SCREAMERS: THE HUNTING (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*                                                                                                                                In my review of the original SCREAMERS, I said that the movie's least effective aspect was building on the original story's use of the "who's-the-alien-among-us" trope. So of course, when someone decided to do a sequel fourteen years later, that's what the creators decided to build on, to Carpenter-esque heights.                                     

   The script doesn't grapple with the sociological issues set up by Dan O'Bannon's script, but at least it does follow up on the ambivalent ending of the 1995 film. The last survivor of the Screamers' devastating attacks on Sirius 6b was seen trying to return to Earth in a one-person shuttle, but he made the mistake of taking along a memento, one that was a Screamer-robot in disguise. According to HUNTING, the survivor detected the intruder's presence and blew up the ship so that the robot would not reach Earth and propagate his kind at the expense of humanity. Several years pass until the time of HUNTING's events. Earth receives a transmission from Sirius, claiming that human survivors are still alive there. One might expect the military to take such a distress call with an avalanche of salt, given that no one on Earth can be sure that the Screamers aren't still extant. But after some lame excuse about how the machines' "batteries" must have run down, a military detachment wings its way to Sirius. Lieutenant Bronte (Gina Holden) is more or less the viewpoint character, and she gets a tad more development than the other unremarkable grunts in the story. She's said to be the daughter of the survivor who blew up his ship-- but the script does nothing interesting with this. For the ninety minutes of the film, the soldiers play tag with Screamers disguised as humans, and they meet a scientist (Lance Henriksen) who claims to have invented the self-propagating mechanisms. The only two pluses to this routine outing are (1) good production values overall, and (2) the fact that the sentient robots themselves talk about their ability to evolve, a minor point of the short story that the 1995 film did not address. But everything else is purely-- er-- mechanical in nature.