I have zero recollection of the movie Runaway coming out in 1984 — and, more tellingly, no recollection of it playing on cable or coming up in conversation after that. At some point in this last decade, it came up somehow, as a bit of a punchline, because it features Gene Simmons — yes, Gene Simmons of KISS — shooting a high-tech pistol with homing-missile rounds.
This did not sell me on the idea of seeking it out. Gene Simmons hams it up, but the other stars play their roles well enough — even though they’re hardly believable as a team of techies:
It turns out that this isn’t a sci-fi B movie — it’s by Michael Crichton — and it’s (unevenly) prescient about modern technology:
It’s about the introduction of smart weapons into civilian life – like the Exocet missile. The pilot who sunk the battleship Sheffield in the Falklands war never even saw the target. He just fired at it over the horizon. When people buy a coffeemaker these days, they expect it to have a microprocessor in it. What about when they buy a gun?
The setting feels like 1984, but with Heathkit robots that work like what we’re now expecting in the next few years. When a “runaway” robot goes rogue, they send in Tom Selleck’s character, who dons something like shark-diving chainmail and BMX gear — and calls for a “floater” drone with a TV camera to go in ahead of him. Prescient. He then dispatches the robot with a totally incongruous laser pistol, despite carrying a semi-auto pistol throughout the film. Again, its prescience is uneven.
Interestingly, the villain uses a “floater” with a smoke bomb, but when he goes to assassinate our heroes he uses what amounts to an RC car with a bomb — something we kids all came up with independently, back in the day.
“battleship Sheffield”
It was a mere destroyer not a battleship…
Crichton clearly had little interest in the details of weapons. In the movie, a household robot goes rogue and acquires a revolver — which makes a pump-action shotgun racking sound before each shot and leaves a ragged two-inch hole in the drywall. Sigh. So I’m not surprised he gets his warships mixed up.
Crichton usually got his computer stuff correct, though. He picked up a degree in “computer graphics” while he was getting his M.D. at Harvard. When he decided he didn’t care for doctoring, he went to Hollywood and made more computer-ish movies than doctor-ish ones.
I only discovered “Runaway” earlier this year; I thought I was familiar with all of Crichton’s movies, but apparently not. I don’t remember ever seeing any mention of it anywhere.
Huh, I remember Runaway being a fairly frequent Saturday afternoon movie option on cable. Not to the level of Rising Sun, but it was on at least once every three or four months. Now, unlike Rising Sun, I never actually left it on…
Rising Sun came a decade later. I remember reading the novel right around when I read Jurassic Park.
The Terminator, on the other hand, came out the same year as Runaways and was a much bigger deal.
Crichton was also a novelist — a fairly good one – and wrote almost all of his own screenplays. He should have known the screenplay for Runaway stank.
Watching Runaway a few months ago, I had a hard time believing it was a Crichton movie; it’s a mess. I didn’t like all of Crichton’s movies, but they were put together better than that.
While on the Critchton subject, I’d like to make a plug for Looker, done about the same time as Runaway, but much better. Crichton had a degree in computer graphics from back when the software was mostly calculus and algorithms and Pong was state of the art hardware, but he projected what could happen if the hardware advanced enough.
In the movie, it was ostensibly being used to generate advertising using computer models of actors…but the real purpose was to deepfake political debates in realtime, to influence elections. Looker was a “made for TV” movie that mostly got ignored, but the last few election cycles have made me wonder…
It looks like Looker is on YouTube!
I greatly enjoyed both Runaway and Looker in the 1980s. Marginally relevant link:
Starring the Computer: Computers in Movies and Television
Starring the Computer: Computers in Runaway (1984)