#365DaysOfWriting — Day 118
Soliloquies
It’s the act of speaking aloud to yourself. In a play. But I feel people have their little soliloquies every day. They either talk to themselves loudly, or in their minds. Who said it can’t be a soliloquy if it’s in their minds?
One of the greatest soliloquies, fascinatingly, comes from a science fiction movie.
As I said, people often associate soliloquies with Shakespeare’s plays, but one of the best I’ve ever heard is from Blade Runner. Right at the end, when replicant (an android robot) Roy Batty is about to die, this is what 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.”
Now why is this important? This is at the end of a long chase — when he’s chasing Blade Runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford, who’s a human). This soliloquy tells us that Roy Batty was more human than the humans around him — and all he wanted was a longer life. Replicants in Blade Runner were created only for doing work in the most harsh environments, where no human could go. And their lifespan was 4 years. Roy Batty wasn’t willing to go down so easily. He showed appreciation for the finer things in life, as it were, and wanted more of it…
