108 Minutes, Color, USA, 1995

Written By: Dan O’Bannon & Miguel Tejada-Flores (based on the short story “Second Variety” by Philip K Dick)

Directed By: Christian Duguay

Dramatis Personae:

Peter Weller is Joe Hendricksson (ha-ha, get it?), world-weary commander of the Alliance forces.

Andy Lauer is Ace Jefferson, standard-issue gung-ho rookie soldier and Hendricksson’s sidekick.

Jennifer Rubin is Jessica Hanson, civilian smuggler and apparently the only woman left on the planet (and she’s hot too; what are the odds?)

Roy Dupuis is Becker, psychotic NEB soldier, as evident by his creepy tattoo, ragged mullet, and proclivity to recite Shakespeare.

Charles Powell is Ross, high-strung and jittery NEB soldier; guess who’s the first one to fall apart when things get really bad?

Ron White is Chuck Elbarak, Hendricksson’s lieutenant and drinking buddy.

Michael Caloz is David (aka Screamer Variety III), rampaging killbot modeled in the form of a lost little boy.

Commentary:

When you stop to think about it, few writers have had as much influence on the evolution of modern science fiction as did Philip K Dick. Influenced by his own personal struggles with drug abuse and mental illness, Dick’s works managed to be personal and grandiose at the same time, touching on themes that have since become familiar to the point of cliché. The pliability of reality and the power of human perception. The intertwining of memory and personality and the dominoes that fall when they are changed. The ways human psychology and society evolve – or de-volve, if you prefer – as we grow more dependent on technology and the machines themselves get more complex. Being a bit of an altered mind himself, Dick was able to present readers with unique visions of altered realities and possible worlds, and his creative veins have been tapped by more than one filmmaker. And as is often the case with stories that are complex and unusual, when they translate into moving pictures, something is inevitably lost. Some things just can’t translate, and sometimes only the core concept can be shown properly. Even at their best, that core concept is often subsumed and reworked to the point that it’s only slightly recognizable as a Dick work – and in the case of Blade Runner, arguably the best, they’re still so imperfect that they require at least five recuts to get right – and at their worst they feature Ah-nuld impaling people on industrial machinery.

Somewhere those two extremes, Screamers is a low-budget sci-fi action movie (written by Dan O’Bannon, no less; Grand High Poobah of sci-fi action movies). It takes the core concept of “Second Variety,” Dick’s bleak post-apocalyptic tale, and transplants it into a new setting. The setting of this tale is the planet Sirius 6B, in the year 2078. Here we have what is possibly the mother of all sci-fi clichés: the mining colony torn by civil war. Some twenty years before, the New Economic Block (the kind of transparently-evil futuristic military-industrial combine that crops up all the time in O’Bannon’s work) set up the Sirius colony to mine berynium ore. Although the NEB originally hailed the substance as the answer to Earth’s energy crisis, the process for extracting and refining the berynium was so hazardous that the workers ultimately refused to do it. This strike soon escalated into a full-scale war on Sirius, and a cold war back on Earth between NEB and Alliance supporters. Although the NEB had the advantage in manpower and resources, the Alliance had one crucial technological edge: the “Autonomous Mobile Sword.” Also referred to as a “Screamer” because of the high-pitched sound it makes before attacking, the Mobile Sword is little more than an animated buzzsaw that moves just beneath the ground and attacks anything living that is not equipped with an electronic scrambling device. The Screamers are independent, self-replicating, and covert, and with their help the Alliance was able to hold their ground.

Ten years into the war, things are not going well for either side. Once a pleasant Earth-like world, Sirius 6B is now a bombed-out wasteland. Only rats and insects thrive in the irradiated ruins of the cities, and the remnants of both sides are holed up in bunkers while the Screamers own the open ground. This grim status quo changes one day, as a NEB soldier carrying a message tube stumbles into Alliance territory. He is gruesomely dissected by the Screamers as the Alliance troops watch. Once the Screamers have finished, Alliance officer Chuck Elbarak heads out to retrieve the message tube. While doing so, he observes strange behavior on the part of the Screamers: they collect the pieces of the dead soldier and take them underground with them. Elbarak pays this no mind and delivers the message tube to Hendricksson.

