"Silent Running" and today's ethos

I’ve always thought this was a great movie, but is it just a little problematic today given that the protagonist is in modern terms an ecoterrorist? He murders his crewmates and hijacks (and eventually destroys) a valuable ship over a cause that nobody else seems to care about. In 1972 that was a cautionary fable; today radicalism is far less sympathized with.

I remember well seeing it when it first came out in '72. Dern had just done The Cowboys, making it difficult for a kid my age to grant him much sympathy at first, that and he was again typecast in his well known slightly crazy, consumed by an idea persona. While it was around the same time as Billy Jack, Dern was more difficult to identify with than Laughlin.

It was an interesting show, Joan Baez on the soundtrack, likeable Star Wars type drones (actually manipulated by 3 double amputees) and a worthy cause when the Sierra Club was a popular force. But yeah, killing fellow astronauts and an indeterminate, off in space ending left it as an important benchmark film for me but a little short of a classic. Influential and memorable though, definitely that.

Prof. Peter Schickele wrote the music! PDQ Bach would have been proud.

He wasn’t exactly an ecoterrorist; he wasn’t attacking innocent people, setting fire to cars or houses, etc.

Even by today’s standards, he counts as an “action movie hero,” a guy who breaks the law when standing up for a higher moral principle. Sort of like “Free Willy.” If you believe in the cause, then the actions taken are justified. If you don’t, they don’t. But they don’t really rise to the level of terrorism.

If he’d re-directed the self-destruct nukes to targets on earth… Now that’s terrorism.

Funny thing: I’m a big Schickele fan, and have had the sound-track of the movie since it came out…but only just saw the actual movie this year. Somehow never managed to see it till now. Very nice, very pretty.

It’s sad that the ecological movement has become so marginalized. It’s had its successes, of course. You can actually breathe the air in Los Angeles, something that wasn’t entirely true when that movie came out. The Cuyahoga River hasn’t caught fire recently. But species extinction is still happening at a scary rate, and habitat destruction doesn’t seem to have slowed much.

Liked to music, liked the effects (a big selling point when it came out), liked the drones*, and really wanted to like the movie, but found it mind-numbingly dumb. The government, after years of hosting an irreplaceably collection of plants, decides to suddenly get rid of them all at once? With nuclear bombs? Our hero doesn’t realize that the forest is dying because it lacks sunlight until almost too late? How are they generating the needed power for heat and light? For that matter, how are they balancing the heat input and outflow, which has got to be changing as they move out from the sun. and don’t get me started on gravity. But the thing with the ecologist not thinking about sunlight until the very end of the movie simply floors me.

Years later, when in a writing course, the professor began by saying that he wasn’t going to accept any more “eco-warrior” stories about heroes killing humans to save whales, or the like. There were just too many of them, and he was getting sick of them. This is, I think, the first time I encountered that trope.

*I’m convinced that George Lucas saw it and was influenced by it to make R2D2 a stubby, speechless robot, and even by the name “drones” to call his mechanical people “droids”, a term not used previous (to my knowledge, although “androids”, of course, was). In the first Star Wars film they called R2D2 and C3PO “robots” only once, and called them “droids” every other time.

I’ll give them the dying forests and the heat balance and, yes, gravity for the sake of suspension of disbelief and in recognition of the technical limitations of telling that story. Power is easily explained by nuclear power. But here’s what, as an adult, bothers me about the film:

The bio-domes were ordered to be destroyed so that the ships could be returned to commercial services. Why? ISTM that the domes could be placed in orbit (with appropriate sunlight) to operate autonomously. Obviously they had their own power sources, so they didn’t need the ships. A small staff of foresters/ecologists could be placed on each one (there’s room for a single-wide for them to live in) to take care of necessary tasks, and they could be rotated in and out much as we do with personnel in Antarctica. There’s no reason to destroy them.

But the film has some of the best ships I’ve seen in science fiction. Good s/fx. The story was appropriate for its time. Though my older sister had a Joan Baez album in the '60s, and I liked it, I didn’t care for her song in the film. When I was a kid, I really wanted one of those vehicles they drove around the ships. The movie has its flaws, but except for the illogical decision to destroy the domes the positives outweigh the negatives.

Reminded me then of an ongoing Saturday morning show called The Banana Splits who had something very similar. In fact like Cal mentioned and I did too, there were a number of elements in the movie that made me wonder if they were borrowed from other flicks or contributed to the development of similar things in later movies. Common I’m sure but several things really stood out.

