Screamers: The Hunting

Greetings,

I will keep it short. This is a movie full of clichés and inconsistencies in relation to the original. Mediocre at best - it should not be considered "Canon" in my opinion as Screamers deserves a proper sequel.

The narrative is broken at best - remember the original? The screamers were made on Earth, there was no point in going back to planet 6B to "retrieve data". It was on Earth to begin with.

Sfx are terrible and could work only for short intros in a video game. The Screamer animations look very bad and they are repetitive. The combat scenes are also disappointing, and don't provide any thriller whatsoever. The best scenes of the movie are not the ones where Sfx is used.

The acting is not terrible but there is a lack of fluidity, as none of the protagonists are memorable the relationships between them are superficial. A black guy was a member of the team - but he dies quite early. Heroically. I suppose that's what it is called these days - a "racially inclusive" movie.

The original was a pure 90s classic, it had its own charm. There were some plot inconsistencies, but it tried to surprise viewers. Remember the child robot? It was creepy. Here on the other hand we don't have any of that.

I personally would like to ignore this as a sequel. Can somebody make a movie where the Earth civilization dies, and Sirius 4 inhabitants face the imminent threat? That would be a lot more plausible.

I would like to see a proper sequel, a reboot of sorts.

I caught the first "Screamers" in the theater and enjoyed the heck out of it. Director Christian Duguay had the foresight to use some decent actors (Peter Weller chiefly among them), paid attention to fashioning a politically charged story and did his best to deliver a decent film. Hey, it wasn't perfect, but he succeeded more than not.

Now comes Sheldon Wilson who tries to make up for a ridiculous story with some interesting visuals. If you give bad actors some good dialogue or even good actors some bad dialogue, you sometimes get lucky. However, when you give bad actors some bad dialogue, riddle a plot with inconsistencies, gaping holes and a lack of any logic while making it all extremely easy to pick out every twist and turn to come, then you get "Screamers: The Hunting".

Things are still bad on Sirius 6B and when a distress signal is sent to Earth, the Alliance dispatches a few 20-somethings to seek out any survivors and bring them back home. Speeding their efforts is some sort of super storm that's going to wipe out all life on the planet, giving them a couple of days to complete their mission.

Along the way they'll meander around, discover some survivors, run, discover that Screamers have gotten aboard their ship (how, exactly, is never disclosed), run back to the survivors, get the majority of the survivors slaughtered, leave with someone meant to be a red herring (right), meander some more while looking for fuel cells and... Let's just leave it at lots of meandering, lots of banal dialogue, lots of bad acting and a thankless appearance by Lance Henrickson. Why didn't they put Henrickson in charge of the mission? The man has presence and the young crew members simply do not.

And the end? It's as predictable as the rest of the film. Oh, and don't forget to count how many times the characters mention the word "screamers". Screenwriter Miguel Tejada-Flores seems to think it's a really cool word and repeats it every opportunity he gets.

I was extremely excited to learn that somebody picked up the story again and moved forward with it. And after watching "Screamers: The Hunting", I think Sheldon Wilson owes fans of the original film an apology.

Observing the comments I've read that give this film a 1 star rating, it is really not that bad, there are some negative points to it but also a lot of positive points that make up for it, one of the negative points is that its predictable, you can tell who's going to survive and who's going to get turned into mince meat as soon as the main characters are introduced, the effects are to me the usual DTV standard, not overly impressive and to bad either.

The acting wasn't that bad either, some performances could've been better though, Lance Henriksen's performance in the film certainly stands out like always, even though he's only in it for more or less 20 minutes.

If you've read the negative comments before reading the positive, just bare in mind that this is a DTV film, and obviously had a low budget, so this is a good movie via DTV standards, and wasn't really better than the first one but it also wasn't worse.

Y'know that feeling you get whenever you've mostly liked an original movie but knew where it messed up, then you catch yourself hoping the sequel will be better than the first film because they must've have learned what not to do?

But then the sequel is actually worse than the first because the new filmmaker learned nothing? Suddenly your bring home the corpse of a squirrel because it was looking at your gold? But you don't have any gold? And you're not prospecting?

It's probably just your mind protecting itself from more harm. Alcohol can help but you're just masking the movie. It's traumatic.

Take a look at the picture of the cover, as posted on IMDb. Note the rather generic and jaded design, and note that significant elements of the scary imagery seem to be lifted from other well known horror/science-fiction films. If you accept that the cover does in fact reveal the quality of the film, then you will have little reason to be disappointed.

This movie has a serious case of 'sequel-itis', and many of the outstanding points in the original from (some of) the acting, to the costumes, are seriously degraded, but nonetheless, the overall result is of sturdy B-movie grade. Most elements, from plot to acting are 'bad' in the sense that they are liable to be rated rather low in comparison to many other films you might have seen, but they are not generally provokingly bad in and of themselves.

The simplest way of judging whether you should see Screamers: the Hunting if you are interested in the genre and intrigued by the synopsis, would be to ask whether or not you are angered by all mediocrity in movies. If so, avoid. If you can be more tolerant and watch with appropriately restrained expectations, the movie is okay.