I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All
those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I suppose I watched
Blade Runner two or three times before I finally came to view this very brief soliloquy by the replicant as one of the key thematic moments of the film.
Hauer, director Ridley Scott, and screenwriter David Peoples asserted that Hauer wrote the "Tears in Rain" speech... In his autobiography, Hauer said he merely cut the original scripted speech by several lines, adding only "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain" although the original script, displayed during the documentary, before Hauer's rewrite, does not mention "Tanhauser Gate"...
Hauer said that these final lines showed that Batty wanted to "make his mark on existence... the robot in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of."
When Hauer performed the scene, the film crew applauded and some even cried. This was due to the power of the dying speech coming at the end of an exhausting shoot.
Unless I'm going crazy, he doesn't actually say "Time to die" in the linked video.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_saUN4j7Gw&feature=related
Above is a link to almost the exact same clip except that he does say it. Perhaps the linked version isn't from the director's cut?
There are, I think, six or seven different versions of the movie. I decided to embed the full text even though it didn't match the version used for this video.
DeleteAfter thinking about it some more, I've decided to remove the "time to die" phrase as being only tangentially related to the message.
DeleteYep, awesome
ReplyDeleteDialogue points: when Roy says "tears in rain" he is crying, while it is raining.
ReplyDelete"Time to die" is what the other replicant, Leon, says to Deckard, intending to kill him, moments before Rachel shoots Leon with Deckard's gun.
The fact that every replicant has a 'time to die' programmed in to him or her from the moment of inception, is one of the main themes of the film. "I want more life, fucker!" is what Roy says to Eldon Tyrell, the inventor of replicant technology. But in the end, he doesn't get any more life.
Thanks, anon. I've deleted Leon's words from the embedded text.
DeleteI love this scene, especially the dove the flies up after the "robot" dies. I have always taken that as a sort of hint that the replicants had spirits, and that life did not necessarily cease upon death.
ReplyDeleteThat's my take, anyway. :)
I agree it was not coincidental.
DeleteIndeed, one of the best scenes in sci-fi movie history, and no doubt adding to the reasons Blade Runner was recently voted - correct me if I'm wrong - by some group, somewhere, as the best sci-fi film of all time. Just remembering this sequence makes me want to see the whole film again, but WHICH version??!! I never knew there was more than one. Ridley Scott must hate it that he didn't have the final say because it was HIS film. Novelists or classical composers didn't have various versions of their creations, if you know what I mean. An official concert of Beethoven's fifth and someone put an organ part in it, or a saxophone solo by ...?
ReplyDelete