Jane Smiley's a Thousand Acres: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries) Book

This book couldn't have been much better titled. 'Retrofitting' refers to tacking on new technology (or whatever) to the old to update/change/modify/what-have-you the old stuff without doing anything to it. That's exactly what this collection of essays does: it takes what was clearly just a cobbled-together science-fiction entertainment that happened to be beautifully made, and nails on a few more planks of symbolism and analysis that are most often unbecoming. The essays themselves range from painfully overwritten academic treatises by the appropriate eggheads, to a haphazard 'take that, little sister' snipe from an undergrad. In the middle of all this, all of which tend to ignore the technical aspects of the film (best left to Sammon's 'making of' book), is the minor treasure that is William Kolb's timecoded trivia-track commentary to the Criterion laserdisc. This piece, though, is not in keeping with the ivory-tower tone of the rest of the book, and is not really anything more than geek culture pandering.
While there are interesting comments on various aspects of the film herein, for the most part I found more interesting notes on things the writers couldn't have dreamt was coming in their own futures (e.g., the changes in technology right around the bend; Scott's eventual repeated tampering with a film he released in a 'final, director-approved' version already; the future of the Star Wars series...). Unfortunately, these essays provide no real in-depth insight into the film, only manage to expound on the already obvious elements any fan of Blade Runner has already taken in.
Strangely, the Bibliography provided some of the most entertaining reading here, showing how almost universally panned this movie was on release.
Not a book I'd recommend to even more hardcore Blade Runner fans than me.