Joe Hendricksson, commander of the Alliance forces, is a weary man, burned out after years of endless conflict. But even he is surprised by the nature of the message: the NEB forces want to talk peace. He relays the message to the Alliance high command back on Earth, who give him even more surprising news: a new source of berynium has been found on the planet Triton 4, this one capable of being mined without the toxic side-effects found on Sirius. The Alliance and the NEB are discussing terms to end the war, and the commander advises Hendricksson against entering into independent negotiations with NEB forces on Sirius. Hendricksson and Elbarak are profoundly relieved at this news, believing that they can finally go home after so many years. This relief is short-lived, however, as a transport ship crash-lands near their base. Allegedly a commercial vessel, Hendricksson discovers that it was actually an Alliance military transport, full of men and weapons. The sole survivor of the crash, a rookie sniper named Ace Jefferson, explains their mission: the Alliance is sending a military force to Triton 4 to claim the berynium deposit. It starts to dawn on Elbarak and Hendricksson just what is really happening. The talk of peace was a lie fabricated for their benefit. The Alliance and the NEB are simply going to continue their war on another world and write off Sirius 6B completely.

Angered by this betrayal, Hendricksson comes to a decision. The NEB commander who sent the peace offering must have known about the Triton discovery, and must have come to the same conclusion: if they’re all going to be stranded on Sirius for the rest of their lives, they might as well do it without killing each other for no reason. Taking Jefferson with him, Hendricksson leaves Elbarak in command and heads off to NEB headquarters.

While traversing the ruins of a city, they find something quite unexpected: a young boy named David, who claims to have lived in the ruins by himself ever since his parents were killed in a bombardment years ago. At first Hendricksson decides leave the boy some food, continue on to NEB headquarters, and come back for him when the peace is struck. A child would only slow them down, he reasons, and if David has survived here this long a few more days won’t hurt. But ultimately compassion changes his mind, and he agrees to David’s plaintive request to take him with them.

That night as they camp, they are attacked by Screamers. Although they are able to defeat and disable them, the attack brings to light two disturbing revelations: first, that their electronic jamming devices don’t seem to work anymore; and second, the Screamers appear to be EVOLVING. An examination of the disabled Screamers reveals a far more organic-looking machine than the simple bladed sphere of the original design. It’s been established that Screamers are self-replicating – they are produced at a fully-automated subterranean facility – but the fact that they are now modifying their own design independently is very alarming.

Eventually the three reach a NEB outpost, where they are greeted by sniper fire. Hendricksson and Jefferson are not the targets, however; David is. An examination of the boy after he’s hit reveals something startling: David is a Screamer. Appearing to be a little boy on the outside, his innards are purely mechanical…and he immediately turns on them once he’s discovered, forcing Jefferson to demonstrate why they call him “Ace.”

Hendricksson and Jefferson enter the outpost and are greeted by the shellshocked Ross, the sadistic Becker, and the fast-talking “freelancer” Jessica. The NEBs explain that the new humanoid Screamers might well have been responsible for wiping out their entire side. Some Davids were found by NEB patrols a few weeks ago and brought to the command center. No one could possibly have suspected a lost little boy was secretly a killing machine, and that proved to be a fatal oversight. All hell promptly broke out, and the three survivors have been holed up in their outpost ever since. For all they know, they are the last humans left alive on Sirius 6B.

Nevertheless, Hendricksson is determined to get the command center and assess the situation, to see if it is really as bad as they think. Jessica puts an offer on the table. She has no wish to continue being the only woman in the company of two men on the verge of insanity, and Hendricksson can at least get her out this place. If she leads them back to the command center, he will take her with him back to Alliance headquarters. Hendricksson agrees, and they traverse a network of underground tunnels back to NEB headquarters.

