Screamers

There must be something about the science-fiction stories of Philip K. Dick that inspires filmmakers to unusual levels of stunning incoherency. Both Blade Runner and Total Recall, the two previous adaptations from the Dick canon, had plot lines that shifted faster than grains of sand in a windstorm. Likewise, so did the characters.

At his best, Dick could give his readers the tail spinning conviction that everything real was illusionary and that nobody could ever be certain of anything, not even their own existence. For Dick, there was no easy division between human consciousness and a good job of deceptive programming. "I think, therefore I am" was a philosophic assumption that Dick could never accept.

Which is part of the problem encountered by Commander Becker (Peter Weller) in Screamers. Like Blade Runner, the movie ultimately tries to wrestle with the question of what is human. Unlike Blade Runner, Screamers gets pinned to the mat more often than not.

On the planet Sirius 6B, a brutal war is dragging into its tenth year. The world has become a ravaged battleground between the Earth Alliance and the New Economic Block (N.E.B.). The surface has been thoroughly nuked and the combatants now primarily stay hidden in underground fortresses.

But the protracted stalemate is suddenly shaken by an offer of peace from the N.E.B. Just as abruptly, peace is shattered by the crash landing of an Alliance troop transporter. Evidence from the ship convinces Becker that the war has simply been relocated to a new planet. In a face-saving move, both sides have decided to abandon the troops on Sirius 6B while routinely feeding Becker and his men with phony messages on a virtual reality system.

Feeling just a tad bitter, Becker sets out to make his own peace with the equally hapless N.E.B. forces. The only problem is that no one knows how many, if any, of the enemy troops are even still alive. Making matters worse is the increasingly unpredictable behavior of the screamers.

The original model of the screamers were insect-like killer robots armed with a wide variety of blades. The Alliance unleashed them as an ultimate weapon against the N.E.B. But the screamers have their own elaborate system of automated programming design and manufacturing and are rumored to be pursuing their own evolutionary leaps. They have even created androids who prey upon their potential victims by appealing to the human sense of empathy.

About now, Rutger Hauer should make an appearance. Unfortunately, he doesn't. Likewise, Weller is no Harrison Ford. He's not even a Charlton Heston, though Weller makes a game try at projecting some of old Chuckie's sense of jaded machismo.

Much of the acting in Screamers has a flat, stilted quality that undercuts the central paradox of the movie. Only Jennifer Rubin, as a female N.E.B. officer, delivers any convincing pathos. Of course, this immediately makes her a prime suspect on the human/nonhuman detection scale.

But the real problem with Screamers is the script. None of the characters are ever fleshed out or clearly defined in any distinctive way. Their humanity is only hinted at through bouts of chain-smoking (special cigarettes that prevents radiation poisoning) and a taste for Mozart (Don Giovanni is Becker's pet fave).

The androids do not fare any better. Unlike the alluring "skin jobs" of Blade Runner, the replicants in Screamers are almost as marginal as their human targets. One of the deadlier models come in the form of an orphan boy clutching a death-dealing teddy bear. The first appearance of this killer waif is mildly shocking. When an entire army of dangerous Oliver Twist types goes gunning for Becker, the film takes a plunge into bad camp.

The multiple twists and turns of the plot also never quite matches up. Contradictions abound, and not just because they are suppose to in a Dick-derived movie. The pre-production history of Screamers is almost as long as the war on Sirius 6B, with Dan O'Bannon first drafting a version under the title of Claw at Disney Studios back in the early 1980s. Screamers plays as if a few too many versions had been stitched together during various rewrites.

Though the film maintains a reasonably suspenseful tempo, Screamers never manages to engage at either the intellectual or emotional level. In turn, the film is too preoccupied with being cerebral to ever fully unload to the action audience.

Ironically, the hi-tech shredding machines shown dicing a man at the movie's beginning are actually the most interesting element in Screamers. Unlike the filmmakers, at least these nasty little drones know what they are doing.