The question of what came first – the chicken or the egg can apply to many science-fiction movies. Did people read Jules Verne and become inspired to make submarines and spaceships or was Verne just expanding on what others were designing? Submersibles date back 300 years before Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
What was once science-fiction 40-50 years is the new normal. In the 2000 movie The 6th Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger quickly orders milk with a touchscreen monitor on his refrigerator. Now, we have them. Did someone see that movie and think it was a good idea or was the technology being worked on at the time?
Who knows?
Runaway is written and directed by Michael Crichton who was a man of health and science as he was of the written word and filmmaking. So, the movie, which would be his penultimate directing effort, is set in an unnamed metropolitan city in the early 1990s. (Both this movie and 6th Day were filmed in the Vancouver area as it’s known for it’s more modernist architecture which gives it a near-future vibe.) Robots and advance technology has become more common place. And thus, law enforcement have added a division to handle robots when they malfunction.
These malfunctioned robots are called “runaways.” Sgt. James Ramsey (Tom Selleck) has become the head of this division. He is a veteran police officer who was chasing a suspect years earlier. However, Ramsey has an extreme fear of heights and had a panic attack which prevented him from going after the person when he ran up a building that was under construction.
Ramsey’s colleague Sgt. Marvin James (Stan Shaw) tells newly assigned Officer Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes) the suspect went on to commit multiple murders. Ramsey blamed himself and took himself off the streets to where he only handles “runaways.” And it seems hilarious that the police department handles this but as a supervisor at a construction site explains, the company’s insurance won’t cover regular people throwing a switch to turn the robots off.
I remember a story I heard about Chow Yun-fat when he was making The Replacement Killers, which is his first American-made move. He is used to helping crew members move props around the set in Hong Kong that he was told he couldn’t do that on the set because the crew consists of union workers. Therefore, the insurance doesn’t cover him movie a harmless lightweight prop two feet.
Ramsey and Thompson respond to a residential neighborhood where they hear a household robot murdered family murders of David Johnson (Chris Mulkey) who works for a local technology company. After rescuing Johnson’s infant and stopping the malfunctioning robot, the police discover integrated circuits that override the safety controls on the robots and allow them to harm human beings. Even worse, the circuits are being mass produced.
As they track down Johnson who has fled to a motel to hide, they discover he is being targeted by Dr. Charles Luthor (Gene Simmons), who has helped developed the technology with Johnson and others. Luthor also wants to sell them on the black market. Luthor has also developed firearms that fire heat-seeking missile bullets that target specific people. He has also developed robotic spiders (even though they only have six legs) that are programmed to attack people injecting lethal substances into them before they explode.
Ramsey and Thompson also discover that Luthor’s ex-girlfriend, Jackie Rogers (Kirstie Alley), is trying to double-cross him by stealing the templates to sell herself. But Luthor has bugged her personal items such as her purse and bra so it’s easier to track her and the police. This leads to a sequence where the police are chased by Luthor and his goons while Ramsey and Jackie ride in the back of a self-driven car.
For the most part, Crichton basically gives us a by-the-numbers police procedural. He knows for the most part you really can’t change much up within 10 years. The robots look pretty much basic. Ramsey, a widower, has a household robot himself named Lois (voiced by Marilyn Schreffler) who functions more like a wife to him and a parent to his son, Bobby (Joey Cramer).
However, the kicker is the creepy spider robots also known as “Assassin” robots. And then there’s Simmons as the villainous Luthor. This was Simmons’ first major screen role. He was famous already for being in the rock band KISS and had only made the atrociously bad TV movie Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. Crichton said that for the audition, he just had the musician look at him without speaking. Simmons does have a creepy stare that says more than words.
Simmons said he didn’t see Luthor as evil but as a deadly animal who kills when someone or something gets in his way. Filming took place in Vancouver during the summer of 1984 as Selleck was on hiatus from filming Magnum P.I. Incidentally, Selleck had a smaller but crucial role in Crichton’s adaptation of Robin Cook’s Coma six years earlier as a patient who goes in for a basic surgery only to find himself in a coma where his organs are later harvested on the black market.
Selleck does what he can with the material but it feels like it was just reworked by the studio, Tri-Star Pictures, which was still getting its feet wet and needed to pull people in at the box office. The studio was still recovering from the fallout after parental groups and critics targeted Silent Night, Deadly Night a month earlier. The marketing of Runaway features Selleck holding the special gun Luthor uses with smart bullets. However, Selleck never brandishes it at all in the movie. He also wears the same mesh suit he wore while trying to stop the robot with the handgun.
Yet, mostly, he wears a regular police uniform and plain clothes throughout most of the movie’s runtime. That might have been why the movie didn’t even break even in his U.S. domestic gross. Produced on a mere $8 million budget, it barely grossed over $6.7 million. And it was competing with 2010: The Year We Make Contact which had opened the previous week. And it had been usurped by The Terminator which made a lot more at the box office.
Yet give Crichton the credit he has due. He knew a lot of the modern technology at the time and what was on the building blocks to anticipate the future. During one scene, Ramsey catches Bobby watching what could be considered a tablet in his bed. During the scene with the robot with a gun, the police send a drone with a video camera attached to look around. Now, we have those. There was even controversy years ago when someone actually programmed a drone to fire a handgun.
Robots using our own inventions and technology against us has been used in a lot of movies, books, and TV shows. However, just like Westworld, Crichton said he was more concern with the faults of humans. Greed stops the organizers of Westworld from shutting things down when the machines start to show problems. Also the greed of the guests is also explored as a character says it costs $1,000 a day. That’s over $7,000 in today’s numbers and I’m sure it probably was a lot in the early 1970s.
Crichton does avoid certain issues some filmmakers could’ve done more with the plot, such as the use of machines to build skyscrapers and take insects off stalks of corn. What has this done to the economy of the time especially if certain people find themselves out of work? We never find out. Remember this was the 1980s where a lot of blue-collar workers and farmers found their jobs obsolete thanks to automaton and outsourcing.
You could say Crichton missed a good opportunity but I feel he didn’t want to find himself too bogged down as a science-fiction filmmaker. There are self-driving cars with sensors that can detect things near us in this movie. And now we have those. Luthor even accesses a computer mainframe that has a lot of Ramsey’s personal information on it, which is similar to social media.
Runaway is not a perfect movie by any means. But at least Crichton does make it fun to watch. And the images of the spider robots along with Simmons’ manic performance is creepy enough. And you have to laugh a little that Selleck, who stands 6-foot-4, would be afraid of heights. I’ve seen big tough guys be afraid of little needle pokes.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 