Movie Review: Screamers

5/10

Philip K Dick has had a patchy posthumous relationship with Hollywood. There are several categories his stories have been adapted into;

1. Movies based directly on his stories (Screamers fits in here)
   
2. Movies with some of his ideas but using them as a springboard to other ideas (Bladerunner, minority report)
   
3. Movies that rape his memory and his stories (Paycheck, Next)

Luckily avoiding type 3, Screamers is a low budget fairly faithful adaptation of the classic Dick tale that is "Second Variety", a return by PKD to one of his perennial points of interest, namely the consequences of creating self sufficient learning robots, and how the inevitable result is that these creations will become self aware and start to turn on their creators. In Screamers this is a direct result of dumb programming at the initial stage (what muppet designs a creature that kills anything that lives and doesn't program any failsafes?) and the consequences of this are a self sustaining, murderous race of convincing fake people.

The strength of the tale Dick told is probably Screamers' saving grace, as is the fact that they make the phrase "Can I come with you?" genuinely creepy.

This movie is probably the most faithful to the original short story of any of the adaptations that I have previously seen - Minority Report is basically LA Confidential in the future and Blade Runner bears very very little resemblence to the original tale (which is superb if you want to check it out).

This faithfulness may be a slight problem though - Dick's messages were never subtle or nuanced, preferring instead an obvious if likable cynicism and simple moralising. In a movie this seems ideally suited, but there is little of the ironic cynicism present here I gain from many of Dick's stories, including the original Second Variety. The main reasons for this are the decision to place the action on a different faceless planet instead of Earth, and to fudge the ending.

The decisions to fudge the story's original very downbeat ending are inexplicable, and create at least 5 extra plot holes as a result, putting aside the massive one caused by one (type 2) simulant seemingly sharing the memories of its face donor, which makes no sense whatsoever.

What tension there is in not knowing who the bad guys are is subdued by the sheer robotic nature of all the actors, so that they all look like they are fakes and if they're not you don;t really care.

It's not helped by its low budget and ham fisted performances from almost all involved (even a sleepwalking Peter Weller is lame). That hasn't prevented a sequel coming into being and it was an ok way to spend a short amount of time but I wouldn't call it anything more than a 5/10.

A