In the not-so-distant future, the problems of the world's energy crisis have been solved by the New Economic Block (NEB). Or so it would seem. For once the mining begins, a massive radioactive cloud is released, and that would appear to be problematic. Do you produce a teaspoon of this wonder-fuel, at the cost of lives, or do you stop and look for something else? I suspect you already know the answer.
If you're the NEB, you continue mining, and do what you can to offset the radiation. But if you're the rest of the civilized people, you try and stop the NEB, and so war breaks out on Sirius 6B, and in 2078, this war has been going on for some 20 years between the two factions, all of which used to be a part of the NEB. But now, it's been six months since anyone has heard from the NEB, until one day a lone soldier comes in from the dessert bearing a message...
This message is directed to the commander, and it says that he wants to discuss peace. Two - and only two - should come to the NEB stronghold to discuss things. Commander Joe Hendricksson (Peter Weller) isn't sure what to make of this message, but then a troop transport crashes and bears some more interesting news. It contains troops headed to a different planet entirely, and they say that the people "back home", who Joe has been talking to via holographic image, have been gone for two years, and that these outposts have been abandoned.
There is a new deposit that has been found, and this one doesn't cause deadly radiation, so a new war has broken out to determine who will be the one to control it. They have effectively been abandoned. And with that, Joe decides to set out for the NEB stronghold.
This isn't an easy trek, and along the way they encounter a youngster who they take in, because his parents have apparently been killed. But just as they arrive at NEB headquarters, the kid is shot and killed - and it turns out that he is a mechanical being. Essentially a grown-up version of the "screamers" robots in the ground. They call them "taggers" on this side of the planet, because they tag along with you to get inside the compound.
Once inside, Joe determines that those in the ground are a model 1, and the kid is a model 3 - but there isn't any time to figure out what a model 2 is. Instead, they are forced out of the compound, and they decide to head back to his bunker, because everyone else seems dead.
Unfortunately, the only radio communications they can get from home are those that say someone was found barely alive, and that they managed to get them in from outside. Then nothing. So you know what is coming.
When Joe and company get back, they are met with a virtual army of the little series 3 screamers, and have to set off a mini-pluto (plutonium) nuclear rocket. This takes out the series 3 screamers, but somehow not Joe. I'm frankly not sure about how this works. Then we meet the series 2 - which are designed to look like injured soldiers, and takes out everyone but Joe and one other person from the NEB base.
They decide to head for the emergency escape pod, somewhere in the mountains. Once found, it turns out that either the series 2 screamers are much more advanced or that there is a series 4 - because they followed Joe and now it's all the two survivors can do to get out. Only it turns out that the other survivor isn't human, and so Joe is the only one left.
He does manage to escape, and as he blasts off in the escape pod, a teddy bear that he picked up moves a little bit in his pod, which makes you wonder just a bit - was it just rolling with the pod, or did it move because it's got a screamer inside?
While the movie is a bit low-budget, it's actually quite surprising, especially at the end. Well worth a look, and even more so if you're a fan of good science fiction stories.
Rated R for sci-fi violence and terror, some language and a brief moment of nudity.
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