Title: Runaway (1984)
Director/Writer: Michael Crichton
Cast: Tom Selleck, Cynthia Rhodes, Gene Simmons, Kirstie
Alley
Michael Crichton was best known for having written Jurassic
Park (1993) but few know that he was already a prolific filmmaker/writer long
before that. For example, he’d written and directed films like the sci-fi
western mash-up Westworld (1973) and the sci-fi thriller Coma (1978). When we
get down to it, he was more of a writer than he was a director, directing wise,
in my opinion, he never really had a style, you couldn’t tell his films apart
by the direction, rather, you could tell them apart because they had a clever
concept, an idea with an often times real life scientific explanation behind
them. However farfetched Jurassic Park might seem, Crichton’s books were based research
he made about cloning experiments that went on in the real world. And like the
best science fiction, Crichton often times tried predicting the future. In
Runaway Crichton imagined a world in which robots are common place in society.
How did Crichton’s concept play out on film?
In Runaway we meet Jack Ramsay, a police officer who
specializes in capturing “Runaway” robots that malfunction and start doing
crazy things, like killing people. You see, in this future robots do all sorts
of jobs like cook, clean, take care of the children...and even hard labor like
construction work. But when robots malfunction and become dangerous, that’s when
the Runaway Units comes into play. You see, Runaway Units are these police
officers that specialize in dealing with these robots gone awry. When a series
of robots start going berserk for no apparent reason, Ramsay discovers a plot
to turn robots into killers by installing a special chip on them; can he stop
the bad guys from achieving their goals?
Michael Crichton’s films always dealt with technology
failing somehow, technology going evil. For example, in Crichton’s Westworld we are presented with the idea of an
amusement park that’s made to duplicate the experience of living in the Old
West, right down to having real cowboys, cantinas, horses and guns. The only
difference is that the cowboys are lifelike robots! At one point, one of the
robots goes rogue and starts killing the guests! As you can probably infer, Westworld was
actually the precursor to Crichton's own Jurassic Park, which plays with a similar premise,
but with dinosaurs. So as you can see, at the center of Crichton’s films there
was always this idea that technology can’t be trusted; same thing with Runaway,
a film in which robots are turned evil by none other than Gene Simmons from
KISS, who plays the villain named Luther. One look at Simmons’s face in this
film, and it’s obvious he relishes playing bad guys, he’s evil stare says it
all.
The Runaway Division plays out a lot like the premise for BladeRunner (1984), with police officers assigned to stop the rebel robots, only
Crichton delivers the whole idea in a cheesier fashion, because while Blade Runner uses the premise of chasing evil robots to explore existentialism, Runaway is all about Ramsay conquering his fear of heights, that's about as deep as this one goes. It's cheesy because while this movie is supposed to take place in "the future" nothing in this movie looks very futuristic at all; everything looks like its 1984, only with clunky looking robots
doing things. By the way, the robots in this movie look like the retarded brothers of R2-D2.
Even cheesier is the fact that all these cops have to do is turn off a switch
on the robots? I mean, it kind of makes you think why people can’t do this job
themselves? Why do they have to call a cop to do it? But part of the fun of
watching this particular movie is how dated technology is, how everyone is
amazed at things that are common place today, like hacking into a computer
system. At one point Gene Simmons hacks into the police departments cameras and
he’s like “I bet you’re wondering how I did that?” So yeah, technology is
completely out dated on this one, which makes it kind of funny.
A promotional still for Runaway, and a sample of the clunky robots in the film
And the film is so incredibly 80’s, starting by how the cops
have cars and uniforms that don’t look futuristic at all, they look like cops
from T.J. Hooker or C.H.I.P.S? Anybody remember those cop shows from the 80’s?
So anyhow, lots of things make Runaway oh so very 80’s, starting by the fact
that Kirstie Alley looks really hot on this movie, so that dates the movie as
well, this movie was shot well before she turned into the poster girl for
overweight women; but on this movie? She’s hotter than Georgia Asphalt! There’s
this whole sequence in which Kirstie Alley having to strip in order to locate a
bug on her body? So sleazy! Then we have Tom Selleck and his intimidating monster
moustache which is just like awe inspiringly huge on this film. And then there’s
all these nonsensical things that could only happen in a film from the 80’s,
like this scene in which a robot spider shoots acid on Ramsay’s face and it’s
like, no big deal, he only gets a mild wound when his whole face should have
melted off? Or when all Gene Simmons’s has to do in order to infiltrate a
police station is dress like a cop? Doesn’t anybody notice this guy doesn’t work
here? And he does this to hack the police files! Then, in order to break into
the computer he uses someone’s eyeball (it’s never explained whose eyeball it
is or how he got it) in order to break the police computers retinal eye scan
code…nobody gives a flying flip that this guy has a detached eyeball in his
hand!? This movie is hilarious as only a film from the 80’s can be.
"Kiss me, never mind the acid on my face!"
But then it’s got some cool things about it, like this whole
chase sequence in which the good guys are chased down a highway by these little
remote control robots that blow up, that was cool. There’s this whole plot line
about Gene Simmons selling these black market guns that shoot heat seeking
bullets. When shot, we get these cool bullet POV shots that reminded me of
something Sam Raimi would have done in his Evil Dead movies. Then there’s this
whole ending sequence that takes place in a construction site, high up, it’s such
an extended sequence, goes on forever, but it has some cool vertigo inducing
sequences. At the end of the day, this isn’t the greatest film in the world, but
it’s also kinda entertaining, and I have to admit it has an original premise.
It just feels like it needed a bit more money to make it a bit more futuristic and
a bit less like an 80’s television show.
Rating: 2 ½ out of 5
