THE RUNNING MAN (film)

THE RUNNING MAN. Paul Michael Glaser, dir. USA: Taft Entertainment Pictures/Keith Parish Productions (prod.) / Tri-Star Pictures (dist.), 1987. Arnold Schwarzenegger, star. Based on the novel The Running Man by S. King (writing as Richard Bachman), q.v. under Fiction.

Significant as a Schwarzenegger vehicle bringing to a mass audience themes, images, and gimmicks from serious SF including images of threatening containment within high-tech machines in the mostly funky near-future world of Los Angeles in 2019. (Note that it is Schwarzenegger, not the heroine, who is momentarily gagged and that the heroine, and the villain, end up in the close, mechanized containment that begins the run.) See in this Category, TOTAL RECALL (1990). See under Drama Criticism T. Doherty on "Video, Science Fiction, and the Cinema of Surveillance."