Steel Dawn and The Running Man arrived on home video this week in 1988, after their respective November 1987 theatrical releases.
One’s a post-nuke western with chaps and swords. The other’s a neon-glitzed game show with body armor and agitprop. Together, they mapped the two big future scenarios we were being prepared for – a wasteland where everyone scrounges for scraps, or a corporate fiefdom run on ratings. Future shock for survivalists or yuppies.
In Steel Dawn, the war already happened. Civilization’s gone. What’s left is sand, salvaged ideals, and the suggestion that survival now depends on discipline – not hope, not reform. Just a new lawless normal, where every day is hard-won and everything teeters on a sword’s edge.
In The Running Man, the war is happening behind the camera. The system’s stable, but only because truth has been turned into malleable content. Justice is focus-group-tested in the interest of good television. The violence is real, the stakes are fake, and the audience is complicit.
Neither film was a huge hit at the time, but they each seemed like the side of a coin flip.
This was the suspicion a lot of kids were already carrying – that we were being sold something, and it probably wouldn’t last. When the inevitable shoe dropped, you would scavenge in the wreckage, or be a performative cog in the machine. Pick one.
This same year, even Star Trek: The Next Generation’s premiere episode told us to buckle up for a bumpy 21st century. Things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.
Running Man leaves the door cracked open, though. It imagines a corrupt system that can be exposed. Brought down. That if people saw the lie, they’d recoil, or maybe even resist. It assumes the truth matters.
It also assumes the audience would still care enough to believe it.