Unfortunately, things at the command center are just as bad as the NEBs feared: there are no human survivors, though they can hear Screamers of several varieties crawling around. Hendricksson tries to at least make contact with Alliance headquarters, but the communications system is down. There is nothing more to do but head back to Alliance territory and hole up. Before they go, however, Hendricksson manages to get some data from the identification chips he has extracted from the new varieties of Screamers. He discovered that the David model was the THIRD new Screamer type; there is an unknown second type between the quasi-organic model they first encountered in the ruins and the little boy model. When Hendricksson confronts the NEBs about this, they reluctantly give up what they know. The second type took the form of a wounded soldier. It would lie on the ground crying for help, luring human soldiers into a deadly trap. The problem is that none of the surviving NEBs actually ever SAW one of these second types, so they cannot say what they look like…meaning that it could possibly be any one of them…

Although it remains relatively true to the core themes of the Philip K Dick story upon which it is based, Screamers is very much Dan O’Bannon’s baby. Ripping himself off shamelessly, O’Bannon presents us with a sci-fi universe very much like the one presented in the Alien series, a grim future dominated by callous interstellar corporations, exploitative industries that devastate entire worlds, and biomechanical monsters breeding like viruses in the shadows, until the shadows can no longer hold them and they spill into the light (by which time, of course, there’s no way to stop them). And the movie certainly has its evocative moments; director Christian Duguay makes effective use of several stark Canadian locations, giving the movie a feel almost reminiscent of World War One. And that actually works quite well for this movie. Here we have two sides locked in an endless stalemate, staring at each other from behind their barricades over a bombed-out no man’s land owned only by the landmines (except these landmines will chase after you if you step on them). The entire surface of Sirius 6B that we see is nothing but ash and rock and snow, and the ruined cityscapes are nothing more than gardens of rusted metal and broken stone. This is a war that has gone on too long, longer than anyone thought or intended, and things are finally falling apart.

And if you need a leader in such a dying world, you can’t do much better than Peter Weller. Weller is one of those guys blessed with intense, distinct facial features and an uncanny ability to act well regardless of the quality of the movie he’s in. And because of that, he elevates the films he chooses to star in. Granted, no one else stands out in the cast, at least not to the point that he does. It’s good for a laugh to see sitcom nebbish Andy Lauer as a hardcore soldier, and it’s…interesting to see Roy Dupuis degenerate into a raging psycho after watching him be all Eurotrashy on La Femme Nikita. But other than that, this is Peter Weller’s show, and frankly that’s for the best. His burned-out Joe Hendricksson is a familiar role – the ground-down soldier, who had his idealism shot off in the war and now just wants to survive the day – but Weller does it justice. He has aged some since he was Robocop, but the years look good on him in this role. In this movie, he’s at that certain age, where boyish good looks are just starting to succumb to the cares of adulthood, and that is the exact physicality required for the role. Haunted by the horrors he has witness, aged prematurely by the death of his hopes and dreams, but still tough as nails when required to be: that somehow manages to be both the quintessential Dan O’Bannon character and the quintessential Peter Weller role. It’s like a perfect storm…

Of course, the fact that Screamers owes more to Dan O’Bannon than Philip K Dick is probably due to the fact that “Second Variety” is one of Dick’s shorter and lesser-known works – and one that is, unfortunately, based on a rather clumsy premise. It’s an old sci-fi saw about artificial intelligence, that if a machine or computer is asked to perform complex enough functions it will eventually develop sentience or something like it, simply out of necessity in order to perform its function properly. But the Screamers of the movie and the Claws of the short story are little more than weapons, simple and straightforward devices that are asked to do nothing more complicated than kill anything they see. It’s a tad farfetched to envision such machines attaining sentience on their own – let alone developing into humanoid forms. Humanoid forms capable of complex enough behavior to actually pass for humans, no less. But Dick, for all his creativity, was a product of his time, and his time was all about killbots and World War Three. It’s quite possible that Dick, writing where and when he did, simply lacked the creative vocabulary he needed to properly tell his story. Because the core of his tale is quite recognizable in modern terms: self-replicating machines, destroying and consuming an entire planet’s ecosystem simply to break down raw material to make more of themselves…that’s a Grey Goo Scenario right there, written down way back in 1953 before anyone had even conceived of such a thing. Before the guy who first coined the term was even himself conceived, actually. Had Philip K Dick written in the era of nanotechnology, perhaps his premise would have been less awkward.

