Screamers – 1995 – United States
Starting in the 1970s, sci-fi seems to take a pessimistic view of the future. Obviously, there are lots of causes for that: nuclear escalation, climate change, ubiquitous surveillance. This is one reason why sci-fi author Philip K. Dick is so ahead of his time. The stories he wrote in the ‘50s and ‘60s are just as bleak and paranoid as anything since. Movie adaptations of his work include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and Minority Report (2002).
Screamers, based on a 1953 Philip K. Dick story, is oppressively pessimistic in the best way. It is set on a war-torn planet where an endless conflict between a corporation and a labor union has turned the world into a wasteland and made basket cases of the soldiers on both sides. One army defends their territory with “screamers”, insect-like killer robots covered in buzzsaws. They burrow underground and consume corpses to harvest methane gas for fuel. Now the screamers are evolving and targeting all human life on the planet.
Continue reading →