Not for me. I’m not going to give them everything you give away in that first sentence. (and Every biodome has its own nuke power? Get real.) You can tell a story without having to concede so much stuff. The destroying the biodomes (especially with nukes) is absurd, as I said in my post. But the eco-hero apparently not realizing that his plants need more light as he moves away from the sun – wondering at lengtyh about why “the forest is dying” – beggars belief.I really kinda want to like this film. The effects, the drones, and bruce Dern all make for a lot of positives. But I have to make too many concessions to make it enjoyable, or to let me recommend it to anyone.

At least people care about climate change now.

One interesting thing for me is the bit about people eating synthetic food and so on. 60s/70s movies were totally schizophrenic about technology. On the one hand, technology is going to destroy us or make us dead inside or whatever. On the other hand, creating synthetic food for billions of people is not a problem. We can’t keep forests alive on Earth, but hey, stick them in a dome and shoot them into space, that’s way easier. And we can remake societies on a whim from the leaders, you just need to program people the right way and you can create any kind of crazy dystopia/utopia.

See “Frankfurt School” and “Agenda 21”. :stuck_out_tongue:

And Ira Levin’s “This Perfect Day.”

I just saw the movie for the first time a few months ago, as it happens, after having only seen clips of it here and there. It feels awfully dated now, but I’m glad I watched it. An interesting story, good sfx for its day, and nice music. The three small robots are cool.

I would say that Dern’s character was a murderer, in that he was willing to kill to accomplish his (otherwise laudable) goal, but not a terrorist, as he was not trying to change others’ behavior or policy by using terror. He was a rather cranky, sullen character to build a movie around, though.

Two things I learned from the DVD extras: the movie was filmed on the soon-to-be-scrapped aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge, hence the name of the spaceship; and the water of the pool in which the Dern character swam was bone-chillingly cold. He had to really act to appear to be enjoying his swim!

The Making of Silent Running, on YouTube:

Ahhhh while no, I wouldn’t exactly call him a terrorist, he’s still undeniably a semi-psychotic murderer. Although his crew mates are portrayed as slacker dicks, they were hardly evil. And the **only **reason they were killed was so Dern could carry out his selfish mission of living the rest of his life with his robots and his silly trees drifting alone into deep space.

That aside, I still find the film enjoyable. It’s silly to bitch about the technical details, power, gravity etc., it wasn’t *2001 *it was more Star Trek. And for a film that was directed by a special effects guy, Douglas Trumbell (who did the effects for *2001 *and later Close Encounters), I found it very competently made. And I liked his minimalist approach. Sure it had a (hippie) message, but it doesn’t really hit you over the head with it. It’s more a character study, akin to a one-man play, than it is bad 70s environmental propaganda.

At the end I find myself wondering how long that forest was actually going to survive, drifting away from the sun and getting all its light from the ship’s power alone, with only the robots to fix the power-plant if something goes wrong.

Also, it’s all at a level of technology that would not seem to support blackbox things like artificial gravity, and since the ship does not spin for gravity, why is everything at 1g?

I always wondered how artificial gravity was maintained in the domed nature “pods”, since they were shown attached to the main ship at different angles.

[quote=“CalMeacham, post:8, topic:673693”]

… But the eco-hero apparently not realizing that his plants need more light as he moves away from the sun – wondering at lengtyh about why “the forest is dying” – beggars belief.I really kinda want to like this film. …QUOTE]

It’s been so long since I’ve seen this … is anything said about Bruce’s supposed training or profession? Is he actually a biologist, or like the other guys just some crewman who was assigned to be a plant-sitter? But unlike the other guys, he bonded with them.

Because in the latter case, I can believe that he fell in love with his plants, and decided to “free” them from the EEVILLL world. Just as I can believe someone “frees” a bunch of rats from a lab, setting them loose to starve in the wild.

At the very start of the film, it shows several big floodlights high in the center of the dome, pointed down. From that image, I can only conclude that the dome was self-contained, light-wise. This seems to contradict events later in the film, right?

I don’t think it’s specified, but the action and dialogue strongly hint at the latter. He’s just a spaceship jockey, who got to messing around with the plants and fell in love with them. He seems to be entirely self-trained.

(He might have gotten some books from the library, same as he got the book on reprogramming Drones.)

If the domes had been facing inward, not outward, artificial gravity might have come from the ship spinning. But as it was? You have to politely look the other way (or assume really cheap and easy gravitics tech.)