Screamers has its awkward moments too. It adheres to Dick’s premise of Screamer evolution pretty closely, and as a result what was interesting on the page just turns out to be silly in film form. The Type 1 Screamer is a strange reptilian-looking thing about the size of a small dog. The Type 2 is a humanoid form. That’s one HELL of an upgrade. From quasi-organic to passing for human in one revision. Man, I wish the people designing the Screamers worked for Apple. And that’s only the most glaring flaw. In the course of ripping himself off, Dan O’Bannon creates a fictional universe that feels a little TOO familiar. A little TOO cliché. Evil corporation, cynical working-class hero, mutant monsters…we’ve been here before, and it was better the first time around. The revelation that any one of our characters could be a Screamer in disguise is the tritest of trite clichés, and it feels forced into the movie, as if just to pad the action. Nothing interesting comes of this revelation, really; even the reveal of who the Screamer really is seems to complicate the plot unnecessarily. The movie also commits the heinous sin of overstaying its welcome: the plot continues for a full twenty minutes past the logical stopping point, and the “shocking” last-act plot twist was telegraphed well before that.

But up until that point, Screamers is a pretty entertaining film. It lacks the utter bleakness of the Dick story, but it makes up for it with a well-developed setting and appealing characters. Sure, it’s predominately an action movie, but it trades Dick’s heady abstract meditations for a harsh reality, and frankly that works better in film form. It’s no Blade Runner, but then it’s no Total Recall either. And that’s got to count for something.

Things To Look For:

- There is what I believe to be a clever twist in changing the premise behind the war from book to film. In “Second Variety,” the war in question is World War Three, the Soviet Union versus the United Nations, while in Screamers we have what is basically a labor dispute that turned into a planetary conflict (you know, I’d respect organized labor more if they actually did stuff like this). As the Cold War was over and the Soviet Union gone from the world stage by the time the movie was made, obviously some changes were necessary, and with the NEB management lined up against the workers’ Alliance, there is a faint trace of that old Marxist conflict of bourgeoisie and proletariat. It’s almost like the prophesized Third World War has been reduced to abstract terms. Or..it’s just Dan O’Bannon ripping himself off.

- Apparently, smoking can save your life on Sirius 6B. A premise put forth is that the atmosphere has become toxic due to fallout from the war. The Alliance purifies their air intake with “reds,” cigarette-like things whose smoke can nullify the toxins in the lungs. It’s such a weird idea that I’m still trying to wrap my head around it – and since it ultimately has no bearing on the plot at all, it’s all the more mind-boggling. I’m a bit foggy on the science behind it, and I’m wondering just why it’s even there. Did Philip Morris sponsor this movie? Were they just trying anything to work smoking into the script (because it’s what working-class heroes DO, even in space)? If anyone out there knows anything about it, please contact The Pit and enlighten us!

- Peter Weller’s character is named Hendricksson. This is a two-fisted in-joke. First of all, it’s a direct reference to Hendricks, the main character of “Second Variety.” Secondly, it’s a sort of homage to Lance Henriksen, frequent O’Bannon collaborator and a kindred spirit of Peter Weller – being that they are both intense-looking character actors who bring dignity and style to movies that often need it. It makes one wonder why Henriksen was not cast in the role. Perhaps because Henriksen is older than Weller, and so wasn’t keen on being tossed around on wires the way Weller was in this movie. Perhaps he was simply unavailable. Nevertheless, Peter Weller is equally awesome and very much owns the role. But then, Peter Weller is awesome all around. And when one considers that Peter Weller, character actor, is also DOCTOR Peter Weller, PhD, Professor of Classical and Renaissance Art at Syracuse University….well that just makes him more awesome by several degrees of magnitude. It’s like life imitating art: he really IS Buckaroo Banzai.

- It’s always fun to look back at older sci-fi movies, to see what predictions have come true and which ones just seem so horribly quaint. And Screamers, all of twelve years old, has a few grand examples to be seen. Consider Jefferson’s personal entertainment system, clearly modeled on a Discman, and clearly not predicting the advent of the iPod. The thing looks so huge and clumsy in retrospect. Consider also Hendricksson’s portable satellite phone, as bulky and unwieldy as it looks to a 21^st-century cell phone owner. Consider the transparent plastic paper our characters use to send messages to one another – a thing that admittedly did look cool ten years ago, but let’s be honest: the things that NEB soldier brought in that message tube could have fit on a thumb drive and would have been less awkward. Ah, science fiction. How wrong you often are. Which is why we love you so.

Written words (c) 2008-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: January 3^rd, 2008

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