Silent Running (1972)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Nice effects though.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

"Silent Running" a movie directed by special effects photographer Douglas Trumbull, produced in the season of 1970/1971 at some remote airfield hangar in Van Nuys, California and starring heart-out-acting Bruce Dern as an space traveling environmentalist, who suffers a nervous breakdown by killing off his entire crew in order to ignite robots to do their jobs and eventually sending his long-time cared for botanic forest under a dome into deep space before ending the mission with complete annihilation of the spaceship, which had been designed to escape Earth in such a desolated state that visuals from "Mad Max" (1979) to "The Road" (2009) pop into my mind, where it supposed to be believed that not even one leaf grows on a tree anymore.Director Douglas Trumbull puts his entire anger, disappointment and sorrow into a picture about the state of the America's union since 1865 with another war raging in Vietnam a hundred years later, while scrupulous industrialized capitalists earning for their retirement in the 1990s despite all warning signs of a polluted world in constant decay; a picture, which runs along within a brotherhood of dystopian Science-Fiction-Films of the early 1970s as "THX 1138" (1971), "The Omega Man" (1971) or "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) directed by Robert Wise, which is arguably the most accomplished one with an nerve-wrecking split-second key-to-key-hole finale. All pictures utilized the elements of research, science and fictional story-telling to give their emotions of contemporary environmental as well as governmental issues a visual playground.If "Silent Running" can be watched closely enough, preferably in an auditorium with 70mm film print, it is possible to find ingredients of the later much more audience-attracting contents as "Star Wars" (1977) or "Close Encounters of The Third Kind" (1977), which serve to this day as role models of workday escaping motion pictures, where no controversy has been allowed, which may go beyond the choice between a soda drink and a cup of coffee toward the way back from the movie house to home to hit a midnight grocery store to indulge further into a synthetic food-chain and forget about the picture the next morning, yet wishing to watch it again a year later in hope of feeling the same escapology emotions to block out the core of a universal contradiction between nature versus industry.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

I saw this film first on a monochrome TV in the 1970s, when its moral premise - that saving other living beings might be worth more than human lives - appalled my late father. It produced a different effect on me - the first time my father's and my views had diverged significantly - and the doubt cast by the film on seeing human beings as the be-all and end-all of life has remained with ever since. At the time, I was a callow schoolboy; now I am a middle-aged father. So yes, this film has affected my views of life and the environment which sustains us. Whatever its technical and storytelling shortcomings, this is a profound film.

this review contains spoilers! its 1972 and the summer of love has been followed by the winter of the machine. what can a poor boy do? realising he is powerless in the face of the new world order, he drops out (hard 1970s style, not soft 1960s style) kills the local supporters of the status quo, retreats to his bedroom in the shadow of saturn (astrological reference), neglects the washing up and lets the pot plants wither away. he's been on the job looking after the terrarium for 8 years but he still hasn't learned that plants need sunlight to photosynthesise, duh. he talks to machines that can't talk back and imagines a response. he goes crazy. in the end he lets his dreams go, and commits suicide, in the process taking out the people who have tried to rescue him. his problem is that he's locked into a machine system which has no avenue of escape. he tries to save the plants with artificial life, ends up using the on-board Abomb to do himself in. his whole existence is predicated on the machines and he just can't deal with it. he's a hippy ideologue. read in this way its an OK story, but really, considering kubrick's 2001 was made some years before it, silent running is pretty lame. it has much more in common with the moralistic scifi movies of the 1950s and 60s, despite its groovy environmental themes (also pretty old hat by this time; rachel Carson's silent spring was published in 1962). and joan baez's sentimental quavering on the soundtrack is frankly unbearable.

"Silent Running" is an appealing, unusual sci-fi tale set in deep space. Bruce Dern plays astronaut Freeman Lowell, who's been working on a project for the past eight years: maintain the last of the flora and fauna scavenged from a devastated Planet Earth, inside huge geodesic domes. One day he gets the orders from his bosses to terminate the project and head home. Unfortunately, this idea doesn't appeal to Freeman, and he mutinies.The film is not subtle about its love-and-respect-for-Mother-Nature, "save the planet" mentality, but it's quite an affecting story no matter what. Lowell does some things one can't exactly condone, but you do understand the man. Thanks to a powerhouse performance by Mr. Dern, you can still sympathize with the man and be moved by his loneliness and social awkwardness. True enough that a story like this would seem like a pretty hard sell to studios, even 43 years ago, since there are no female characters and the main person isn't all that noble.Special effects veteran Douglas Trumbull, renowned for his work on "2001: A Space Odyssey", obviously has a real affinity for creating interesting environments and striking visuals. He uses these visuals just as much as any dialogue in telling the story, which is a pretty entertaining one; it was scripted by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, and Steven Bochko. The effects are nicely done, and those robot characters - referred to here as drones - do have some personality, and are highly endearing, if not as memorable as, say, R2-D2 from "Star Wars".The songs, by Joan Baez, and score, composed and conducted by Peter Schickele, are lovely.Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, and Jesse Vint are all fun as Lowells' younger, more carefree associates, but after a while only Dern remains as the sole human presence on screen. His performance has to rank as one of his all time best.Overall, watching this one is a fairly potent experience, and it does stick with you once it's over.Eight out of 10.