Screamers 1995 Directed by Christian Duguay

 Screamers 1995

Directed by Christian Duguay

Christian Duguay was born on March 30th, 1956 in Canada. He graduated from Concordia University in 1979 and started working as a cameraman, taking work in documentaries, commercials, and music videos. Besides Screamers, he also directed Art of War, the 2000 film with Wesley Snipe as well as an incredible number of television movies of the week and mini-series. I don’t think this impacted his work on Screamers but we get to that. An additional fun fact: Screamers was written by Dan O'Bannon who some of y'all may remember as one of the writers of the 1990 Total Recall and Alien. He wrote Screamers in 1981 and the film was stuck in development hell for over a decade.

Screamers takes place in another solar system. The planet Sirius 6b is the only hot front in a war between the Alliance which started as an alliance of miners and scientists and The New Economic Block (My Soviet Stand-in Sense is Tingling…{Oh nononono, the NEB is made up of ruthless capitalist to a man.  They talk about them being led by corporations}). The crux of the war was the discovery of a new element on the planet that allowed for cheap energy; one character claimed that a spoonful would allow you to power a starship from Earth to Saturn (So, antimatter, but not.). It does allow them to build one-man starships that can fly from Sirius 6b to Earth without needing provisions so clearly, it's a powerful element. There is no free lunch, however, as the mining releases powerful, man-killing bursts of radiation. The miners and local scientists banded together to close the mines, refusing to commit suicide for distant taskmasters’ profits.  We find this out via an opening crawl and voice over which is a failed attempt to copy Star Wars.  Also, don’t do a voice-over and a text crawl together…  It just comes across as not trusting your audience.  Pick one. 

Said taskmasters responded by sending in mercenaries (I’m so happy my senses were wrong.  We’re dealing with the real enemy here.  Capitalists.)  to force the mines open and when that didn't work they escalated to the point of nuking the planet into a frozen ash-choked wasteland. Because nuking the resource you're fighting over is a rational response to workers calling for safety measures (I… that makes no sense.  In fact, that makes negative sense.  Not even Captain Planet villains are that dumb.). I have to assume given this and other decisions that future humanity here has suffered a plunge in intelligence, common sense, or both. That or everyone is taken out behind the school at the age of 13 and smashed over the head with a brick a few times. (That would create a lack of intelligence.  More likely, however, this is just a society that never stopped using leaded gasoline in engines.{that’s possible but I feel my brick theory is more satisfying}) Well, as you can imagine word of the N.E.B atrocities got out and half the planet promptly rose up against it. On Earth, a simmering cold war holds, as no one actually wants to turn the homeworld to ash. On Sirius 6b, however, as many civilians as possible were evacuated and the dogs of war were unleashed.

At the point the movie starts, said dogs of war are nearly exhausted. Both armies huddle in their fortress bunkers and just kind of rot in place. In between the bunkers is an irradiated wasteland, now the troops have anti-radiation meds, amusingly taken by smoking them. This is kinda a funny way to excuse everyone smoking like a chimney in this film (It would have been funnier if they snorted their meds…). However, the status quo is broken by an N.E.B soldier rushing to the alliance bunker with a message in hand asking for peace talks, sadly that soldier is taken apart by screamers.

Screamers are an artificially intelligent autonomous weapon system. What that means is they're a bunch of self-controlled robots that in theory work for the alliance but the alliance troops have utterly no control over or even communication with (Why? Why would you design this?  A bunch of scientists with enough technical skill to program an AI, and exactly no one ever considered the control problem!? {See brick theory}). Even the factory they're built-in has no human input at all. This is a situation that is just begging for the robots to develop out of control and kill us all. It's also further evidence for the brick theory bluntly, as there are certain things you should always strive to have some level of control over, like your source of food or you know... Your insane weapon platforms! (This goes beyond a brick to the head.  These idiots were all lobotomized.)

Our main character is played by a frankly wasted Peter Weller of Robocop fame and God bless him he's trying but he just can't make the character work. I can tell that our main character Commander Hendricksson is supposed to come across as an intelligent man driven to dourness by his circumstances, but he comes across as a moody, pretentious prick to me instead. Screaming at his subordinates for making reports to him and flipping out and reaching wild conclusions on fragments of data. (Lead poisoning plus TBI? {This character does make a strong case for that})

For example, a troopship crashes near the base, despite being bound for a completely different system (how is this not suspicious?) with a single survivor. That survivor claims to him that the guy they've been reporting to the whole time was actually arrested and deposed on Earth two years ago by Alliance high command and he just buys it (That should definitely be suspicious.  And that is not something anyone should buy…). In fact, he declares it's proof that Earth has abandoned both armies on the planet and things are going to go hot across the galaxy. I'm left asking... Why? Armies are expensive and if you abandon one, people ask questions. It's hard to get people to volunteer if they think they'll be left to rot. I mean, we've proven you can keep unpopular wars going for decades on volunteers but if volunteering for army service meant you never came back from Afghanistan I have doubts we could have kept that going (Are we sure it’s a volunteer army? {People talk about volunteering so I’m pretty sure}).

Commander Hendrickson decides to take the lone survivor of the crashed troopship with him as his lone escort to the N.E.B base to hammer out a truce, instead of taking any of the troops he's led and trained for years and who know how to survive in the wasteland (No!  You don’t do that!  You don’t do lone-escorts at all, let alone the lone new and completely unvetted guy!). I'm throwing this on the pile to support the brick theory. They run into a trio of survivors and learn by almost being killed by a new type of screamer built to look like a small boy that their uncontrollable weapon system has developed into something that is a danger to both sides. Gee, who could have seen this coming? (It is shocking and a complete outside context problem!  Oh wait…) Hendrickson insists on heading over to the N.E.B bunker despite being told it's full of human-style screamers and learns that there's an additional unknown type while there (Excuse me, as my head repeatedly impacts my desk. {No! Don’t ! That just sets you for the brick, it’s a trap!}).

This sets the stage for paranoia that to Hendrickson's credit he stomps down pretty quickly. They head back to the Alliance bunker but are, of course, too late, and only he, and the survivor of the N.E.B forces that happens to be a pretty girl, escape from that. They head to the one-man ship and I'm sure you can figure out the twist. I have no guilt if I've spoiled this movie for you by the way. The gynoid he was traveling with, however, decides to fight her sisters to protect him and even gives her life to let him escape, proclaiming that she came to love him. Which... I can't figure out why but then again she's likely less than a year old, maybe it's just because he was the first entity to treat her as a person in her own right even if just barely? (Either that, or she succumbed to the allure of Peter Weller? {In any of his other roles I would agree but the director worked overtime to kill his charisma})

Screamers has the elements of an interesting story in it but the dialogue and characterization are frankly poor and the world-building is kind of meh at best. As usual, I will give two scores for the movie as it is an adaptation. As a stand-alone movie, I'd rate it a D+, although I imagine I'd have more fun if I watched this movie in a group. Don't watch it alone is my advice, give it the full mystery science theater 3000 treatment. As an adaptation... It preserves the major story beats and essential ideas of the story and I don't blame Mr. O'Bannon for dropping the WWIII going hot part of it. However, the love conquers all sting at the end just fell completely flat for me and I feel it's an inferior ending. I'm not usually a fan of downer endings either, it's just this “happy ending” feels really rote and pre-packaged to me.  Of course, there would be the question of what one robot alone on Earth can do, so maybe it would be more interesting if the robots seized the starship and the movie ended there. So I'm giving it a D+ as an adaptation as well. All well maybe A Scanner Darkly will lift my spirits.

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Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders