Wonder Woman

[kandrathe]

I have never seen Bladerunner before. Is it worth a watch, i.e. does it hold up to modern cinema in terms of a good story? I also want to see Ghost in the Shell. I guess those both fall under sci-fi, and not superhero, so I guess I'm derailing the thread right now, lol.

I'm usually dubious of films derived from books, although they tend to have better themes, they also try to cram too much story into too short a time. The original Bladerunner was derived from a Philip. K. Dick short story, so has the best of just enough story, and plenty of time to tell it. It had a great cast, and was passionately directed by Ridley Scott, even so the film started at 4 hours before editing and creative control was wrested from Scott.

Philip K. Dick first came up with the idea for his novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' in 1962, when researching 'The Man in the High Castle' which deals with the Nazis conquering the planet in the 1940s. Dick had been granted access to archived World War II Gestapo documents in the University of California at Berkley, and had come across diaries written by S.S. men stationed in Poland, which he found almost unreadable in their casual cruelty and lack of human empathy. One sentence in particular troubled him: "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children." Dick was so horrified by this sentence that he reasoned there was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote it. This led him to hypothesize that Nazism in general was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word human could not be applied to them; their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick reasoned they couldn't be referred to as human beings, even though their outward appearance seemed to indicate that they were human. The novel sprang from this. And, interestingly enough, it is now thought that some people are "Occupational Psychopaths" due to low-functioning amygdala, the fear centres of the brain's limbic system.

I would like to see the original 4 hour version, before it was repackaged with the voice over.