Screamers begins with scrolling text over black. A background story, to catch the viewer up on the happenings of Sirius 6B and conditions between the NEB and Alliance. This is extremely helpful for those of us not yet familiar with the ongoings of 2078, but it's not necessary. Most of the information emerges organically as the story develops; though the text is helpful in an orientating sort of way. It's nice. Why it's mostly sci-fi and fantasy films that begin this way I'm not sure, I think it'd work to the same extent in a romcom or action movie. One possible reason is that scrolling text requires reading and a modicum of patience, factors that obstruct enjoyment for some movie goers, yet are acceptable for some sci-fi geeks and the like. Though a lot of times when a film cuts to text I can feel some of the audience turn against the idea. The text, of course, is anyway read to us by a narrator, and maybe it's simply more sophisticated, artistically, to have a visual counterpoint to the narration. Many movies of all types begin with a voice over narration, but only in sci-fi and fantasy films does the text function on an ornamental level.
Scrolling text is a slow opening, and Screamers does little to ignite its jet thrusters in the moments following. The first scene is atmospheric. It establishes the forlornness of the protagonists, the malevolence of the landscape, and introduces the screamers. Screamers are an advanced version of the worms in Tremors. They stalk you subterraneously. They're murderous. They're mechanical. They're self-sufficient. They improve themselves, in order to better kill. They're Phillip K. Dick inventions, and the movie is based on his "Second Variety," adapted by the also-great Dan O' Bannon, co-written by Miguel Tejada-Flores. O'Bannon writer of Alien, stalwart genre writer and sometimes actor and/or director, whose breakthrough was with John Carpenter and Dark Star.
O'Bannon tends to build his scripts upward, and this is the experience of Screamers. He gives you as a gift the death of the message boy by screamers in the beginning, and then backs off and develops his characters, the severity of their plight, and the stakes. Few writers, compared to the whole, give their characters this much consideration. I consider O'Bannon a-grade, though Screamers is a b-grade genre film in terms of budget and acting, with the exception of the also a-grade Peter Weller as the main character. Weller isn't a-grade simply because he's RoboCop. His performance in Screamers is textured: you sense his loss, his struggle, his growing disillusionment, vestiges of discipline, a protracted sense of responsibility, fragments of sympathy and goodwill. You sense both the ice in his veins and the restorative warm blood in his heart.
Mysteriously, perhaps unnecessarily, a plane crashes outside the Sirius 6B Alliance base. The only survivor, unfortunately, is Andrew Lauer. Lauer gives the kind of performance that projects insecurity and astonishing insincerity. I can easily see Lauer on the Late Night couch, right ankle propped on left knee, telling David his experience in the weird sci-fi film. Lauer deserved the sitcom sidekick hell to which he was later banished. There's not a moment of believability in his entire performance. He's the worst part of the film; I'd believe in space colonies before I'd believe a moment of his acting in Screamers. There's too his role as the ace new-graduate of military school who's dying to get out and shoot some guns and prove himself, a pretty annoying and single dimensional character in the first place.
So there's that. Weller chooses to bring Lauer along with him. They set out in response to the message of peace delivered by the boy in the first scene. Their journey from the Alliance base to the NEB base is another moment of mood setting and orientation. This is when we the audience see the devastation nuclear war has borne upon Sirius 6B. It's also when we the audience are allowed to explore the environment and see the extent of the filmmaker's imaginings of this fictitious planet; it's a real powerful genre moment, I mean it, and perhaps partly the depth of this experience relies on a certain development of appreciation*, a building of understanding about the avenues of innuendo and allusion genre filmmakers explore while creating films of fantasy, because if you're tuned in on their wavelength, if you're experiencing the inner genre of the film, you're seeing shadows of real pain, you're seeing the skeleton of a belief system, suggestions of fear, paranoia, insecurity, anxiety, longing, patches of dread, bursts of horror, and genuine human feeling and thought. A good genre film gives up something personal, and if it does that, and you can read it, a connection as powerful as what happens in dramas or romances, whatever, occurs, a sharing of world views between the filmmakers and the audience.
D.H. Lawrence, for example, uses landscapes composed of emotion to enhance the depth of his characters in Sons and Lovers. Some of his text could fit into a Philip K. Dick story, and illustrates the dramatic range of landscape metaphor and allegory.
"Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall … He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seem to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere - dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit." (Clara chapter)
At any rate, part of the delight of a sci-fi film is often the exhibition of the unfamiliar elements. The presence of Lauer interferes with the effectiveness of this long scene, in which Weller and Lauer encounter a young boy, named David, in the ruins of a major city on Sirius 6B, and bring him along with them to the NEB base. David is small and dirty and clutches a stuffed bear. He says very little, mostly "Can I come with you," and is only slightly more tolerable than Lauer. The presence of them together is insufferable. In these moments Weller is outnumbered, and the film is statistically at its lowest point.
Dramatic justice services the young David a rifle-shot through the chest, delivered by the bunkered Roy Dupuis (badass with tear drop tattoos) and Charles Powell (geeky and skittish with glasses), two off course NEB soldiers being sheltered by the strong-willed Jennifer Rubin. David is a Level 3 screamer, a weapon disguised as a boy, and Dupuis and Powell know this from previous experience. Rubin, Dupuis, Powell, Weller, and Lauer compose the largest and longest staying group of characters in the film, and together they set out into the perilous deserts of Sirius 6B, determined to reach the NEB base.
Things get worse. The NEB base is devastated, no one remains. Weller can't contact his Alliance base due to radioactivity interference. Powell and Dupuis can't get along: the overbearing Dupuis easily frustrates and enrages the fragile and nervous Powell. Their feud is a high-point in the movie. Progressed in increments, their mutual antipathy culminates in the killing of Powell by Dupuis, who claims to suspect the former of being a screamer. What and who are the screamers evolving into is an important question for the rest of the film.
* I mean development of appreciation in both a positive and negative sense. I understand that certain sci-fi films and novels require a heavy level of commitment from the audience, and I understand why for some people that would inhibit the performance of the work as dramatic material. Completely understand. James Cameron recently referred to contemporary sci-fi as fractal, and said that he doesn't read it anymore because of the high entry level. The king of filmic sci-fi doesn't even have the time or intensity of dedication required to consistently/excessively engage with the material.
Screamers is an old-favorite of mine, a film I was exposed to at an early stage and so I cherish with a fondness peculiar to emblems of nostalgia. Last night I attempted to watch it with fresh, impartial eyes. I was mostly successful, I think, because I could see the film's problems: its over-active camera work, its concessions to action film tropes, its sometimes lousy acting, and its overambitious scope in relation to its budget and potentialities. It comes on pretty strong. I also think there's a lot to admire about the film, perfectly expressed by the film's trailer.
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