Sure, I have fond memories of the Gil Gerard Buck Rogers movie and TV show, and as a kid I loved the so-bad-it’s-good Flash Gordon movie with the Queen soundtrack.
And if you haven’t read it, the novel version of 2001 — which was actually a short story in 1948 but came out in novel form after the movie — is actually a lot more optimistic than what Kubrick did with it. And by the way, Kubrick’s version is incredible, although not the kind of movie I run back to very often. Too ominous.
For my money, the best prose-to-visual translation of sci-fi begins and ends with Blade Runner, from Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?
The next question becomes … which version of Blade Runner? And my answer is … all of them.
They each have their subtle distinctions, and I’m not going to get into those now, but as a stand-alone, 2-hour movie, I just love the atmosphere, the noir tone, and the underlying question of what it means to dream.
And rarely has Harrison Ford been better.
It’s the kind of movie — and role — where I wish there had been an entire detective series of movies, with Harrison Ford essentially playing Humphrey Bogart, only in a hardcore, sci-fi setting.
There are plenty of other great sci-fi movies, but when we’re talking adaptations, for me … it’s all about Blade Runner.
I’ll never look at origami the same way again …
I love Blade Runner, but to this day I want to know the in-universe reason why replicant-killers are called Blade Runners in the first place. (The real-world version, of course, being that they had the rights to an unrelated work of that name, plus it sounds cool.) I remember first reading a passing reference to the upcoming film in some Starlog article about Harrison Ford, and assuming it would have something to do with smuggling swords.