Screamers

This movie aptly showed that you don't need a huge budget to make a good picture, even when that picture is a sci fi. It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but for crying out loud it was a heck of a lot smarter than Independence Day and that movie cost a mint. I had read Phillip K Dick's 'Second Variety', the short story upon which this movie is based, before I ever saw Screamers, and I didn't realize Screamers was even based on the story until I watched it. Being a big fan of the original story I was glad to see it brought to the screen, and more or less faithfully - I thought Peter Weller did a great job in this movie, the atmosphere was actually somewhat as I had imagined it reading the story (they updated it somewhat by placing it in a totally different location, since the original story's wasteland was a result of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia; something which I'm sure seemed plausible at the time it was written but is a little dated now), and although I don't think they pulled off the sort of paranoia we saw in The Thing, there was some nice tension as the story unfolded, although it fell apart a bit at the end.

Bottom line - if you're a sci fi fan sniffing around for some sci fi you haven't seen but don't want to sit through a total dog, it's not a bad renter.