After Blue Bloods star Tom Selleck was famously denied the opportunity to play the role of Indiana Jones in the 1981 action-adventure blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark due to his commitment to the Magnum, P.I. television series, Selleck made his feature-starring debut in a second-rate Raiders of the Lost Ark imitator, the 1983 adventure film High Road to China. Following his suave performance as a jewel thief in the stylish 1984 spy film Lassiter, Selleck made an unexpected entry into the science fiction genre with his starring role in the 1984 thriller film Runaway, in which he plays a futuristic police officer who specializes in apprehending violent robots.
Runaway was directed and written by Michael Crichton, for whom Runaway embodies Crichton’s core technology-gone-wrong philosophy, which Crichton first explored as a director with his feature directorial debut, the 1973 science fiction Western film Westworld. However, despite a seemingly commercially appealing mixture of action and science fiction, as well as a solid lead performance by Selleck, Runaway became a commercial and critical failure, which did lasting damage to Crichton and Selleck’s careers. Indeed, just as the failure of Runaway essentially ended Crichton’s once-thriving directorial career, Selleck didn’t appear in another feature film for nearly three years afterward.
Michael Crichton devoted virtually his entire career to exploring humanity’s continually evolving and uneasy relationship with technology while also making bold predictions about the future. Within Crichton’s feature directorial career, his visionary approach is most omnipresent in Runaway, in which Tom Selleck’s cop character, Jack Ramsay, tries to prevent a deranged scientist, Dr. Charles Luther, from unleashing killer robots on the public. In an advanced society in which robots are commonplace, Luther, played by rocker Gene Simmons, has programmed ordinarily safe robots to serve as his army of assassins.
