Director: Michael Crichton
108 minutes (12) 1984
108 minutes (12) 1984
101 Films
Blu-ray region B
[Released 2nd March]
Rating: 8/10
Review by Steven Hampton
While
SF masterpiece Blade Runner (1982)
was by far the greatest movie about androids and A.I. of its era, this action
thriller about a police officer chasing rogue robots was, and still is,
markedly more realistic with its futuristic concerns for the common genre trope
of man versus machine. Sergeant Ramsey (Tom Selleck) meets new partner Karen
(dancer Cynthia Rhodes, doing much more here than just her best Heather
Locklear impression), and they fly off to deal with a farming drone that’s gone
faulty on pest control. At night, the scene of a domestic rampage has cops sending
in a floating copter-camera for video surveillance. Ramsey’s fear of heights on
a building site means Karen tackles a machine problem on the 18th floor. Their
biggest challenge is the comic-book styled villainy of Dr Luther (Gene Simmons),
a techno-terrorist who claims to be from Acme repairs, but is a smuggler
dealing in dangerous microchips. Glamorous secretary, Jackie (Kirstie Alley),
is held hostage by a sentry and she is discovered to be Luther’s unwilling
accomplice.
With
more hi-tech gadgets than most 007 movies, Runaway
features smart-bullets used for aiming around corners, and nefarious Luther
deploys toy-sized cars to attack moving targets on the road. Advanced weaponry includes
creepy spider-bots, injecting acid like poison. We might expect Michael Crichton
- creator of Westworld (1973), maker
of Coma (1978), and under-appreciated
media-satire Looker (1981), to have
grasp of science but his directing on Runaway
is also fairly astute, with fascinating use of some sound effects, and unexpected
silence to help generate breathless suspense. Credibly detailed in its off-beat
depiction of routine police work against hazardous tech, this movie eventually
wins a measure of genre respect for spotlighting a less exciting job
description but making its own specific world believable within the context of a commercial screen entertainment.
Supported
by right-wing governments, capitalist exploitation of workers appears to have
scuppered the sort of widespread 21st century techno-fear, where sabotaged (or
hacked) robots might become dangerous in a futuristic society dependent upon
factory machines, in Runaway, just as
the many replicants of Blade Runner
never materialised. Cyber-crime is what really happened in our modern age, but
such contemporary facts actually support Crichton’s thesis for this cautionary screen-drama,
that it’s the criminal mentality and/ or incompetence, not mechanical failures,
which pose greater risk in society than ubiquitous technology itself.
