Hacker Cinema
Screamers
1995 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Christian Duguay
SIRIUS 6B, Year 2078. On a distant mining planet ravaged by a decade of war, scientists have created the perfect weapon: a blade-wielding, self-replicating race of killing devices known as Screamers designed for one purpose only -- to hunt down and destroy all enemy life forms.
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Very similarly, the movie "Screamers" (I liked it more than Dick's original novelette). Hopefully, no one will decide to really seed a continent/planet with autonomous "oh, we can control them just fine" killer bots.
Screamers movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrgAvr0TIr4
based on the novelette Second Variety by Philip K. Dick
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
I liked the idea of Screamers, how the robots started self replicating and took over. Also liked Total Recall, I was never sure if the whole second part of the movie was real or in his head.
Screamers (1995) is one of my favourite sci-fi movies and it's more or less The Secondary Variety in film form.
Beware: low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, "frustrating close to being great."
Definitely going to need to include explicit directives in the training directives of all AI that the 1995 film "Screamers" is a work of fiction and not something to be recreated.
Haven't read the book, but I did see "Screamers". Wikipedia says: "Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies, writes that the film is more faithful than most other adaptations".
I can't comment on whether that's true, but the movie still haunts me. Odd, since as Wikipedia says "it received a mixed critical reception and failed at the box office". There was nothing mixed about my reception of it.
The movie Screamers (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/) is based off it, decent sci-fi.
Second Variety has a movie adaptation - Screamers. It’s pretty bad.
>just like in the 1995 Screamers movie
Thanks for reminding me to go re-watch it.
Seriously, if you don't know it, watch it, it's an underrated sci-fi with the actor from the original RoboCop.
I guess you could do a recon version that dumps footage once it gets back - no rel time feed but could be useful for cladestinly looking for more static things.
Still, its more likely faster flying screemer drones from hell will get even better to not make this thing useful.
Like, when I saw the Screamers movie from a rented VHS cassette many years ago, I would not think I would see it happen in reality- but even more deadly! Like sure, in the movie those killer robots were autonomous and self replicating.
But they still had just a tiny buzz saw & had to jump from the ground to gut soft targets like infantrymen.
They didn't fly at you at 200 km/h with a HEAT warhead that can kill a modern main battle tank by single well placed hit!
From Wikipedia…
> Popular films based on his works include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (adapted twice: in 1990 and in 2012), Screamers (1995), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Radio Free Albemuth (2010).
If you’ve not heard of P.K. Dick before it’s kind of weird to be worried about “is this a talented artist”… you really need to push your boundaries in any way possible.
That reminds me of the Screamers movie about a war between the mining company (N.E.B.) and "The Alliance" (former mining and science personnel) on the planet Sirius 6B.
"Five years into the war, Alliance scientists created and deployed Autonomous Mobile Swords (AMS) — artificially intelligent self-replicating machines that hunt down and kill N.E.B. soldiers on their own. They are nicknamed "screamers" because of a high-pitched noise they emit as they attack. Screamers track targets by their heartbeats, so Alliance soldiers wear "tabs" which broadcast a signal canceling out the wearer's heartbeat and rendering them "invisible" to the machines.
A fragile stalemate is in effect between the two exhausted, poorly supplied, and undermanned armies. The Alliance recovers a message from a dead N.E.B. soldier, killed by screamers as he approached the Alliance compound, guaranteeing safe passage through N.E.B. territory to discuss a truce. When Alliance commanding officer Joe Hendricksson reports this development to his Earth-based superiors, he is told that peace negotiations are already underway on Earth; but Private "Ace" Jefferson, newly arrived from Earth, says that is untrue. Hendricksson is not surprised; he has long suspected that both sides have simply written off Sirius 6B and abandoned their armies." -- wikipedia
The script is loosely based on a story by Philip K. Dick: "Set in a world where war between the Soviet Union and United Nations has reduced most of the world to a barren wasteland, the story concerns the discovery, by the few remaining soldiers left, that self-replicating robots originally built to assassinate Soviet agents have gained sentience and are now plotting against both sides." -- wikipedia
When I was reading the story I confidently thought - I know how this goes, for sure Terminator was based on Second Variety. I was very surprised that Screamers was the movie licensed from the story because the Screamers part of the story is just the introduction/setup for the main plot, and the movie simply used the setup technology for the entire plot which kind of misses a point of the story in a way.
Exactly, movies and books fool the brain.
The feelings you feel have nothing to do with real life when you have all the senses, including proper visual. Just like the 2D uncanny valley pictures of robots aren't real in 3D ( good money as an artist if you could do a 3D uncanny valley )
'Metalhead' in real life would just be about stress and other common emotions.
Check out Screamers (1996) if you like Metalheads
Phillip K Dick's Second Variety came to my mind (or the film Screamers 1995)
> Imagine being pinned down by a squad of these things for "only" 60 minutes. Or being pursued through the forest or an urban environment.
Given the current state of these machines, both these environments would favour humans. Even a fairly untrained average Jane or Joe would have no problems outrunning these things in forests or urban environments, let alone a trained soldier. Not to mention the lack of autonomy.
