Perfect Movie Scenes - Blade Runner

Such a cool looking movie. Blade Runner was based off one of my all-time favorite books, a little somethin somethin called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

This is just my opinion, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who would say the title is too long, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADOES) is possibly the greatest book title of all time. Some of the other competing titles? Much Ado about Nothing, To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, and how about another Phillip K. Dick book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

It isn't make-up. He actually
looked like that.

DADOES was definitely too long a title for the semi-literate crowd of Hollywood, so Blade Runner became the working title that worked itself into the actual title of the movie, which is just fine because the story in the movie has only a cursory resemblance to the story you read in the book. What Stanley Kubrick (the director) got right was the feel of the book, and that was more than enough.


The perfect movie scene in Blade Runnder comes as much from the casting director as from Stanley Kubrick or the writers, David Peoples and Hampton Fancher. Whoever the casting director was, he or she chose Rutger Hauer to play the warrior replicant Roy Batty, a being of wrath who has returned to earth with other replicant friends to try and find a way to extend their life.

Roy is a human creation, almost indistinguishable from his creators, who in the end is clearly the most human of any other character on the stage.

Through the movie, Harrison Ford's character, Rick Deckard, kills each of Roy's friends, one after the other, but at the end is about to fall to his death from atop a high rise as Roy watches. It is a moment where feelings of just desserts would be justified.

This is the perfect moment.

And it isn't just Rutger Hauer. The setting on the roof is chaotic and ugly, the rain unrelenting, seeming to push the characters along in a torrent. The action and build-up to this denouement has the viewer on the edge of his seat. It's wonderful. This is where Hauer knocks it out of the park. He saves Deckard, the real killer, and then he tells him what the world is about to lose.


"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter int he dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain."

And then Roy dies.

Rutger Hauer apparently added that last line of the monologue himself. The "tears in the rain" is all his. I read this on the Internet so it must be true.

Note that I don't shorten Rutger Hauer's name to "Hauer" or "Rutger." I can't. The name is just so cool. Rutger freakin' Hauer. If I was a bad guy and I found out Rutger Hauer was after me I'd wet myself, even if I didn't know who Rutger Hauer was.

Anyways, things being lost in time like tears in the rain, that's a line that belongs in a "Somebody else thought of that" post. I would love to have that line forever associated with my name.

The scene on the roof has all the elements of greatness in it. Beauty that is just barely able to rise above a bitterness that destroys all else. Perfect.