but as is said, the book and the film is in fact quite different in many aspect other than the general background. i think the most obvious and significant difference is (not the plots but) the theme expressed.
i love the film though it is depressive, i love the book more because it is even more depressive. (and maybe i just love depressive stuffs which finally leads to my depression - -.) we will not forget the words roy baty said in the film:
all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain, time to die.
and when i checked the 1982 version, i found that rick deckard did have a comment on it:
he took all the time he had as though he loved life very much. every second of
it, even the pain. then he was dead.
i decide this is what the film wants to say, the love to life, to the life we have, or had. it must be heartbreaking that you realised that you are a replicant and only have four year to live, and it must be even more heartbreaking that you have the emotion to feel the heartbreaking feelings. perhaps it is correct that replicants should not have emotion, they shouldn't be able to love. it is not cruel, because without emotion, cruel is nothing.
and in the book, things are getting worse. the characters inside seem more cryptic, i cannot really think of the personality of every single character. and worse, they themselves cannot, either. the way of 'recognise that you're alive' is meaningless. even rick deckard could not be sure that he was human but not a humanoid android. and the rachel was not the good girl in the film. she did something humanoid, she seemed to have humanoid emotion, but everything was faked. every single thing in the book was faked, electric, and getting worse even. androids could only live for four years, because of the problem of cell replacement, not the evil purposes of human beings.
PDK really did a great job. he seems to focus more on the essence of an entity. do androids have soul? do they think and love as human? do they dream? and do they have the emotion of sympathy towards the living creatures? we never know. i cannot know weather they loved life or not. maybe they did, maybe not. but one thing i am sure is that they do have their own 'free will' and, in other words, they have their 'souls'. but are these souls the same as the ones belong to human beings? are electric animals still animals?
isn't it much more depressive to doubt your existence than losing your life? i say yes. and this is the reason why i love the book even more than the film.
