most of which seem to come from Jerry Goldsmith scores such as Planet Of The Apes and Alien. You also have some quite exhaustive documentaries, still galleries, trailers and deleted scenes (which one day make the cut in a “beyond final cut” I would guess). All this stuff is valuable to fans of the film and, even though it’s just a duplicate set, by and large, to what we had five years ago, it’s still something which should be applauded and rewarded with high sales. At least when Ridley Scott revises his films, some may say for the worse, he makes available all his previous stabs so you can experience the version of the film that you want to be seeing at any given time... something that a certain Mr. George Lucas might learn from, is my opinion on that one.

There’s so much stuff I could say about this movie that I could literally go on forever. How about I break the film down into 5 minute sections and write a chapter or two on each? This review is already way too long though so if there’s anything you want to know further to what I’ve written here, please leave a comment/question and I’ll try to get back to you.

One thing I will say, though, is that if you’ve never experienced this movie at a cinema, or even a massive screen, and especially if you’ve never experienced it at all... then I urge you to do so. It’s one of the greatest artistic achievements of 20th Century film art. That comes with the caveat, of course, that you try and see one of the original 1982 cuts first... my understanding of people who have just seen the "director’s cut" blind without having seen the original version are that their experience is far less rewarding without those “dreaded” (to some) voice-over narratives. Whatever you do though... go see it. Every sequence is a learning experience on the art of film.

*With thanks to Chew, as played by James Hong in the movie.