Movies - The Running Man

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	Movies - The Running Man

The Running Man (1982) is a science fiction novel by Stephen King, written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. In 1987, the novel was loosely adapted into a film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The story is about a man who competes in a deadly game show. Some critics draw parallels between The Running Man and current reality shows such as Survivor or Fear Factor. The film also shares themes with the film Series 7: The Contenders
, itself a parody of Reality TV.

A similar kind of concept of the novel/movie was used by Insomniac Games for Ratchet: Deadlocked.

Stephen King stated in "Why I Was Bachman" that the entire novel was written in the space of seventy-two hours.

Novel

Context

The dystopian theme of the book resembles that of another of King's books written as Bachman, The Long Walk. Both books appear in King's novel collection The Bachman Books.

The game show in the book bears a resemblance to a game show posited in the 1958 Robert Sheckley short story (that story was itself the basis for two movies, the 1970 German TV movie and the 1983 French film Le Prix du Danger). It has been speculated that the short story was the inspiration for The Running Man, though King has not confirmed this.

Plot

The protagonist, Ben Richards, needs money for medicine for his gravely ill daughter, Cathy. Not wanting his wife Shelia to continue prostitution to pay the bills, Richards walks into the Games Federation, the producers of several violent TV contests. Show contestants win money according to whether, or for how long, they manage to survive their appointed tasks—such as a heart-attack-prone person running on a treadmill. After rigorous testing, both physical and mental, Richards is selected for the most elite of these games, The Running Man.

To play the game, Richards is deemed an enemy of the state and then released to the outside world. He is given a twelve hour head start before an elite group called "the hunters" (essentially gladiators) begins their search to kill mission. The contestant earns one hundred dollars per hour he spends alive, five hundred for each law enforcement officer he kills, and a billion dollars should he manage to survive the entire month (which no player has even approached). But the game is not limited only to these players — the Network pays civilians for confirmed sightings of the fugitive, and it ups the ante for sightings that lead directly to a kill. The "runner" can travel anywhere in the world, if he can arrange anonymous transport. Every day the runner must videotape two messages, which he must send (by pre-paid, overnight mail) to the TV show. Failure to do so will result in a default of the prize money. Herein lies the secret behind the failures of previous contestants: despite the producer's claims to the contrary, as soon as the network receives a videotaped message, the hunters immediately know (from the postmark) the runner's approximate location. If/when the runner is caught, he or she is killed live on TV. Generally, there are two contestants released at the same time, with one in reserve in the event one of the contestants is killed too soon.

Richards manages to elude the hunters for more than nine days, traveling through New York to Boston, ultimately ending up in Portland, Maine. During a dangerous chase in Maine, in which Richards is wounded, he takes a hostage, Amelia Williams, to secure his safety to the Portland Airport. Though Amelia is afraid of Richards and refuses to believe his truths about the disparity between the haves and have-nots, she assists him to prolong his survival. Richards' holds a lengthy standoff against the chief of the Hunters, Evan McCone, in an attempt to secure an airplane, claiming he has a large amount of a powerful explosive.

Richards boards the plane, taking Amelia and McCone as his insurance, during which it is revealed by the Network that they now know (by having planted an explosives detector aboard the aircraft) his "bomb" to be a fake and that he is currently the longest surviving contestant ever to be on the show. Richards is also given a surprise; he is offered the role of Chief Hunter, Evan McCone's post. One final bit of news awaits him, though. Shortly after he began running, Shelia and Cathy were brutally murdered. After some deliberation, and with assurances that he will be able to use his new post to track down and take revenge upon his family's killers, Richards accepts.

However, Richards ultimately undergoes a change of heart. Not wanting to become one of the people he has come to hate, Richards murders almost everyone on the plane, mortally wounding himself in the process. He gives a parachute to Amelia and releases her before he crashes the aircraft into the Games Headquarters.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Running Man ]

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