On the remote mining planet Odessa, miners work long grueling hours to extract minerals and fossil fuels for shipment back to a resource depleted Earth. The government sends down a legion of Military Police Droids to enforce their brutal rule on the Odessa miners which is resisted by a ragtag band of young resistance fighters including Lorca (John Tarrant), Abbie (Donough Rees), Suzi (Casandra Webb), and their short statured robot Kid (Deep Roy). When they uncover a conspiracy to replace the miners with a robot workforce and kill the miners, the group sets out to stop this insidious plan being carried out by the cruel Captain Jewitt.
Following Roger Christian's troubled debut on The Sender for Paramount Pictures who recut the film without Christian's input, he decided to produce his next film independently to avoid a repeat of the experience. Christian wrote the sci-fi film 2084 (aka Starship aka Lorca and the Outlaws) alongside screenwriter Matthew Jacobs who would go on to write episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the failed 1996 relaunch of Doctor Who. Christian described the film as an update on the George Orwell novel 1984 but with an action adventure focus and lighter tone (how is it 1984 then?) and would go for a style inspired by films such as Death Watch and Alphaville. The film was financed by Swedish video company VTC and filmed in Australia and the United Kingdom and like many euro-genre productions was financed by foreign pre-sales (hence the different names). Contemporary reviews wrote the film off as a cheap knock-off of Star Wars and it certainly is, but unlike certain other Star Wars knock-offs of the time that kind of endeared themselves such as Battle Beyond the Stars or Starchaser: The Legend of Orin that were entertaining, 2084, Starship, or whatever other name it's known by dares to be a boring tedious slog and incomprehensible mess.
The movie's about as basic as you can get with a premise like this with oppressed working class and overzealous militarized villains who abuse said working class in a setup that dates all the way back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis as far as sci-fi is concerned (and possibly further if you're so inclined), but despite one of the simplest setups imaginable, the movie bungles it in terms of establishing any kind of world building, character, or motivation so while you may know "what" is going on, be prepared to be eluded by the "why" quite a few times including a climax that involves a rogue killer robot for no adequately explained reason. Despite one of the titles being Lorca and the Outlaws, Lorca's barely a factor in this movie for the first half as he disappears for a long stretch and not only is John Tarrant not a strong lead, but Abbie and Suzi are conspicuously underwritten with so little to them you could replace them with mannequins and no one would know the difference. But then we have the most prominent character of Kid the robot and with a whiny delivery and a voice that seems to have been run through a filter on top of an under annunciated delivery I maybe only understood half of what this character said if that. But to top it all off we have the film's lacklust production values which feature a host of darkly lit cooridors and a quarry complete with ordinary looking dumptrucks and contemporary automobiles.... THE FUTURE! Rather embarrassing for a man who was nominated for an Academy Award for his art direction on Alien and WON an Academy Award for his work as a set dresser on Star Wars.
The movie sets a precedent for Roger Christian's directorial career that would bring him to future films such as Battlefield Earth. The fact that the best regarded film Christian ever made as a director was his first film the Sender is a massive indictment of his skills especially since it was taken away from him and re-edited by Paramount. Watching this movie: it's undeniably Christian's film through and through.
