50 Greatest Movie Scenes Ever
8. Tears In The Rain - Blade Runner
Much like those tears, our very perception of humanity is washed away as Roy Batty extends his hand to save the life of the man, Rick Deckard, who considers his a defective abomination to terminate as administrative duty.
A cloudburst of rain falls over the hyper-industrialised techno landscape. The otherworldly, futuristic synthesisers so alien in their menace recede into the mix, replaced by tinkling piano classical in composition. Rutger Hauer, mirroring the autonomy of his replicant character, delivers _that_ improvised, iconic spiel aching in its beauty.
Sound; vision; the high watermark of acting performance: humanity supplants the artificial in something so moving it makes us question everything. Roy Batty redeems himself from eye-gouging horror to something more human than human, his soul visible behind the ice-cold blue eyes that so perfectly cast him as a replicant. Batty in this moment is every poor creature you have ever judged, and this scene, in its framing of another world and portrayal of emotional complexity, is the conclusive distillation of cinema’s magic.
“Time to die,” Batty says, pointedly. He does not use the “retire” euphemism, because that’s what it is, ultimately; a verbal means of obscuring the dark heart of the creator refused, poignantly, by the creation.
[Michael Sidgwick]