The Running Man is on Netflix. I re-watched it. It’s the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that missed the mark commercially, but it was the perfect blend of all of the more popular Reagan-era dystopian movies: Robocop, Tron, They Live, with a little bit of Total Recall foreshadowing.
It wasn’t a bad movie, aside from Arnold’s lame one-liners (he used “I’ll be back,” again?), but it could have been better. Here’s one way: at the start, instead of showing what really happened in the helicopter during the riots, show what was broadcast—the heavily edited version that framed Ben Richards (Schwarzenegger) gunning down the protesters, against the command of his CO to back down. You could even show it as it’s on a television, as some clips are shown at other parts of the movie, instead of with the standard film production values. Also, cut out the “government controlled media” thing from the pre-footage exposition, to make everything less obvious.
Keep everything else in the film the same: Richards will continually claim innocence, where Amber (Maria Conchita Alonso) will be the only one, both in the real-world audience and in-film characters, who would doubt the official story because of the airport incident. That would make her character more weighty, especially since she’s willing to put herself in physical/legal danger by snooping around the raw and edited files of the Bakersfield broadcast. That would make the hijacked broadcast of what really happened inside the helicopter more damning, since we would be wondering all along if Arnold is a liar or just crazy.
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