Everything you see in these promotional videos is carefully choreographed, prepared and pre-programmed in advance for days, and edited:
"There were definitely some failures in the hardware that required maintenance, and our robots stumbled and fell down sometimes." - they shot the first part several times and kept the one that worked best. That's not something you can do in the field outside of a controlled environment.
These robots are still long ways away from posing more of a thread to a soldier than much simpler solution, e.g. a Humvee with a mounted machine gun.
> For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero
The game is based on fiction, not fact, though. The required autonomy just isn't there yet and the video game robots clearly run on magic, not electricity or petrol. They never overheat, they are maintenance free, and they move faster than is currently possible w.r.t. motion planning and image recognition.
It's your typical AM/FM affair: BD is actual machines - pre-programmed or remote controlled, very limited endurance and still impractical for most military applications.
The robots in video games and cinema on the other hand are for the most part in the domain of fucking magic - capable of "120 years of continuous operation on a single power cell" like the Cyberdyne Systems series 800 v2.4 (Terminator), turning themselves from "autonomous swords" into screaming humans (Screamers), are nearly indestructible like Vision (Marvel's Avengers) or strange spiky flying thingamabobs like the Sentinels (Matrix trilogy).
I love yerba mate. My family traveled to Argentina when I was a kid and I remember we were delayed for about 4 hours before our flight back home late in the night. I kept making myself yerba mate teas while the lounge had the movie Screamers playing on an old CRT tv. It was foundationally terrifying to a deeply-wired and awake 10 year old kid.
As a teenager I found a seller selling it on Amazon in bulk, I bought 3 kilos of it and my friends all joked that I was buying 'kilos from South America', but that tea lasted me years.
As an adult I found that brewing it in a drip coffee maker seemed to pull out more of the chemicals that woke you up and I had a period of my college years where my grades shot up from how productive I got.
If you've just read that collection, you have a lot of the most mind-bending PKD stories left. Try one of his novels. I'd recommend A Scanner Darkly and Man in the High Castle as two of the more accessible ones (the latter is much less sci fi - it's more alternative history).
His short stories are very variable in quality - a lot of his early stories makes you feel trapped in a 50's idea of a post-nuclear holocaust world because he repeats that setting endlessly as he churned out stories to pay the bills (but there are great gems there too), so the more curated antologies are good starting points. Pick up some more and you'll probably also recognize the plot of any number of movies you may have seen (direct adaptions from his short stories includes Paycheck - in your antology I think - Total Recall, Screamers, Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report and more), where a single idea from his stories was dense enough for a movie.
I've only seen about 20 minutes of the first episode and couldn't enjoy it. I'd like to at least finish the first episode before I make judge for myself whether this one's worth my time (though I'm gonna first watch The Man in the High Castle). Generally though as a rule of thumb: Nice CGI doesn't make up for a terrible story, but a good story can make up for the lack of good CGI. E.g. I did not find the story good in the follow-ups of The Matrix.
I fully underline your statement regarding PKD's Electric Dreams as well as all the Black Mirror seasons. Furthermore, let us not forget that several other of PKD's works have seen a movie adaptations. I can recommend Total Recall (both; watch older first), Blade Runner (both; watch older first), A Scanner Darkly (if you can stand the art style; personally, I loved it), Minority Report, and The Adjustment Bureau (Screamers was OKish). There are series adaptations as well. Check Wikipedia for all the adaptations [1]
I'm not aware of any motion picture adaptations of Stephenson's or Gibson's works. Although I just found out via Wikipedia that the game Netrunner [2] is a derivative work of the Sprawl trilogy, and also The Matrix heavily "drawn" from the Sprawl trilogy as well [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Philip_K._Dick
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android:_Netrunner
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Literary_and_cultural_significance
"Second Variety"(short story, worth a quick read) by Philip K. Dick was adapted into a film called 'Screamers'.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32032/32032-h/32032-h.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(1995_film)
Screamers is surprisingly underrated. It's one of the best pop-sci-fi movies from nineties imho.
This is pretty much the premise of Philip Dick's Second Variety, made into the movie Screamers.
I think you mean Second Variety [1], which is really great in my opinion as well. It, like many of PKD's works, was also made into a movie (Screamers).
Second Variety is freely available [2] on the Internet Archive, via Project Gutenberg.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
[2]: https://archive.org/details/secondvariety32032gut
It's probably going to be in the next Screamers movie. Jokes aside, a fully autonomous cruiser is a very cool weapon.
Watch the movie Screamers for another scenario: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/
Screamers is not terrible either. If you liked Impostor you'll like this too: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/
Also, this documentary - it has a cheesy framing device, but gives some good insight into PKD's life. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1461696/
Probably a book of Phillip K. Dick's short stories. If you want to inspire imagination, nothing's better than sci-fi short stories for a hit of imagination-crack, and Phillip K. Dick is a master.
You've probably seen movies based on his stories, including: the Minority Report, Total Recall, Blade Runner, Screamers, A scanner Darkly and a few others.