Tears In The Rain

"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. Time to die."

The year is 2019. This was the year in which Blade Runner was set. Flying cars are still being somewhat ineffectively engineered. You can still wander around Los Angeles on any given day without a trench coat or umbrella with a neon handle. Sure, there are plenty of similarities to the mixmaster dialect spoken in Ridley Scott's film, Somali, Russian, Japanese, Arabic: the sound of most any big city in the United States these days. As for the robots, pardon me, replicants? They're still in development.

Roy Batty is not. Roy has gone to that place where Nexus 6 replicants go. He certainly outlived his four year lifespan, on one particular timeline. Rutger Hauer, the man who played Roy lived to be seventy-five earth years old. Maybe he was a Nexus 8.

He certainly had a pretty amazing name. It always sounded to me like it should have been the name of a pistol carried by Nazi officer. But since he was of Dutch extraction, that would probably be a little indelicate. I remember him from Ladyhawke as well. And The Hitcher. And Nighthawks. Rutger was your go-to bad guy in the 1980's. In 1992 he had taken a back seat to Luke Perry and Paul Reubens, but he was still menacing as the vampire Buffy needed to kill. 

But mostly, he was Batty. Trapped in a world that he never wanted to serve, Roy just wanted to live one more day. His motivations were, at times questionable, but he faced his end with courage and conviction, and a little bit of maniacal laughter. 

Rutger Hauer was not just an onscreen bad guy. He was an environmentalist and philanthropist, who started his own Starfish Association, " dedicated to providing help, attention and care to children

and pregnant women with HIV/AIDS, as well as educating communities about this disease." Not such a bad guy, after all. He helped us see things we wouldn't believe. He stomped on the Terra and elsewhere in the galaxy. He will be missed. Aloha, Herr Hauer.