Dis­cov­er the out-of-time futur­ism of this ​’90s Philip K Dick adaptation

In 2058, the min­ing cor­po­ra­tion known as the New Eco­nom­ic Bloc (or NEB) dis­cov­ered a new ener­gy source known as Beryni­um on the plan­et Sir­ius 6B. But when min­ers learnt that its extrac­tion also released radi­a­tion and oth­er pol­lu­tants, they organ­ised as ​‘The Alliance’ and ceased all work.

This min­ers’ strike led to all-out war with the NEB, who nuked the planet’s civil­ian pop­u­la­tions and reduced its sur­face to a tox­ic waste­land. The only thing that saved the remain­ing min­ers was the inven­tion of ​‘scream­ers’, self-repli­cat­ing blad­ed automa­ta which tear apart any­thing with a heart­beat that tres­pass­es onto Alliance-held territory.

Now, in 2078 (and after a decade of con­stant war), the bunkered-in Alliance Com­man­der Joseph A Hen­dricks­son (Peter Weller) decides to accept an invi­ta­tion sent by the enemy’s sur­vivors, and to under­take the dan­ger­ous jour­ney to the NEB’s head­quar­ters, in the hope of reach­ing a peace. The ​‘scream­ers’, how­ev­er, have changed in unex­pect­ed ways, and now rep­re­sent a far greater threat to all human­i­ty than any off-world war.

Most of this sci-fi plot­ting is laid out in the text (and voiceover) which opens Chris­t­ian Duguay’s Scream­ers. But all the decades of suf­fer­ing which it chron­i­cles serve equal­ly to fig­ure the many years of devel­op­ment hell in which the pro­duc­tion of Scream­ers itself became stuck after Dan O’Bannon, screen­writer of Alien, Dead & Buried, Return of the Liv­ing Dead and Life­force, deliv­ered his adap­ta­tion of Philip K Dick’s short sto­ry ​‘Sec­ond Vari­ety’ back in 1981.

In those 14 inter­ven­ing years, much of the dia­logue had been rewrit­ten by Miguel Teja­da-Flo­res (although O’Bannon, who only learnt that Scream­ers had final­ly gone into pro­duc­tion after its release, has stat­ed that the char­ac­ters and basic plot remained intact).

More impor­tant­ly, though, between 1981 and 1995, times had also changed. The British coal min­ers’ strike of 1984 – 5 which might have made the film look pre­scient had long since come and gone. The Cold War which the sci­ence fic­tion of both Dick’s sto­ry and the film’s nar­ra­tive was clear­ly ref­er­enc­ing was effec­tive­ly over, mak­ing the New Eco­nom­ic Bloc now look more like Bush Sr’s New World Order.

This polit­i­cal shift from end­less war to what was, from the ear­ly ​’90s, being termed the end of his­to­ry, cre­at­ed a new con­text for the film’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tions (the pos­si­bil­i­ty of détente, the devel­op­ment of unex­pect­ed con­se­quences). Com­ing at a time when the USSR had dis­solved and West­ern lib­er­al democ­ra­cy was in the ascen­dant with no obvi­ous rival, Scream­ers was new­ly pre­scient in its recog­ni­tion that peace and sta­bil­i­ty nev­er last, and that the buried effects of past con­flicts always, in the end, return to the sur­face to bring new threats.

Remem­ber that Al-Qaeda’s bomb­ings of the US embassies in Nairo­bi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and of the USS Cole in 2000, were all just around the cor­ner when Scream­ers was released in 1995 – and they would cul­mi­nate in Al-Qaeda’s destruc­tion of the Twin Tow­ers and part of the Pen­ta­gon on 11 Sep­tem­ber, 2001, bring­ing a deci­sive end to the ​‘end of his­to­ry’, and chang­ing the geopo­lit­i­cal land­scape for ever.

With the delayed pro­duc­tion of Scream­ers there also came its belat­ed­ness in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma. Where a 1981 ver­sion of it might at least have coin­cid­ed with the repli­cants of Rid­ley Scott’s Dick adap­ta­tion, Blade Run­ner, and would have direct­ly influ­enced the robo-apoc­a­lypses of The Ter­mi­na­tor and Hard­ware, the under-sand preda­tors of Dune, and the Newt char­ac­ter (mirac­u­lous­ly evad­ing mas­sacre, although here with a twist) from Aliens, in fact the influ­ence was all now in the oth­er direc­tion, leav­ing Scream­ers look­ing like a mere ripoff of these oth­er films.

As per­son­ae from either side of the con­flict – the war-hard­ened Hen­dricks­son, his lieu­tenant Chuck Elbarak (Ron White), the crash-land­ed crack shot Ace Jef­fer­son (Andrew Lauer), NEB sol­diers Ross (Charles Pow­ell) and Beck­er (Roy Dupuis), black­mar­ke­teer Jes­si­ca Hansen (Jen­nifer Ruben), and the aban­doned boy David (Michael Caloz) – all try to deter­mine if they can get along with each oth­er and back to Earth, their mutu­al dis­trust is only ampli­fied by the dis­cov­ery that the Scream­ers have now evolved new forms, some of which are very hard to dis­tin­guish from humans.

The ensu­ing Dar­win­ian strug­gle com­bines space opera skir­mish­es and Cold War para­noia – although the char­ac­ters rarely rise above card­board cutouts, and their dia­logue involves the kind of griz­zled tough guy/​gal pos­tur­ing over­fa­mil­iar from the sort of ​’80s action movie that this was in fact sup­posed to be.

Scream­ers is avail­able on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK from 101 Films Black Label on 25 May.