Written and directed by Michael Crichton, the sci-fi thriller Runaway had its thunder stolen by another killer robot movie in 1984: The Terminator.
It’s a wonder what author and filmmaker Michael Crichton must have thought when Orion Pictures released its moderately low-budget sci-fi thriller The Terminator in cinemas in October 1984. Not just because of its parallels between Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld – right down to Yul Brynner’s implacable, gun-toting robot cowboy, which Arnold Schwarzenegger later admitted had influenced his performance. Rather, because young upstart filmmaker James Cameron completely stole Crichton’s thunder.
Less than two months later, in December 1984, Crichton’s own killer robot movie emerged in cinemas. Called Runaway, it cost a little more to make than The Terminator (Cameron’s debut cost about $6.4m; Crichton’s film cost $8m). But unlike the former, Runaway was a box office disappointment. The Terminator made almost $80m in cinemas alone, turning Cameron into the Hollywood player he remains to this day. Runaway, on the other hand, lost money, critics were largely dismissive, and Crichton swore off making another special effects movie (his next film as director was the 1989 thriller, Physical Evidence, which fared even worse with reviews and audiences alike.)
Forty years on, and it’s fascinating to compare and contrast Crichton and Cameron’s approaches to what are, on the surface, not dissimilar concepts. In Runaway, Tom Selleck stars as Sergeant Jack Ramsay, a 30-something cop working in a near future Los Angeles in which robots have become ubiquitous. They work in fields, harvesting crops; they assist humans in drab offices; they even cook, clean and babysit kids, like Ramsay’s own son, Bobby (Joey Cramer).
Unfortunately, while robots are everywhere, they’re also prone to breaking down – which is where Ramsay and his ‘runaway’ police division comes in. When a robot malfunctions, Ramsay is rushed to the scene and tasked with deactivating the rampaging droid. It’s depicted as a dangerous and distinctly unglamorous job, and one that becomes even more complicated for Ramsay when a psychopathic killer named Luther (Gene Simmons – yes, the Gene Simmons from glam rock outfit, Kiss) shows up with an array of high-tech weapons.
Read more: Westworld | The race to make one of the most important films of the early 1970s
Crichton’s gadgets, first of all, are absolutely top-notch. Simmons’ dead-eyed killer Luther has an unspeakably cool gun capable of firing heat-seeking bullets, like tiny exocet missiles. He has a little robot like a remote controlled car, capable of hurtling down a highway, magnetically attaching itself to the underside of a vehicle, then exploding.
Then there’s his collection of pet mechanical spiders, which are perhaps one of the eeriest things Crichton ever conceived; small enough to sneak out of bags or crawl under toilet doors, they’re seemingly autonomous, and capable of leaping on a victim, injecting them with some sort of deadly poison, before detonating in a shower of sparks. The Terminator may have served up a Grim Reaper for the silicon chip era, but there’s also something decidedly unsettling about a homicidal robot spider.
Luther also has another disturbing MO: modifying regular domestic robots with his own custom computer chips, which turns them into boxy murderers. There’s a tense scene in Runaway’s first act, for example, in which Ramsay and his team race to deal with an incident in a quiet residential area. A normally benign ‘Model 9-12’ robot has picked up a kitchen knife and murdered a mother and her sister; on arrival, Ramsay learns that there’s a nine month-old baby still inside the house, lying in its crib.
It’s a sequence that shows Runaway at both its best and worst. Crichton, using noirish lighting and handheld cameras, builds up the suspense as Ramsay sneaks into the blood-spattered house in search of the baby. The robot, by this point, has gotten its pincers on a .357 Magnum; Ramsay has little more than a glittery-looking ‘electromagnetic scatter suit’ and a feeble-looking laser gun for protection. The scene’s set for a tense standoff.
And then a doltish roving cameraman, implausibly intent on getting some footage for the evening news, blunders in through the front door. You can probably guess what happens next.
Runaway continues a similarly frustrating pattern for the rest of its lean 99 minute duration: clever sci-fi concepts are constantly introduced, but they’re often rapidly followed up by a groan-inducing line of dialogue or cop movie cliche. (Even more so than the similarly tech-infused Blue Thunder, released a year earlier, Runaway’s intent on slavishly following the template of typical 80s police thrillers.)
Certainly, Runaway hasn’t aged as well as Cameron’s The Terminator – which, for all its bubble perms and 8-bit computer era stylings, has a relentless, unsparing quality that still gets the nerves jangling 40 years later. Crichton’s film, with none-more-1980s Tom Selleck (then at his peak Magnum fame) as a Ron Burgundy-esque cop, is unmistakably a product of its time. You could probably even guess what year it came out just from watching a few minutes of it.
What has aged remarkably well is Crichton’s depiction of how robots and AI might integrate themselves into people’s everyday lives. The filmmaker’s utilitarian, faintly clumsy-looking droids look remarkably close to the assorted Roomba vacuum cleaners roving people’s houses in the 21st century. There’s a police drone camera in Runaway – unfortunately nicknamed ‘the floater’ – which looks uncannily like the ones used today, right down to its tiny spinning rotor blades. There’s also a Ring-style doorbell system, albeit one that records its footage on VHS tape. Runaway may have its feet planted in the 70s cop thriller format, but Crichton’s talent as a futurist is still on full display.
Unlike The Terminator, which is still being discussed 40 years later, Runaway has largely been forgotten, at least beyond fans of 1980s cult films. Ironically, though, as The Terminator franchise has faltered and Cameron has talked about rebooting it once again, Crichton’s film contains several ideas that would work remarkably well if anyone thought about making a Terminator prequel.
The overarching antagonist in the Terminator franchise is Skynet, a sentient AI set on wiping out humanity. Originally developed for the military by a company called Cyberdine Systems, Skynet became self aware in August 1997 and triggered an all-out nuclear war (at least according to Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s version of events). It’s easy to imagine an alternate Terminator timeline in which Cyberdine Systems also made consumer products – Runaway-style robots that clean our homes and cook our meals, and that those robots, centrally controlled by Skynet, could suddenly rise against their human captors.
Even Gene Simmons’ army of robot spiders could make a fascinating – and unnerving – alternative to the hulking T-101/T-800 murderers Skynet keeps sending back through time. If Cameron wanted to reintroduce the horror undertones that made his first Terminator movie so effective, turning his time-travelling robot assassins into something more compact and stealthy could make for a fascinating twist on a 40-year-old formula. And besides, it wouldn’t be the first time Cameron has taken inspiration from Michael Crichton…
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