Back in the first decade of this century, my wife and I would occasionally attend science lectures. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure why we did, whether we were that desperate for entertainment options, deluding ourselves into thinking we were intellectuals or thought we were living in the world of roughly 100 years earlier. The presentation that most sticks in my mind is a shrill guy talking about preserving a local creek, and who largely berated the audience for their precious flush toilets. I highly doubt a single mind in the auditorium was changed that night.
I was reminded of this while watching 1972’s Silent Running. Bruce Dern is one of four people who maintain one of at least three spaceships orbiting Saturn, each with terrarium domes preserving the last vestiges of Earth’s flora. I assume fauna are extinct on our planet in this future, and that the bunnies, squirrels and a falcon we see are all part of making these self-sustaining environments.
I’m less sure what purpose the three bozos who aren’t Dern serve on the ship, as they seem to do little more than race carts through the corridors and his precious flower beds. Given these three space hillbillies love to tear them up some mother nature, it is no surprise they enthusiastically carry out orders from their superiors to abandon the mission and blow up the domes.
And the strangest aspect I found in the course of watching this picture was finding myself identifying with them more than I did with Dern’s environmentalist. It is always odd to encounter somebody who holds the same beliefs I do, but who is repellant enough to make me question my commitment to those ideals. Dern is petulant when he isn’t angry. Top this all off with a layer of smug superiority and I have an even greater appreciation of the Primal Scream track “Kill All Hippies”. An overly earnest number sung by Joan Baez certainly didn’t improve my opinion.
Oh, and he’ll also soon become a murderer. In a G-rated film, I was surprised to see our hero kill one co-worker by a shovel to the neck. He’ll dispatch with the other two by trapping them in one of those domes when it is launched into space and blown up with a device I swear has text on it declaring it to be a “nuclear detornator”.
That we’re supposed to identify with this guy is astonishing to me. And that’s not even the elements of this that have me the most confused. I never understood why, if the planet was trashed to the extent of the near extinction of all plant life, why anybody would care enough to preserve any of that in a doubtlessly very expensive effort in space. Nor could I comprehend what the intention was in rescuing this flora when there don’t appear to be any possible futures those plants back on Earth.
But I was most confused as to why the ships are sent to orbit Saturn. There will even be a curious development in third act where our hero botanist apparently didn’t realize plants need the sun, which made me realize how strange it is we would try to save plant life by putting it so far away from the sun as to make its light almost moot.
If there is one aspect of the film I can appreciate, it is the risk a major studio was taking on a film where only one actor is on screen for the vast majority of the runtime. To give Dern somebody with whom he can interact, he has three droids. Each of these stands roughly waist-high and are cute without being fully anthropomorphized. I was not surprised to later learn this was the inspiration for the element of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where Joel Hodgson had invented robot friends to keep him company.
Dern nicknames his Huey, Dewey and Louie, after Donald Duck’s nephews. After some reprogramming of them, he has one take one step forward and has another do the same, which had me suspect this cruel bastard was going to make them do the hokey pokey. Instead, he’s going to teach them how to maintain the plants, which I thought was a task he would perform while the droids are otherwise preoccupied with every other aspect of running this huge vessel. He also teaches them to play cards, and I bet robots have the ultimate poker faces.
The effects are a mixed bag. I was very impressed by the fluid movement of the drones, which I thought might have been a combination of puppetry and early robots. I should have realized the simplest explanation is the most likely, and that these were performed by legless actors using their arms as the androids’ legs.
Unfortunately, the film’s worst visuals are the exteriors of the ship. I am able to suspend my disbelief according to the budget and age of a film, but these are simply unacceptable. These look only like the miniatures they are, to the extent the illusion is broken. To my considerable shock, this film was directed by Douglas Trumbull, who had done the effects for 2001, and went on to do the same for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner. I even scoffed at the spacesuit Dern wears at one point, as I wondered how well what appears to be a scuba suit and motorcycle helmet were doing to protect him in zero atmospheres and a temperature near absolute zero. Then I watched a making-of video on this disc and discovered that’s exactly what those articles of clothing were.
The bonus features on the disc made me reconsider many elements of the Silent Running, but I find it only fair to express my preceding thoughts without exposure to the film itself and without any other influences. A movie has to stand on its own, and this one didn’t work for me. Now, I will say, after watching some of the supplemental materials, this was a passion project for all involved and knocking the resulting work feels a bit like kicking a puppy. Hearts may been in the right place, but the completed film will not only fail to challenge the beliefs of any climate change deniers, it might even alienate some tree huggers.
Dir: Douglas Trumbull
Starring Bruce Dern
Watched on Arrow Video blu-ray