Silent Running, released in 1972 and starring Bruce Dern, is one of the most emotionally powerful and thought-provoking sci-fi movies I’ve ever seen. Basically, the earth has become a concrete jungle – all of it, not just parts – and the remaining forests and plant life are housed in giant domes being transported through space in the vague hope that they can one day be returned, and the world reforested. The only trouble is, only Freeman Lowell (Dern) actually still dreams of this being a reality. When the orders come through to destroy the domes... well, Lowell isn’t exactly happy about it.
His three crew-mates are hardly sympathetic of his attitudes and completely fail to comprehend his love of the beauty and wonder in nature, nor do they understand why he insists on eating the natural produce he grows instead of joining with the synthetic junk they all eat. One of the crewmates is a bit more sympathetic, but he also cannot understand Lowell’s viewpoint. With the destruction of the last forests being imminent and nobody seeming to care (despite repeated statements such as “May God have mercy on all of us” by the powers that be, nobody thinks of opposing the orders, which came through with no explanation), Freeman must take matters into his own hands.
Bruce Dern gives an incredible performance here. The character he creates is one we can completely empathise with, and our whole connection with the film hinges almost completely on that. Despite the message of the film being far more about humanity’s relationship with nature, it does so through the eyes and emotions of this one man. Dern gives a person who, despite being a loner, we can easily relate to; despite not condoning his actions as such, we can completely understand what has driven him to do so; despite having been pushed to the edge of sanity and at times beyond, he never loses basic humanness, nor does he fail to feel remorse over the things he’s done to save the forest.
There are several key stages to the film; the uneasy relationship with the rest of the crew, the coming to terms with being alone, the terrible realisation that he cannot continue living the way it is, the anthropomorphising of the ship’s computer, the terrible final decision... All are handled very well and Director Douglas Trumbull moves the action along smoothly at a pace that’s slow but never plodding. The robots in Silent Running are like none you’ve ever seen before – weird little things that seem completely incapable of performing the tasks set them, and having no way of expressing emotions – if they have them – yet there’s always the sense that they have some form of sentience beyond what Freeman imputes to them. Some of the scenes with the robots in leave you with a real lump in your throat... leading to you wondering just how you can be so affected by the fate of robots that look like small walking TV sets in the first place. This just illustrates though how this movie pulls you in – you care about every character in it, even if they’re not human. There are some shots of how the animals in the forest seem to sense that something very wrong is about to happen early on, and these really tug at the heartstrings. However it never feels manipulative, and Dern’s performance has a real earnest intensity to it.
For the time, the special effects look pretty good and the spaceship models still don’t look at all bad. The music lacks orchestral complexity, but it certainly packs a hefty punch in adding to the mood of the movie. Joan Baez provides a couple of songs, one of which I really liked, the other I wasn’t too keen on – “Silent Running” and “Rejoice in the Sun”, both composed by Pater Schickele with lyrics by Diane Lampert. Peter Schickele also composed the rest of the music for the film.
There are a few faults with Silent Running, but the overall tension lifted with occasional moments of unexpected humour, the incredibly powerful performance by Bruce Dern, good cinematography (Charles F. Wheeler) and a potent message that seems all the more relevant today with the global ecological concerns that keep making an appearance in the news, I cannot but give it 5 stars. I hadn’t seen it for a long time before tonight and wasn’t sure whether the effect would have lessened on a film I remember loving when I was younger; in fact the effect has intensified. It’s not going to be to everyone’s taste – too slow for some, and if you don’t connect with the main character you probably won’t be much moved – but to me it remains one of the finest science fiction movies ever made. So much so that it has a home in my Top Ten Science Fiction Movies of All Time.
As this science fiction classic opens, botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) has spent eight years aboard the space freighter Valley Forge preserving t...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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