Now don’t get me wrong, I like Logan’s Run. Great campy fun, that Michael York is just cute as a button and except for Peter Ustinov as The Old Man everybody’s a hoot to watch (especially Farrah Fawcett in her first role). Been a fan since I first saw it way back in the 70s, bought the DVD and everything. But as I was watching the last few minutes of the movie this morning, a thought occured that in any number of viewings hadn’t occured before.
All of these people are going to die.
I mean think about it. Here we have a population in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, comprised of people who apparently either engaged in no meaningful or productive pursuits, or engaged in a job (like surgeon) which required enormous technological resources that, with the destruction of The City, are no longer available. They have no readily apparent food sources (other than, when it comes to it, each other) and are dressed in gauze.
Yep, they’re corpses who just ain’t fallen down yet.
Now, I am not as bothered by this realization as I was by my realization that Quint from Jaws didn’t have to die (a nifty thread about which I started but a search is not turning up), but it still in thinking about it affects my opinion of the movie negatively and I’m not sure upon watching it again that I’ll enjoy it as much, knowing that everybody’s gonna die.
Well, they were all going to die anyway, right? As are all of us, eventually. I look at it this way–they’ve been freed from their sybaritic emprisonment with the mandated death dates, and given an opportunity to fend for themselves. Some will die off pretty rapidly, I figure, but others will dig in and make a life for themselves. And their children will be stronger and life will continue. It will be different, but it will be life. For me, the big question here was along the lines of whether it’s better to starve, free, in the desert, or die a slave amongst the fleshpots of Egypt.
Death in science fiction is inevitable. It is all part of the great scheme. If we did not die, there would be no raw materials to make all the Soylent Green.
In the Marvel Comics adaptation they actually went just beyond the movie.
The first scene in the first comic book immediately post-movie featured a massive food riot and Ex-sandmen forming a militia to put it down.
So I certainly think that most of them are going to die. But some will adapt. Certainly Logan and Jessica did. They didn’t get from the city to Washington in zero time. They had to feed themselves somehow, right?
Live in a perfectly controlled city with all of your needs met and the biggest decision is who to have sex with tonight (and you will have sex tonight) with the only catch is that you die when you turn thirty?
Or
Go all outdoorsey and try to live off the land and have to worry about your next meal and shelter and you might live past thirty?
The sets must have been very nutritious for Ustinov to survive so long chewing the scenery.
Anyway, the people emerging from the ruined city were young, fit, and educated. There would have been problems, especially at first, but Ustinov’s character would have mentored them, and it looks like most of Washington was more or less intact, so they probably had the resources of the Library of Congress to help them out as well. So I don’t think they were in as terrible straits as Otto imagines.
Or, they could eat the other Runners that Box had frozen in the Ice Cave.
No, I’m not saying people don’t normally die. What I’m saying is that the end of the movie is presented as this victory over this dystopic horror of The City, but the result of that victory is going to be that vast numbers of people who would at least have lived for several more years are instead going to die (and probably fairly horribly, of starvation or exposure). These people have no agriculture, no manufacturing, no likelihood that the basics of survival will become available any time soon. Sure they can maybe learn some things from Ustinov, but locating or developing the resources to keep one person or three people (Logan, Jessica and the Old Man) alive are several orders of magnitude different from finding or making enough to support an entire city full of people with minimal survival skills at best.
Hell, just about everyone on the Titanic would be dead by now, anyway. That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to cringe when you get to the part in the movie where Ismay’s encouraging the Captain to try and make the Atlantic-crossing record.
And just for the record, there’s little evidence outside Cameron’s movie that Ismay so encouraged Captain Smith. Cameron needed a villain other than the iceberg.
Otto, here’s another way to look at things. The City was run by an infrastructure and intelligence so fragile that merely telling it that something only rumored to exist (Sanctuary) did not in fact exist, was enough to cause a complete system collapse.
So the Citizens were going to have to fend for themselves sooner or later anyway.
Is this a trick question? I can picture one of the escapees being slowly mauled by a bear or something saying “yeah…this was much better than the painless death they had planned for me…”
I think the movie made the point clear that choice was superior to satisfaction, at least in the minds of the scriptwriters (it’s different in the book).
So you’re saying people don’t normally die? :eek: