Screamers (1996)

I did not have high hopes for this when I started, but there's a core of something good. The do the infodump scroll at the start about humanity discovering an incredible energy source on another world, which turns out to be massively radioactive. When the people mining it (the Alliance) demand mining cease, a war starts between them and the company (NEB) spearheading the mining. One which may have stretched to other worlds, though I'm unclear on if all humanity is dragged into this war.

Anyway, Peter Weller's the commander of part of the "Alliance" on the alien world where the mining began. The Alliance has only held out by building things called "screamers", which are little metal balls with buzzsaws around the exterior. They roam around underground and leap out to dismember anyone or anything with a heartbeat. They also emit a high-pitched noise which disorients the target so it can't fight back.

There's a whole thing about a possible armistice, chance for negotiations at the NEB base, and then a shuttle full of Alliance soldiers from Earth crash lands. So this part is kind of interesting. The one survivor (who I think Charlie Banks in Necessary Roughness, did not expect to see him), hasn't heard anything about an armistice. The commander that sent the message was executed as a traitor two years ago.

It effectively creates this sense that Weller and his people are really on an island. They're still fighting, but they have no idea what's going on in the wider universe, or even if they should still be fighting. And it feeds into the exhaustion of them being there for 20 years, which is why Weller essentially decides to try and visit the NEB base anyway. Maybe it's a trap, or maybe the NEB soldiers are getting orders just as out-of-date, or maybe they're tired.

Weller and Charlie head out, quickly learning things are not what they seem. Specifically, the Alliance's laissez-faire approach to their screamers was a bad one. Weller admits they have no idea why the screamers drag the body parts of people they kill below ground. I would be wondering how something the size of a softball with no limbs drags anything, but that's me.

This is the second part that interests me. Not just the Frankenstein, man recklessly messing with things they don't understand, but the notion that the screamers, given the better part of two decades where they were simply set loose, have begun to evolve. Their forms are growing more varied. There's one that looks like the skeleton of a fish, and another that looks like a child and can even speak. I'm curious how the fish is "Type 1" and the kid is "Type 3". Seems like quite the leap, but life finds a way. It's something you see on isolated islands here on Earth, where animals will evolve to fill available niches, so you get iguanas going in the water, or giant komodo dragons or flightless killer birds because there are no large mammalian predators.

This leads into the back half of the movie, where Weller and Banks reach the NEB base, but find three survivors huddling in one section. They behave oddly, but you can chalk it up to the stress and isolation. Weller has become a sort of gruff asshole over his time here, so maybe a guy quoting Shakespeare and obsessively sharpening a knife is just developing his own coping mechanisms. Or they're yet another Type. So in addition to the growing sense that they're all in much deeper trouble than they realized, there's the game of "who is actually a monster in disguise?"

The movie goes a bit too long. You know there's one more "gotcha!" moment coming, but the movie still has 20 minutes left, so I was really just waiting for it to happen. As it turns out, there's maybe 3 more "gotcha!" moments, but in such quick succession it blunts the impact. Also, much of it turns on a romantic subplot which only appeared with about 20 minutes to go. Unless I was simply supposed to assume that if there's only one woman in the cast for a long stretch, she and the lead actor are obviously attracted to each other. Because they sure weren't doing much showing.

Not great, but I was expecting something truly horrible, so the fact there was as much of interest as there was pleasantly surprised me.