I just saw Logan’s Run, and I really liked it. I thought the look of the movie was really cool, despite being cheesy and some of the effects being quite fake-looking. Having only seen Michael York in the Austin Powers movies, it was strange to see him so young. He looked uncannily like Jon Voight in his younger days, and also sort of like Hutch from Starsky and Hutch. I thought Farrah Fawcett would have a bigger role, too. I really loved the soundtrack with all the heavy synthesizers - that one scene where they’re walking through some kind of weird orgy on their way out of the city was audio-wise one of the trippiest scenes I’ve ever seen.
A few questions for anyone who knows (or has read the book that the film was based on.)
That robot near the end in the ice caverns - where the fuck did that come from?! Was he built by the authorities of The City as a last line of offense against runners trying to escape? Why was he freezing all those people?
The old man at the end - how could he really be THE last survivor of the outside world? How could there not have been more people? What exactly happened to them, anyway? Does it explain in the book?
It has been decades since I’ve read the book so there may be a few flaws in my memory. First of all, in the book 21 was the legal limit. (I think that 30 makes more sense.) the old man was sort of a gatekeeper/ conductor for a spaceship that took runners that made it to another place that had no age limits. If you got to him, he would get you to safety. An underground railroad for the elderly.
The book and the movie were two different stories of the same theme.
In the book, at 21 you were to report to the Sleepshop where you were put to sleep. Runners were “helped” to sleep by Deep Sleep Operatives (AKA Sandman).
In the movie the term Sandman didn’t make as much sense as they replaced the Sleepshop with floating and exploding at 30.
Box, the robot dude in the ice cave, used to catch “proteins from the sea” and freeze it for food. One day the fish stopped coming and the people (assumed runners) started. I don’t think he knew who he was freezing food for, so he considered the runners food to freeze.
“It’s my job”.
It is explained in the film but that scene was badly edited to bits. Box, as well as freezing food, likes to carve ice sculptures. He’s carved birds, seals and other sealife. That’s why he starts freaking out about “my birds” when the whole place is falling apart.
There was also supposed to be a scene where he carves a sculpture of Logan and Jessica. (If you look closely you can see a frame or two of it in the explosion scenes.) You’ll notice one moment he doesn’t have his laser arm thing,. then the next moment he does. That laser thing is what he uses to sculpt with. But, because they edited out the sculpting scene, it just appears.
As for the old guy in the movie. I always guessed he was one of many that were left and survived outside. He had parents but they died. He says his parents assumed there were others.
Why they were all in the dome is explained in the first few frames of the movie…
Oh yeah, another thing. I noticed that every single person in the city was white. Is this deliberate? In the book, were non-white people excluded from the city?
Farah Fawcett had an extremely minor role because at the time of the movie she was an unknown actress.
The all-white cast was probably an artifact of the time in which the movie was made.
It’s been a couple years since I re-read the book, but if I recall it did have some non-white characters, and some whose race was not specified.
In the book there was no single city in which everyone was confined - the action takes place across the entire planet, where there are multiple cities, people living out in the wilds, free movement, etc.
I watched the DVD with Michael York’s commentary. It was recorded just a few years ago, and York had forgotten that Jenny Agutter had a nude scene.
When we reach that point in the film, York sighs, “Oh, Jenny…!”
Argent Towers, in the original novel [spoiler]Sanctuary wasn’t a myth; it was a real place, a space colony in orbit around either Earth, the Sun or Mars (I forget which). Successful escape from the Sandmen got you passage on a spaceship to Sanctuary.
In the book, the scene with Box took place just outside of Hell (an escape-proof prison in the far Arctic). Box was a serial torture killer who fell into a machine (IIRC, a slidewalk) while trying to avoid capture, but the authorities weren’t going to let him off that easy — they patched up what they could, jury-rigged what they couldn’t, and shipped him out. I believe he had a chainsaw rather than a laser.
Logan and Jessica sought him out because being half-machine, he was attuned to the Thinker (the computer which basically ran the planet), and could tell them how to negotiate the exit maze and escape.
(The scene of Logan and Jessica posing for the statue reputedly showed a great deal of the lovely Ms Agutter. Unfortunately, it was cut for ratings purposes, and the only print was subsequently destroyed. A pity.)
Right. In the book, there had been no world-wide calamity except over-population. Reacting to harsh population control measures a worldwide cult of young people under a particulary charismatic leader sieze control in the “Little War” - the world militaries, mostly staffed by under-21’s, pretty much join en masse. The cult leader then becomes the first to voluntarily take his own life. Thereafter it becomes law.
There is no illusion about “renewal.” It is simply your patriotic duty and the law that you die at 21. Naturally many people rebel at the notion despite indoctrination - hence the Sandmen. Logan isn’t deprived of a few years as in the movie. He simply becomes conflicted when he himself hits 21.
The book was fairly different from the movie. One big difference was that it wasn’t limited to a single city - their society covered the whole world and Logan and Jessica traveled quite extensively as they were “running”.
One of the places they went to during their travels was an Antarctic prison colony called Hell. Box was one of the prisoners. He was a cyborg who knew an escape route out of Hell. Logan and Jessica went to him and posed for him in exchange for the information.
In the book, Ballard was the “old man” who ran the underground movement against the government. Other than his age, he didn’t resemble Peter Ustinov’s character from the movie. In the book, there was an actual place called Sanctuary - it was an abandoned base on Mars that Ballard had reclaimed for refugees like Logan and Jessica and the book ended with them escaping to there.
The book had two sequels: Logan’s World, set several years later when the government on Earth had collapsed and Ballard was dead and Logan travelled back to Earth to gather supplies for the Mars colony; and Logan’s Escape, where Logan traveled to an alternate timeline where the government hadn’t collapsed and was still trying to kill runners.
The movie Logan’s Run was based partly on the book and partly on an obscure 1971 British SF movie, Glen and Randa (although I believe there was no official credit). Glen and Randa were two teenagers in a primitive post-nuclear world who left their village and went to a city where they found an old man living.
In an effort to popularize the PDF format, Adobe has several books available for free as Acrobat e-books. One of them is Logan’s Run, if anyone here wants to try reading it on-screen.
Editing to add: They’ve got both of the sequels, as well.
Editing again to subtract: Ignore me. The things they have there are only excerpts. They have a couple of complete modern books, but not the Logan trilogy. They have a goodly number of complete public-domain offerings.
They changed it to 30 because they couldn’t get enough under-21 actors for the movie to work. It might be a different story today, but not in the 70’s.