Blade Runner - Analysis of Roy Batty's Final Monologue (2024)

"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."

If Batty is a villain, then he's a villain in the image of Milton's Satan, poetic, intelligent, fallen, but not entirely evil, an angel of light in a world of dark. Certainly, if he's a villain, he's a complex villain. I maintain that he's hardly a villain at all.

In fact, by the end of the movie, he reads as a redemptive figure. Sure, he offs Tyrell in a rather gruesome way, thumbs to eye-sockets, but that reads a bit like deserved vengeance. Tyrell is an unjust god, creating flawed beings, baking in mortality when it wasn't necessary. And Batty, well, he isn't happy about dying. All he wants is more life and his creator god isn't playing nice. Why not let Tyrell lead the way into the doom-laden dark? Certainly, Batty's actions to Tyrell feel deserved, a critique of an unjust creator God coming from a created being made to suffer pain for no reason. And not only does Batty suffer his own pain, he suffers at the loss of those he loves, and even symbolically suffers for others, even the Blade Runner tasked to kill him.

In case you're wondering, Roy's critique and judgment of Tyrell reads as a critique of our own culture's received stories about creator gods, especially a critique of pain, a philosophical tradition otherwise known as theodicy. If a god created the world, why wouldn't that god engineer pain out of the system? Why create hell when you can create heaven? We'll likely never know. Maybe the creation of the universe was God's final act. His last opus before receding into nothing. Perhaps he hoped the world he created would be better than the one that came to be?

Hating death, Batty even saves his would be killer. After he finishes his iconic speech--"Time to die," he gives up his spirit and the dove he holds flies away, symbolizing the departure of the spirit from the body.

However, Ridley Scott gives us a second image to counterbalance the white bird's upward flight. At the end of the scene, one of the flying cars lifts off directly behind Roy's slumped body. Pay attention and you'll hear how Van Gelis gave the music a synchronized upward lift. As a constructed mechanism, the vehicle's flight questions whether Roy's spirit and his experience is genuine or ersatz. Is his experience of giving up his spirit a human experience or only something similar? Is it more like the flying car taking off or more like the bird flying away? Either way, his death is marked with sorrow. Whether man or no, Batty's behavior challenges an easy reading of the narrative. Deckard, as the Blade Runner, reads as the villain, not Roy Batty.