Isegoria

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.

Posted in Media, Technology, Weapons | 2 Comments »