It's 2078 on the planet SIRIUS 6B. The Berynium mining colony was run by the all-powerful the New Economic Block (NEB). The Alliance, mine workers and scientists, demanded mine closure due to the pollution. This led to the devastating war as the Alliance unleashed self-replicating weapons under the surface called Screamers. Col. Hendricksson (Peter Weller) commands an Alliance outpost. He receives an offer for peace negotiations. Ace Jefferson is the sole survivor of a mysterious transport crash. Hendricksson discovers the Screamers are being modified. With conflicting reports, Hendricksson believes that they've been abandoned. He takes Jefferson on a mission to negotiate with the surviving NEB soldiers.The story is overloaded with background expositions. Sometimes, less is more. The movie needs to have one scene which reveals everything that is needed to know about the Screamers. Once that stuff is put away, this is a compelling sci-fi B-movie. Peter Weller is a solid sci-fi actor. I really like the premise but the expositions need to be tighter.

This is a mediocre film... I would normally give it a 5/10 but I give it 1 extra star for the ending that leaves you thinking. The budget is clearly low, and the sci-fi nature of the film suffers as a result. The plot is pretty cool, but the film constantly violates the laws of physics and just overall looks pretty cheesy. Towards the end, the plot is interesting and good enough for me to watch. I was entertained by the film but wouldn't watch it again. The mini-nukes look like a lot of fun! The military component of the film was terrible.... 2080 something and they have giant, cumbersome shotguns that hold only a few rounds.The character development isn't that bad, but the dialogue is kind of predictable. The movie does keep you guessing a little bit as to the next design of the robot, but I think everyone can predict that the final form is a human being. This film would have been better suited as an 80s film.There are some parts of the movie that deny common sense, such as when the commander guy looks at the screamer's programming files: He sees that the chip from the type he killed says it is "type 3", so he concludes that there are only 3 types of the robot. First of all, there could be 20 types and he only got a "type 3" by coincidence, and this also neglects the fact that there is the original design (the one that digs around in the sand).

This movie is an awesome movie and is one that leaves you wondering what really was the truth. In the end you find out but what seems basic at the beginning of the movie, that is the nature of the screamer, in the end becomes a plot with many twists. This movie is about what you think you know is really what you do not know.Screamers is set a little way in the future (2078) and is on a planet, Sirius 6B, that has been totally ravaged by nuclear war. An energy corporation, the New Economic Block (NEB), has discovered Berynium, a new source of energy. The problem is that mining it is incredibly lethal and the miners want protection. The NEB won't give it to them so they form an alliance and declare war on the NEB. The war turns into a cold war on Earth between the NEB and the Alliance while NEB obliterates Sirius 6B with Nuclear bombing raids. The movie opens at the tail end of this where both sides are holed up in bunkers and want to negotiate peace.This war seems to the something similar to the union disputes occurring today. The workers are being forced to work in harsh conditions and the corporation doesn't want to fund the extra money to protect them. The protests today are of a different matter, namely removing union control, but what we see here is the same sort of thing happening, except the war between the unions and the corporations has resulted in a shooting war.There is also the idea of the arms race. Both sides have struck with destructive weapons. The NEBs used nuclear weapons while the Alliance developed the Autonomous Mobile Sword, or the Screamer. They are called Screamers because they scream when they attack. At first they are just little nasties that burrow under the ground and attack anything with a pulse, but we learn a little way into the movie that the are built in an underground bunker, operated completely by automation, and they upgrade themselves. At first the Alliance believe they know all about the screamers, but when a new guy arrives, ignorant of it, they slowly begin to realise that what they accepted for so long they really don't understand.Then there is the nature of the war. It seems at first that the war is coming to the end and negotiations are nearby so they prepare to travel to the NEB bunker to talk, but then a transport crashes and they learn that the war is nowhere near over, but just moving to another planet. With the nuclear wasteland and the screamers, Sirius 6B has become uninhabitable. It is also interesting to note that Hendricksson says a number of times, "We were all NEBs once." The whole nature of war is that we are the same and in the end the whole reason of the war becomes moot and we just fight because we can.

