The 1980s are known as being a dark period for Robert Altman. Having been branded uncommercial by the New post-Star Wars, post-Jaws, post-Heaven's Gate Hollywood, the creative freedoms he and others like Coppola enjoyed during the seventies, as provided by the studio tit, were largely stripped from him as he found himself unable to find studio backing for his projects. Altman's work in the '80s greatly reflected this ostracization, as films like Secret Honor and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean found him moving away from the freeform mosaics that distinguished his 1970s work and adapting stage plays most of which were chamber pieces restricted to a single set. Streamers, adapted by David Rabe from his Tony-nominated play, is as revealing of this dynamic as any of Altman's work from this period, its drama confined to an army barracks at the eve of the Vietnam war, its characters all existentially and ideologically "trapped" by the tenets and schemata of military life.

Surely this theme resonated with Altman, who almost defiantly does his damnedest to turn a work of theatre into a work of cinema. For better or worse, he does not succeed, and the result is much like the filmed plays produced by Ely Landau's American Film Theatre. As far as filmed plays go, Streamers is a very good one, with electrifying performances from Michael Wright and George Dzundza, some strong performances from David Alan Grier and Guy Boyd, and some rather mannered ones from Matthew Modine and Mitchell Lichtenstein, the latter of whom plays a young recruit whose open homosexuality becomes a matter of eventually explosive contention (although not in a way that's anticipated). Rabe's play is both brilliant and flawed, and the film's virtues and shortcomings are those of a lot of contemporary stage work: characters often speak tangentially, but in a forced way that calls excess attention both to the given monologue and to the lack of subtlety in the message the tangent is intended to augment; overwrought metaphors such as the titular "Streamers" (a song sung by military paratroopers after they realize their chutes have failed to deploy) are both needless and needlessly reiterated for dramatic effect; and the characters as well as their environment remain one-dimensional in their lock-step service to the author's statement. If Altman's work prior to and after the 1980s is built upon his unequaled gift for creating a world that vividly exists well beyond the spectator's frame of view, Streamers achieves the opposite. That said, the experience of watching the film remains a potent one, largely thanks to the performances and the often visceral psychological straightjacket that torments the young members of the drill company. If the flawless first half of Full Metal Jacket describes a degree of physical imprisonment on top of the emotional torture dished out by an abusive and meticulous drill sergeant, Streamers offers the flipside, wherein the young enlistees are shown lounging, showering, and at play, while the drill sergeants, always drunk, stumble obliviously into and out of the drama like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In that way, they're the most characteristically Altmanesque characters in the film.

Paul Haynes