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For years, this has been somewhere in my extremely long Word file titled FILMS TO WATCH SOMEDAY, as well as in my 390+ DVD queue on Netflix. I usually peruse around the queue and pick out a film that I'm in the mood to see, but sometimes I just let whatever is next on the list show up in my mailbox. It makes opening that red envelope a little like Christmas morning! Anyway, Silent Running apparently has a cult-classic status.
The entire film is set in the year 2008 and on the American Airlines space freighter Valley Forge (complete with the AA logo) in orbit around Saturn. The whole cast consists of four on-screen individuals, and three drones (small robots, played by several actors without legs, which enabled them to fit on the small squarish robot 'body'). There's also a couple off-screen characters, one on Earth and one on another space freighter, that appear only as voices. The main character, played by Bruce Dern, attentively cares for several artificial domes biomes which the freighter carries, that preserve forest environments that can no longer survival and the eologically-impaired Earth (where, weirdly, the temperature is 75F and never varies - why that is, is never explained).
One day, the order comes - American wants to put the freighters back into commercial service. The domes are to be abandoned and the ships are to return to Earth. Freeman Lowell (the Dern character) rebels and takes over the ship, killing his three crewmates, in order to preserve the remaining biomes (several are destroyed before he decides to act). The film ends with Lowell committing suicide by nuclear detonation, but not before jettisoning the one remaining biome into deep space, with the single surviving drone carrying out its orders to nurture the small forest within.
Does it work? Well, yes and no.
Frankly, even though the film is only 89 minutes long, there's not enough happening to even fill an hour of screen time. And the protagonist is problematic - he's a triple murderer! Sure, the men he kills aren't particularly sympathetic, and they're a little dickish, but they don't warrant being killed. It's a major problem when the hero of the story, presented as a force for good, wantonly kills people for no good reason. And this is 1971, so the special effects are about what you'd expect - in other words, they're not Star Wars caliber (that film was still six years in the future).
Still, the effects aren't bad for the era, and they have a sort of charm to them. And that's really how the film works - as a cultural artifact. It's a curiosity, and fairly entertaining in that context. Dern delivers a solid acting performance. And there's some interesting camera work along the way. There's also a pair of very Woodstock-y Joan Baez songs that are weirdly incongruous with the setting of a space freighter (this reminded me of the film Ladyhawke - set in a medieval fantasyland but with a 1980s pop/synthesizer score that is completely out of place).
All in all, it was as much interesting as entertaining. I can't really recommend it, but I also can't say that watching it was a wasted experience. Enjoy, if you're into this sort of retrospective.
Final note:
The interiors of the space freighter were filmed on the decommissioned WWII-era Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge. The carrier was subsequently scrapped.
For years, this has been somewhere in my extremely long Word file titled FILMS TO WATCH SOMEDAY, as well as in my 390+ DVD queue on Netflix. I usually peruse around the queue and pick out a film that I'm in the mood to see, but sometimes I just let whatever is next on the list show up in my mailbox. It makes opening that red envelope a little like Christmas morning! Anyway, Silent Running apparently has a cult-classic status.
The entire film is set in the year 2008 and on the American Airlines space freighter Valley Forge (complete with the AA logo) in orbit around Saturn. The whole cast consists of four on-screen individuals, and three drones (small robots, played by several actors without legs, which enabled them to fit on the small squarish robot 'body'). There's also a couple off-screen characters, one on Earth and one on another space freighter, that appear only as voices. The main character, played by Bruce Dern, attentively cares for several artificial domes biomes which the freighter carries, that preserve forest environments that can no longer survival and the eologically-impaired Earth (where, weirdly, the temperature is 75F and never varies - why that is, is never explained).
One day, the order comes - American wants to put the freighters back into commercial service. The domes are to be abandoned and the ships are to return to Earth. Freeman Lowell (the Dern character) rebels and takes over the ship, killing his three crewmates, in order to preserve the remaining biomes (several are destroyed before he decides to act). The film ends with Lowell committing suicide by nuclear detonation, but not before jettisoning the one remaining biome into deep space, with the single surviving drone carrying out its orders to nurture the small forest within.
Does it work? Well, yes and no.
Frankly, even though the film is only 89 minutes long, there's not enough happening to even fill an hour of screen time. And the protagonist is problematic - he's a triple murderer! Sure, the men he kills aren't particularly sympathetic, and they're a little dickish, but they don't warrant being killed. It's a major problem when the hero of the story, presented as a force for good, wantonly kills people for no good reason. And this is 1971, so the special effects are about what you'd expect - in other words, they're not Star Wars caliber (that film was still six years in the future).
Still, the effects aren't bad for the era, and they have a sort of charm to them. And that's really how the film works - as a cultural artifact. It's a curiosity, and fairly entertaining in that context. Dern delivers a solid acting performance. And there's some interesting camera work along the way. There's also a pair of very Woodstock-y Joan Baez songs that are weirdly incongruous with the setting of a space freighter (this reminded me of the film Ladyhawke - set in a medieval fantasyland but with a 1980s pop/synthesizer score that is completely out of place).
All in all, it was as much interesting as entertaining. I can't really recommend it, but I also can't say that watching it was a wasted experience. Enjoy, if you're into this sort of retrospective.
Final note:
The interiors of the space freighter were filmed on the decommissioned WWII-era Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge. The carrier was subsequently scrapped.
We-ll, it probably helps to have lived in that era to understand or appreciate it. As it was, I read the novelization back in 6th grade when the movie was about. As it was, I don't think I got to see the movie until on TV (now have a DVD) in 1985 and to me, the opening title scene with the music, the close up of the turtle is the kind of thing that could bring one to their knees.
There is probably more to understanding Freeman from reading the book but even in the movie, Anderson (one of the voices), comments of how he's been with the project from the very start. Freeman is so committed to replanting Earth that when the order is given to destroy them without explanation, as Anderson says, he is faced with an impossible choice. Follow orders or save the last botanical life of Earth and if the latter, then it means to stop his crew mates from carrying through.
Toward the end, leaving out here a lot of what is catching up with him, there are those voices again, of Anderson and Neal (done by Joseph Campanella), voices of friends who are so concerned about him, that once again, he is faced with an impossible choice, or, if not that, then an offer that friends are offering that he cannot accept.
Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), and Clarence Williams III (Mod Squad).
Like his recent film Tangerine (2015), this was shot with an iphone.
When she cuts the first piece of cake for Nadine, you can see where she stuck her finger to taste the frosting, and you'll wonder who eventually got that piece.
Keep an eye on the shot where she visits the guy who digs up buried military ordnance, and what the camera does when he hits the detonator plunger.
Expand to full screen, and set the video quality to at least 720p.
Foxcatcher-Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo starred. Carrell was nearly unrecognizable in some makeup and demeanor as the disturbed and deadly John DuPont. Channing Tatum truly put on a tour de force with his intensity in this role and Ruffalo was great as always. This is based on a true story as well.
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