A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

A sub-par science fiction tale dealing with intelligent robot life, this has been done too many times to be constantly entertaining, although there are a few choice moments. Frankly I'm pretty sick of the gloomy, grungy, depressing tone of a lot of modern thrillers like SEVEN and HARDWARE, and obviously that kind of atmosphere has rubbed off on the makers of this film who do their best to make their world look as dull and horrible as possible.The story itself - based on Philip K. Dick's novel - is not too bad, dealing with A.I. and an interesting race of self-replicating robots. Unfortunately the film should have concentrated on these robots as they are the most interesting thing about the film, but instead human relationships are the main focal point, and they're really not that interesting.On another note, if you're expected good special effects, then look elsewhere. The original flying spheres (like something out of PHANTASM) are shown only briefly a couple of times, and then gone for the rest of the film. The only time we see them is when they're underground like the worms in TREMORS. The use of children as merciless killers is a clever idea - see the original VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED for another menacing example - and this film has one excellent moment, where Weller and his friends desperately fight a never-ending stream of robotic killers issuing from an army base. It's this kind of visual theme which makes SCREAMERS stand out a bit from the rest.The cast itself is okay, yet nothing special. Peter Weller is rather good as the charismatic, ageing hero, and proves himself well in the action sequences. It's good to see him in another film. However, everybody else is merely middling. The action scenes are well staged, especially the ending, but are frequently at the expense of the plot. Still, for a science fiction film you could do a lot worse; just try watching TERMINAL FORCE.

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.

There are two sides at war, but the war is winding down, it looks like one side has won, and the other side wants a truce... The trouble is that the autonomous weapons systems that the winning side deployed (called "screamers") and which helped them win, have other ideas. It stars Peter Weller, from Robocop.On the face of it, this looks like it'll be a by the numbers crappy scifi thriller horror with paper thin characters and wooden acting, and at best some testosterone fueled action movie sequences... That's what I thought anyway. I was very wrong.The acting was all extremely well done, especially by Weller. I was very impressed. Very good performances by all. The filming was atmospheric and well shot. Sets were great, props and costumes too. The story was full of emotion, it was thought provoking and well acted. This was an intelligent film!It was let down in two areas: 1. For most of the film the effects were very cheap, contrasting with the quality of the rest of it. 2. They lent a little too much on the cheap thriller aspect in parts of it, especially at the very end. It detracted a little from the intelligent themes and great acting. It's almost as if there were two competing forces at work: Highly competent, professional, pro, A-list film makers VS some strange incompetent cretin who BADLY wanted it to be a B-film. So it was flawed.

I decided to watch Screamers because I'm a big Phillip K. Dick fan, and this was a film based on one of his stories I never read yet. I had realized I overlooked the movie for way too long. I originally thought the movie was outdated, since I have experienced the human/robot social films for a while now, mostly with Battle Star Galactica, Blade Runner, i, Robot, and even Terminator. However, this is one of the first and original stories to convey the human/robot social conflicts and was glad to find the film on my video on demand lists.Worth mentioning first is the fine acting by Peter Weller, and I can't help but wonder why he never became more than a cult film actor, he truly could have been a big time action star on par with the other heavyweights of the 90s. And he really is convincing in this film, as a man who was on the brink of madness from desolation and hardship. As for the supporting cast, excellent performances for a low budget film. It reminded me of a time when all Science Fiction films were B-movies, before the Star Wars and Star Trek's came along.Come to think of it, the film had a decent sized budget for a 90s film. Nothing like other adapted Phillip K. Dick novels had gotten, such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, or Total Recall, but still, Screamers is a story that needed a bigger budget and if it had gotten one, this film would be a classic to be mentioned in the same breath as Dick's other masterpieces. The story reminded me of Blade Runner in some ways, and another short by Dick called "The Defenders" In a sense, Dick re-tells his themes over and over again, but nevertheless, Screamers is well written and unique in its own way. It's just perplexing why this film didn't come out in the 70s, or even early 80s, before the original Battle Star Galactica, and before Terminator, etc. This story would have made for a very pioneering film.