Death in prime time

Stephen King wrote The running man (published in Spanish as the wantedIn the early seventies (a decade before publishing it under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), he wrote the novel, setting it in the year 2025 in a dystopia where the underprivileged participate in risky television game shows hoping to escape poverty. The most extreme (and lucrative) of these is the one that gives the book its title, turning participants into fugitives who must survive the pursuit of relentless hunters and all the viewers hoping to earn a reward by reporting them. Now that the present has caught up with the chronology of the fiction, the prediction of a society absorbed by a harmful audiovisual culture seems accurate, but not particularly shocking.

Perhaps that's why Edgar Wright wanted the film version of The running man Connect with its context through the distrust generated by images susceptible to being altered to manipulate public opinion. But above all, its aim is to orchestrate a grand spectacle, driven by the star charisma of Glen Powell, who announces his candidacy for action hero (closer to the sardonic wit of Bruce Willis than to Arnold Schwarzenegger, star of the first adaptation of the book…) in the denouement to avoid staging the image that closes the novel: the protagonist crashing a plane into a skyscraper. An unintentional prefiguration of the September 11 attacks that, today, has become a traumatic echo.