Silent Running (1972)

Dir. Douglas Trumbull, co-written, interestingly, by "Deer Hunter"'s Michael Cimino. This was a way better idea than execution, and it kind of kills me, because half of me really wants to use it in a class about seventies environmentalism or environmental disaster or ecophagy (new word I learned from the Wiki entry I read on "Screamers"!), but the other half of me knows that the undergrad mind would not easily handle the sections where Bruce Dern, wearing a druid-esque gown, communes in the garden with bunnies and the box-of-junk-looking robots he talks to. Why, Trumbull, why?

Dern is a biologist who's responsible for maintaining a giant spaceship which holds several biospheres. The ship, one of a fleet, is charged with saving what's left of non-human nature from the "poisoned soil" of Earth. The thing is, nobody except Dern's character cares anymore about non-human nature. His three co-workers on the ship are yahoos who only like to run around in little go-karts, trampling the gardens, and are ecstatic when the decision comes from Earth to jettison all of the biospheres and return home so the ships can be put back into commercial transport. Dern kills all of them in order to save some non-human nature, although he does have sad, guilty second thoughts about having done so.

The movie is very careful to make sure that you think of Dern's character as just as much of a man as the yahoo crewmembers (he can beat them at poker, and he beats them in a fight). Just because he eats cantalope instead of the processed food provided for them doesn't mean that he doesn't have testicles, etc. Ha! I love the seventies. Total disconnect between human and non-human nature; burly yet caring man; nerdy proto-robotics technology fetish.

Screamers (1995)

Dir. Christian Duguay (who also directed the sequels to "Scanners" - who knew they existed?), made from a Philip K. Dick story, "Second Variety," that was probably way better than the movie ended up being. (There's also a documentary with the same name from 1996 that's about a tour by System of a Down. Screamers indeed!) Peter Weller is a tough-as-nails corporal in the army of miners and scientists that's fighting against a giant corporation that wants to mine berynium (sp?) on a distant planet and release all the deadly radiation sideproduct that everybody knows is released when you mine berynium. Weller is the kinda guy who kills tons of people but also has a desk that's got a giant pyramid as a pedestal, at which he sits with his legs propped up and listens to classical music as he looks at his coin collection to pass the time.

The "screamers" in question are "autonomous swords" that the good guys have implanted in the sand all over the planet. They race toward anything with a pulse and dismember it. Somehow, only the good guys have figured out the special tech that will disable a screamer (a wristband that screws up your pulse until you don't sound tasty to a screamer). The bad guys are still vulnerable to being all ripped up. Meanwhile, the screamers themselves have evolved, until they're no longer a little animal-looking thing and instead have figured out how to manifest themselves in form of a pathetic little kid clutching a teddy bear, a tough-guy soldier with teardrop face tattoos, a hot-girl soldier, and basically anything else they want. (Where's the missing link, I ask you?)

I don't even really feel like I can properly criticize the movie, because it was so low-budge. I always love an interplanetary resource extraction plot, but I credit Dick with that. But mostly, it made me want to see "Starship Troopers."