"We are now in a new form of schizophrenia. No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic. […] The schizophrenic can no longer produce the limits of its own being. […] He is only a pure screen." - Baudrillard "That's right - Pinnochio's not a real little boy!" - Becker ("Screamers")Scifi author Harlan Ellison once took James Cameron to court, alleging that the director's 1984 film, "The Terminator", plagiarised "Demon With A Glass Hand" and "Soldier", two tales written by Ellison in the 1950s.But Cameron, a scifi nut, seems to have also borrowed heavily from Philip K Dick's "Second Variety", a 1953 short story which finds the world ravaged by war and mankind locked in combat with a race of machines. These machines were created for defence purposes, but eventually became "self aware", started evolving, making armies, factories and hunting down humans, whom they sought to completely eradicate. The machines then began creating terminator-like infiltration units; cyborgs which convincingly resemble humans and which are programmed to penetrate human bases. Dick's hero, a resourceful soldier, even resembles Cameron's Kyle Reese, and much of Dick's dialogue, desperate, fast and apocalyptic, recalls the frenetic banter in Cameron's "Terminator".While "Screamers", Christian Duguay's adaptation of Dick's "Second Variety", barely captures the tone and urgency of Dick's short story, Cameron's "Terminator" films do, though all these "adaptations" are more interesting in the way they demonstrate how Dick's approach to scifi changed from the 1950s onwards. All of Dick's novels are ontological conundrums, taking place in a landscape in which all "reality" seems to be constantly shifting, and in which worlds and selves constantly seem to fall apart. For Dick, there is no definitive reality, human identity itself is uncertain, nothing exists as it seems, and everything is simply a perception of pure information. In "Second Variety" these themes are approached in a fairly simple manner ("Is it an undercover killer robot or is it a human?", "What constitutes a robot?", "What constitutes a human?", "Aren't humans already cyborgs?", "How do I know what is real?", "How do I know what is machine?", "How do I know what I think I know?"), which is largely why it, and Dick's early work, remain his most popular. As Dick turned to drugs, stopped proof-reading, stopped perfecting and re-writing his stories, abandoned conventional narrative structures and started churning out novels quickly in a desperate attempt to pay his bills, his books, like his heroes and his own state of mind, became increasingly schizophrenic, paranoid and shapeless. Many deride Dick for this, but such a stance was the logical continuation of his early 1950s work. Today, Dick's later writing bare a striking similarity to postmodernist theories by thinkers such as Jameson, Baudrillard and Brian McHale. Dick anticipated the twenty-first century network society, a fragmented, culturally overloaded, media saturated world characterised by rapid technological change, constant movement and a dizzying, excessive and sometimes surreal aesthetic. For Dick, the future, our postmodern present, would morph into a sort of virtual reality game. A "consensual hallucination" in which all traditional demarcations or distinctions are erased. It is no longer an issue of there being a split between man and robot, but of man and technology constantly co-mingling, of both servicing the other, of all being technology, of man himself already being cybernetic, of the world already being cyberspacial, representational, all emotions faked, all behaviour play-acting, every object in quotes, everything grounded on the illusory. Whereas in an explicitly modernist film such as "Metropolis" the dichotomy between the original copy or experience (man) and the replication (machine) is very clear, in later Dickian films ("Blade Runner", Total Recall", "A Scanner Darkly", "Matrix", Cronenberg, Assayas etc - note how comparatively conservative Spielberg's version of Dick's "Minority Report" is) a crisis of representation occurs, as the signifier is now alienated from the object it signifies, a Deleuzian "schizoid existence" brought about by a breakdown "in the signifying chain".Unlike the apocalyptic, cosily hopeful rubble of "Terminator" and "Second Variety", later Dick also posits a urban, networked and mechanical landscape which engenders a consequential decline in organic feeling and sensibility. Men then become "consumers of illusion", an illusion of "belonging and participation" covering up massive industrial alienation. But every connection seems to lead back to corporations, a "soft fascism" whose grid it is impossible to escape. Here, everything is organised by the constant flow of money, all landscapes are advertising-saturated and the "goal" of commerce is to destroy history itself, to put its customers in the eternal Now, the big happy theme park of desires. No surprise then that one of Dick's last stories, "Stability", takes place in a world in which mankind doesn't progress anymore, despite the illusion of constant, hyper-motion. The story's solution? The invention of a Terminator-like time machine. If Dick got one thing wrong, it was in his assumption that this "schizoid existence" would trouble or traumatise man. Today, the opposite is true. Man's adapted. He loves his cage, even as he fantasises about Judgement Day.So postmodernist theory has itself has become what Brian McHale calls the "sister genre" of science fiction, both revolving around similar themes (What is reality? What constitutes the authentic human being?) and issues of technology and its effects on society and the individual subject. And while modernism was mainly interested in epistemology, the condition of knowledge, both Dick's scifi and postmodernism are governed by ontology and the basic conditions of existence. But "Screamers" and "The Terminator" films represent a kind of outdated, 1950s Philip K Dick, with nice easy, clear demarcations best suited for action cinema. Latter Dick is perhaps unsuited to the medium of cinema itself, though some of Olivier Assayas' more trashy films capture well his style ("Boarding Gate", "Demonlover").7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.