Film Friday: Maximum Overdrive (1986)

Why am I reviewing this turd? To deservedly slam Stephen King as a writer and as a director? No. That would be beating a dead horse. To ponder the fate of our greatest thespian, Emilio Estevez? Hardly. I’m reviewing this film for two reasons. First, I want to point out just how idiotic a film can be when no one bothers to think it through. Secondly, I want to point out why this film shouldn’t have been made in 1986, but is now ripe for a remake.

Plot

Written and directed by Stephen King, Maximum Overdrive is the story of what happens when the Earth passes through a comet which brings all the machines in Wilmington, North Carolina to life. The film begins with one machine after another killing the unsuspecting and surprised humans around them. Eventually, with everyone dead or just off screen somewhere, the film settles down on a truck stop where Emilio Estevez works as a parolee who is enslaved to the owner... an old Hollywood trope. Soon, trucks surround the truck stop and demand that the humans fuel them up so they can _____. It’s not explained. To force the humans to work, the trucks enlist a jeep with a machine-gun mount to threaten the humans. Estevez and the others eventually blow up the jeep and escape. As they slip away to an island on a sailboat, we are told that the problem ends when the Russian’s blow up a UFO with illegal space-based nuclear weapons.

Uh... What?

This film sucks in so many ways. Forget King’s utter lack of grace or vision as a director. Also forget the standard liberal insults King lobs... like the oppressive capitalist who treats parolees like slave labor or the Bible salesman named Billy Brett Graham who is also a quasi-rapist and later attacks a child – these are standard King smears. Forget the bad acting and the stilted dialog and the poor effects. Yeah, forget those things. Let’s instead talk about the real problem with this film: King never once thinks anything through.

Look, the premise is hard to swallow in the first place: machines come to life and attack humans. Hmm. How does that work exactly? Machines without brains or emotions suddenly find themselves sentient and they decide they want to kill and enslave the humans for no reason. That’s a tough sell. So when you pick a premise like this, you need to be extra careful to make sure that everything else you do throughout the film is believable. In other words, the harder your premise is to believe, the more careful you need to be to make the action within your scenes feel real or it reminds people of the unbelievability of the premise. Unfortunately, King doesn’t bother.

Indeed, one of the first things you notice is that King doesn’t worry about the laws of physics. For example, he has an electric carving knife attack a waitress even though the knife itself has no ability to move other than to vibrate or hold itself in place. This is like a screwdriver jumping off a table to stab you repeatedly. How does it move without legs or arms? How does it maintain an attack without any mass behind it to allow it to thrush itself through a resisting surface? It can’t, but King doesn’t care. We’re just meant to accept that it can because it’s alive now... as if that explained an obvious violation of the laws of physics. Similar, King violates our disbelief by having the machines do things they are not mechanically able to do. For example, a coke machine starts shooting coke cans out of itself at high speeds despite the lack of any mechanism within it that shoots cans.

These things immediately bring back your other doubts about the overall plot because it makes you realize that King isn’t sure what rules he’s using as a premise for this film. Are these machines come to life or are they supernatural forces which can manipulate the machines in ways the machines could not manipulate themselves? And if they are the latter, why can’t they do more? In fact, the rule King seems to set is that only electrical machines come to life and they can only do things the machines are designed to do. This is why the fuel truck cannot remove its own hoses and plug them into the tanks and why the pumps can’t float over and fuel the trucks. But then a car somehow slams its own hood and the electric knife jumps. And consider the jeep with the machine-gun mount. The gun is not electric in any way, i.e. it is purely mechanical. It’s mounted on a metal poll. To fire it, a human must pull the mechanical trigger. Yet, the jeep can operate it... somehow. So what are the rules? And why can’t the other guns they have work themselves?

This is the problem. Throughout this movie, King repeatedly fails to establish any set of rules by which the machines can operate. And then he keeps violating the few rules he seems to have set down to force his ideas to work. Each time this happens, it either highlights that he has broken his rules, or the lack of rules in the first place, or it calls into question why other things in the film haven’t happened: if X can do Y, then why didn’t the other Xs do Y... and why can’t Z do A, B or C? This would be a problem in any film, but really becomes a problem when the premise is as fantastic as this one: it constantly leaves you saying, “That doesn’t make sense,” which keeps reinforcing your doubts about the premise.

A Reboot, Are You High?

Despite the above, this film is screaming for a reboot. Think about it. This film was made in 1986. At that time, most machines were dumb. Computers were rare and few machines had one... most machines were purely mechanical in nature. Phones still had cords and used analog switches. Cars ran on carburetors and cables (remember “rolling down” your windows)? People weren’t dependent on the power grid for so much of their lives yet. So this film seemed far-fetched. But today, today it would be different. Today, everything is electronic. All those mechanical switches are now electronic and analog has given way to digital. And all the machines around us have brains... some smarter than us. Your phone owns you. You live online. You need the permission of machines to get your news, to talk to your friends, to start your car, to do your job, and even to get through doors. And how powerful are today’s machines? Forget the machine-gun jeep, how about a drone or robotic weapons or cruise missiles?

This is a premise that may have sounded interesting in 1986, but it was too premature. Technology had not yet reached the level that people could credibly believe that they had anything to fear from a revolt by machines. Today, those could be real concerns. If this movie were remade today, it could not only be made much tighter as there are infinitely more (and smarter) machines running our daily lives than there were in 1986, but the impact would be greater because we have become genuinely dependent on our machines... something we all realize and kind of dread. That’s why this film should not have been made in 1986, but should be rebooted today.