Blade Runner Poster

If I were in charge of coming up with a new title for Blade Runner, I would call it “Tears in the Rain.” This comes from Roy Batty’s final monologue on the roof. He says, “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.” At its core, Blade Runner is a movie about what makes us human and, in context, what differentiates us from the movie’s replicants. On the surface, we appear the same, but we are different things with different purposes. Teardrops and raindrops are the same. They are indistinguishable just based on appearances. The title, “Tears in the Rain,” describes the replicants among humanity. In the movie, the replicants are the ones who show the most emotion, tears being a symbol for them makes sense. Also, tears come from the eyes, which is a motif Blade Runner uses often. Going along with this theme, the poster has a large, glowing, red eye in the background. This is because one of the ways to tell if someone is a replicant is by looking at their eyes. The poster also has Deckard, Rachael, and Roy Batty on it. These are who I consider to be the main characters of the film. Roy Batty acts as the antagonist for most of the film, so I have his face looming in the background. While he is the main antagonist, Roy doesn’t really fit the definition of a “bad guy.” Most of the characters in the movie have a nuanced portrayal so I don’t think it’s completely accurate to group them into good and bad categories. To represent this, I chose pictures of Deckard and Rachael where they both have guns drawn and put a dove next to Roy’s face to show the peace he chooses in his final moments. Roy is looking at the eye, while the other two are looking away from it. This represents how Rachael and Deckard were both unaware of being replicants, unlike Roy. Above the title there are silhouettes of running unicorns. This is because of their significance to Deckard’s character. I chose a dark background for the poster because the film has a dark atmosphere. I think that it would be kind of hard to tell exactly what the movie is about just from looking at the poster, but I think that fits because of the film’s ambiguity.