How many of the movie buffs, at least once, have not mentioned the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner with the famous monologue: “I have seen things of it that you humans could not imagine. Battleships ablaze off Orion's ramparts, and I watched B-rays flash in the dark near the Tannhauser gates. And all those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain. It's time to die." That time has come for Rutger Hauer who left us just in the year in which the events narrated by the film signed by Ridley Scott in 1982 were imagined.
Many years of cinema have passed since then and that film marked a further watershed moment in the genre (science fiction) which from the fear of an alien invasion during the Cold War years between the USA and the USSR had turned to computer threats. It had just been a decade since 2001, A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick from 1968 and from the following year, when the first man landed on the moon, where the future of humanity could be glimpsed beyond the confines of virtual and symbolic space. They imagined machines and technologies that would soon enter our daily lives (and yet not everything has been realized). As often happens, narratives through images need a "sign", a symbol, a signifier, and Rutger Hauer has represented this in the best possible way.
First of all let us remember the man: with his face we have seen countless films (along with as many theatrical and television titles) and we mention only a few among the many: from Osterman Weekend by Sam Peckimpah in 1983 to The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Ermanno Olmi up to to recent The Sisters brothers directed by Jacques Audiard. A character often characterized by a stylization centered on the role of tough, bad, ruthless. With this role he has proposed an always convincing primordial, fundamental mask of cinematographic, television and theatrical narration. For everyone, he will always be the replicant Roy.
The occasion allows us to return to the current year, when precisely in Blade Runner 2019 imagined a dystopian world, bordering on post-apocalyptic, leaden, acid, always wrapped in cold lights. That world was inhabited by human beings and by "mechanical creations": replicants created to measure and image of humans, to the point of making their recognition difficult. Luckily for us, that world is still far from us, from our daily lives, even if many topics are extremely topical: just think of the enormous progress made in the various fields of medicine, materials and engineering. The film was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick who is rightly considered a founder of contemporary science fiction.
We are talking about a milestone of the big screen, a masterpiece that has marked contemporary cinematic culture.
