MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological* I only watched SCREAMERS once before this recent re-watch. Given that the primary adaptor was ALIEN's Dan O'Bannon, I tended to assume that he had translated Philip K. Dick's short story "Second Variety" to repeat his ALIEN-tropes: isolated group under siege by a relentless monster. Even the idea of the group being the pawn of governmental forces appears more in SCREAMERS than in the short story. (Note: another writer revised some or all of O'Bannon's dialogue for the finished screenplay, but O'Bannon claimed that his plot and characters were substantially unaltered.)
I freely admit that the "Screamers"-- the name given to the metamorphic robots from the Dick story-- don't even come close to the mythic appeal of The Aliens. However, I appreciate that O'Bannon reworked the Cold War aspects of the Dick story to something closer to the milieu of Vietnam. This time, the opposed parties reside not on the moon but on a colonized mining-planet named Sirius 6b. The Earth-based corporate combine known as "The New Economic Block" sends miners to Sirius to harvest valuable minerals. However, the mining activities unleash fatal radiation (more or less taking the place of the original tale's nuclear fallout). The miners refuse to keep mining, so the NEB starts a war to force their compliance, radiation or no radiation. For twenty years the Sirius-based Alliance contends with the forces of the NEB, and the former manage to come up with a counter-measure-- albeit one that's a double-edged sword. The Alliance (taking the place of "the Americans" from the prose tale) manufactures robots called "Screamers," robots that tunnel beneath the earth and attack anyone not wearing a protective screening-device, which device only the Alliance soldiers have. However, the Screamers start producing new varieties of their species on their own, and they have no loyalty to their creators if they find them out in the open without their protective devices.
Alliance commander Joe Hendricksson (Peter Weller) desperately wants to see an end to the stalemate conflict, with the hope that he might return to the planet of his birth. He's briefly buoyed up by news that the NEB back on Earth may be seeking a detente, but this proves to be a lie to keep the proxy war going. Meanwhile, a new source of minerals on another world renders the conflict on Sirius irrelevant. Disgusted, Hendricksson decides to seek out the NEB compound, presumably to negotiate a separate peace. Hendricksson takes along an eager-beaver young soldier who's completely naive about the realities of the war, and the script gets a lot of mileage out of the "young pup/old dog" badinage. On their way, the two soldiers find a ragamuffin boy, and they take him with him to the NEB compound. One of the NEB men shoots the child, proving that it's just a new model of Screamer (so called, by the way, they emit screaming noises when they attack).
No detente discussions ensue. The NEB forces--two soldiers and female civilian Jessica (Jennifer Rubin) -- recently lost most of their forces to another infiltration by a human-looking Screamer. Hendricksson and his aide escort the other three back to the Alliance base, only to find it too has been overrun by Screamers. There are various Carpenter-like moments where humans accuse other humans of being robots, but these don't develop into anything compelling. The script does play into Hendricksson's desire for normalcy by having him fall in love with Jessica, presumably the first woman he's seen in many years. When the survivors have been narrowed down to just the two of them, Hendricksson tries to make Jessica use a one-person emergency shuttle to go back to Earth-- an action that loosely parallels the conclusion of the Dick short story. And as in the Dick story, the only female turns out to be one in a series of robotic human pretenders. However, in a turnabout ending that I'll bet resembles NOTHING in the Philip Dick oeuvre, the Jessica-Screamer reciprocates Hendricksson's feelings, fights another model of her type, and makes it possible for Hendricksson to escape-- though there's an indication that even now, he may not be alone. Though all the performers are good, Weller is the glue that holds the whole apparatus together-- though, to be sure, the Screamers comprise the main icon of the film. Despite SCREAMERS' commercial failure, years later there was a sequel-- though I'll surprised if it works that well without being able to draw from the wellspring of Dickian paranoia.
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