Silent Running (1972)

Watched this after getting onto a scifi kick this past week and reading many recommendations for Silent Running, with a some reviewers stating its as good or even better than 2001.Bad move, this movie is cringy AF right from the opening credits. The FX are the only interesting thing happening here. The praise for this film's delivery of its message must be coming from some very simple minds that do not get embarrassed watching poorly written and overacted scenes conveying simplistic ideas as if they are so deep, man. No scifi aliens here, but plenty of alienation for viewers such as myself.

There is something undeniably appealing about the art direction of Silent Running. Its Apple-Esque set design is simple, white and functional, and the spaceship crew in 70s Formula One style boiler suits completes the effect. Bruce Dern gives an interesting performance and the film begins with real verve and good humour. Dern is given the con for the rest of the proceedings and the story of an uncomplicated man faced with awesome, uncomplicated situation is made quite well, and entertainingly. His beloved eco-system in the end is nothing without people and although there is an inevitability to this, it is enjoyable to watch it unfold. The special effects are never tiresome, nor dated, and there is an interesting poignance about a future civilisation that underpins the story.

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.

I was a young adult, married with children, when this movie came out in 1972, but I only saw it yesterday. I found it on Netflix streaming movies. I found it a very interesting study in human values and the extreme one might go to when choices are limited.I have always liked Bruce Dern, and he was great in last year's 'Nebraska' playing an older man in his twilight years. Here he is young, an astronaut caring for almost extinct forests. But I get ahead. It is some future time and apparently Earth has become, or is becoming, uninhabitable. So a mission with several very large space ships and small crews have been sent into some sort of orbit, perhaps around the sun, intent on preserving life. Specifically, forests and the greenery that goes with it. Each large space craft has several transparent domed areas attached, under each dome is dirt and a forest.Freeman Lowell (Dern) is one of four on this particular ship. From all the patches on his suit (Sierra Club, Mount Rainier, etc) we know he is a conservationist and he takes this job very seriously. In his spare time he grows various crops to supplement the space food they are dispensed. Trouble arises when the crew is told they will jettison each domed forest into space and explode each, they no longer want to save them. As Freeman watches each pod in turn be jettisoned then exploded, each time he winces almost in pain, seeing life destroyed with no hope.So he does the only thing that makes sense to him, taking drastic measures.SPOILERS FOLLOW: He decides he will first get rid of the three other crewmen. The first comes easily, in a struggle in Freeman's garden, with a shovel handle across the man's throat. Next he jettisons a forest pod when the other two men are in it, destroying them when it detonates. And finally, he modifies the remaining three drones (robots) to obey him, he teaches one how to take care of the forest, then jettisons them but WITHOUT an explosion. Then he causes his own space ship to explode, with the knowledge that the little robot will take care of the forest for an eternity!