RoboCop Star Peter Weller Disagrees With Critics About His 1995 Philip K. Dick Sci-Fi Movie

Peter Weller has certainly had his fair share of antics over the years (like his fiasco with Oreo cookies during the shooting of "RoboCop"), regarding some of his best and most iconic movies such as "Naked Lunch," "Leviathan," and the original "RoboCop" and its sequel. But he also had some unfortunate misfires throughout his multiple-decade-long career, such as Christian Duguay's 1995 sci-fi horror, "Screamers." The feature was panned by both critics and audiences at the time of its release, receiving dismal reviews and flopping hard at the box office, garnering a mere $5.7 million worldwide against its $20 million budget.

Despite those harsh and scolding critiques, however, Weller defended Duguay's feature in a 2019 interview with Booth Talk (via After Movie Diner), saying, "I had one of the most fantastic times I ever had making that movie. I'm really proud of that movie. Even though we changed the circumstances of it, it still has the feel and dedication and drive and theme of Philip K. Dick, at the notion that you make machines, and those machines will develop on their own. Yeah, it's science fiction, but indeed there's an Einsteinian and Zen theme in that that if your mind made it, your mind can evolve. I loved 'Screamers,' man."

Based on Philip K. Dick's 1953 short story, "Second Variety," "Screamers" takes place in the future of 2078 on the mining planet of Sirius 6B, where there's a war going on between the New Economic Block (N.E.B.), a mining company, and The Alliance, made up of former mining and science employees, led by military Colonel Joe Hendricksson (Weller). The abandoned areas between the two sides are patrolled by AI-driven killing machines dubbed the Screamers, which Hendricksson and his men have to fight off if they want to get to the N.E.B. base alive and offer them a truce to stop the mindless killing orchestrated by his own superiors on Earth.

Based on the convoluted plot, the disastrous special effects, and a total lack of vision from director Duguay, it's hardly a surprise that "Screamers" didn't appeal to virtually anyone in the mid-'90s. It might've attempted to address the central themes in Dick's source material, such as machines becoming sentient and turning on humans, the futility of a technology-driven war, and the omnipotent corporate greed running rampant; it clearly failed at capturing them on any meaningful level. Still, it was nice of Weller to defend the movie's qualities he thought stayed true to the essence of the story.