MovieChat Forums > Blade Runner (1982) Discussion > Who were the good guys ?

Who were the good guys ?


This has just popped up on my facebook feed, and given the nature of FB will probly lost forever , like tears in the rain. So I thought I'd preserve it here.
Author "Movie and Entertainment Sphere"
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In what movie was the villain actually right?
In the film Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty is absolutely right, despite being portrayed as the villain.
(Not just 80’s neo-Noire awesome, the film also has a “villain” who is 100% right.)
The replicants he’s leading in his failed uprising simply aspire to some form of freedom and dignity instead of facing incredibly short and painful lives of slavery. And this is exactly what the humans who created them have signed them up for.
(Some of the replicants cages might appear velvet-lined, but they’re all serving life sentences in a prison of the humans’ making, for crimes they never committed. It’s ghastly, corrupt and horrific.)
Facing sexual slavery, lethally dangerous work or outright war, the replicants, who we discover are fully sentient, have a few meager years to live in the various Hells they been assigned to since their creation. They have no choice in anything, and no say in how they’re used.
And if and when they do try to escape, they’re ruthlessly hunted down and killed by bounty hunters.
If this doesn’t sound like a good reason for a revolution, I’m not sure what does.
The human society that has created them is ultimately evil, and the relentless exploitation that the replicants face needs to stop.
So Roy Batty is absolutely right.
Yes, his methods are violent, and not everyone needs to agree with them, but he doesn’t really have any other tools than violence at his disposal. No one but other replicants will ever listen to him - even though, in the end, he just wants a human to hear him out and understand his plight.
(Rutger Hauer, as Roy Batty, delivering Tears in Rain.)
In the tragic ending of the film, though, he gets exactly this.
After saving Rick Deckard, the human bounty hunter sent to kill him, he delivers the truly staggering Tears in Rain monologue to Deckard before dying; summing up his entire existence in just a few perfect words.
(Yes, there’s some debate over whether Deckard is actually human, or a replicant himself. But that’s a function of authors shifting their position over time. It was only many years after the film’s release that anyone began suggesting he was a replicant. Regardless, having been saved by Batty, he is forced to hear him out and understand him.)

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Yeah I think the film makes it pretty clear that blade runners aren't heroes. The theatrical version even has Deckard narrating at the start that he's an "ex-blade runner, ex-killer" and that police using the term "skinjobs" would have been calling black people the n-word decades ago.

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It's a film without any which is one of the reasons why it's so good, and probably one of the reasons why it flopped.

People were expecting to see Harrison Ford in another Han Solo/Indy type role. Ridley Scott himself says it on the commentary track that you want Deckard to get away from Batty at the end while feeling sorry for Batty. You sympathize with both at the same time.

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