The back cover incorrectly lists the former screen ratio. The film's originalyl composed aspect ratio of 1.85:1 has been opened up to 1.78:1 as you won't seen any slim black bars circumventing the frame. Scream Factory has given Screamers its inaugural HD release on Blu-ray with this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50. While Screamers seems to have fresh ideas to say about automatons and the dystopic future, they've been much better articulated in the various versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing. The Rubin character is introduced too late and O'Bannon/Tejada-Flores have attached her as Hendricksson's love interest. Scenes are unevenly developed and the plodding narrative can't sustain enough momentum. But Screamers suffers from structural problems that its aesthetics can't overcome. Visual effects artist Deak Ferrand, whose career began with Screamers and has gone on to work on eighty feature films, creates some hauntingly beautiful matte paintings that alternately show stark bleakness and the cosmic wonder of the universe. The desertscape in the first reel has been vividly photographed as have the wintry flat plains on the Alliance's unending trek. Cinematographer Rodney Gibbons and director/Steadicam expert Christian Duguay have skillfully taken the viewer through the vast terrain traversed by Hendricksson. Screamers is heavy on exposition and while that's one of its biggest strengths, it also contributes to its undoing. Hendricksson and the Alliance are armed to defend themselves. The characters soon find out that the Screamers not only lurk beneath but can also assume human flesh directly in front of them. In a different ramshackle, the trio encounter Becker (Roy Dupuis), a husky warrior with teardrop tattoos, timorous Ross (Charles Powell), and black market queen Jessica Hanson (Jennifer Rubin). The two men discover David (Michael Caloz), an innocent-looking orphan with a teddy bear whose lived two years without his parents in a ruinous settlement. Ace Jefferson is one of the lone survivors from a transport accident who joins Hendricksson on his long journey through the desolate wasteland. Peter Weller portrays Alliance Commander Joe Hendricksson, who seeks to negotiate a peace treaty with NEB. But the Screamers are now also going after the Alliance and have demonstrated the capability of mutating into indistinguishable human form. The Alliance has countered with "Screamers," long subterranean androids that slither under the sand dunes and frozen tundra with sharp, whirring buzz-saws. It's difficult for Alliance troops to venture near NEB's territory because the latter has permeated the colony with a lethal radioactive element. Set in the year 2078, a ten-year war has ensued between the Alliance and the New Economic Bloc (NEB). With the dissolution of communism in the former USSR in the early nineties, though, Tejada-Flores dropped the American-Russian conflict and situated the action in a very cold government outpost called Sirus 6B, which is located far away from Earth. O'Bannon retained Dick's Cold War themes and pitted US soldiers versus Soviet troops. Production information from Screamers' press kit indicates that O'Bannon wrote his draft in 1980. Dick's Second Variety (the literary basis for Screamers) was originally published in 1957 in the anthology, The Variable Man and Other Stories by Ace Books. One of Screamers' core problems is that something was lost in translation when famed sci-fi scribe Dan O'Bannon adapted Dick's short story into a full-fledged screenplay, which was then rewritten about fourteen years later by Miguel Tejada-Flores. Sony put it in nearly 1,600 theaters but it did tepid business and received middling reviews. When the movie screened at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1995, word of mouth was overly positive. According to Rea, executives at Triumph unspooled trailer reels, created T-shirts, and had testimonials written about the film, all of which were exhibited on the sci-fi convention circuit (at a time when conventions were growing in number). In fact, while Sony's studio subsidiary Triumph Films has mostly specialized in direct-to-video releases, it put its full marketing muscles behind Screamers. Dick, it was initially touted as "the next BIG sci-fi flick" by film critic Steven Rea. Though Screamers is one of the least known adaptations of a work by Philip K.
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