Movie Review: Silent Running

I started writing this while watching the movie so it may come out a bit odd.

I'd heard of "Silent Running" (1972) before, but never seen it. I saw it on NetFlix and added it to my instant queue. A few days later I saw a list of best underrated sci-fi movies.

The first thing I'm noticing is that it's suffering from 60's poisoning. I gathered that it's an environmentally friendly hippie flick, but there's hippie flicks and then there's hippie flicks. We've got Joan Baez performing 60's flower child music and misty shots of plants and turtles and whatnot. Good thing I know this is all on a space ship or I'd have quickly turned it off.

The ship is standard 70's sci-fi botanical garden design. Look at the ships in old Battlestar Galactica episodes. This shows the same kind of thinking. There's a central framework with engines at one end, a bridge and crew quarters at the other, and attached to the central column are several glass domes with plants growing in there. Artificial gravity has to be assumed. There's a shuttle attached to the framework that looks like a craft from the British sci-fi series "Space 1999".

Then we get into the performances. The characters are a bit cliched. There's one guy who is overly emotional about the plants and trees, the beauty of it all and the wonders of grown food. Then there are three guys who mock him, are loud, destructive, and refuse to see the point. They tear around the ship racing their rovers and tear up the carefully tended flowers just to prove how big of bastards they are.

These three ships that they're running seem to be the last of the trees and plants. Earth is a uniform 75°F with 100% employment but no plant life. After 8 years of tending to these ships full of plants with the hopes of reseeding the Earth they've been told to nuke the trees and return the ships to commercial service.

Nuke the trees? Really? I guess if the characters are going to be doing cliched melodrama we should go that way with the weapons, too. To really drive home how evil you're supposed to think the non-hippies are they're planting the nukes inside the biodomes while bunnies are hopping all around. Overweight squirrels play in the grass as the biodomes detonate overhead after being detached and pushed away from the main vessels.

As a lone guy comes to plant the nuke in one of the final biodomes the hippie is waiting with a shovel. They talk, they fight, the guy with the nuke gets killed.

It's interesting the number of corporate logos on everything. American Airlines appears to own the ships and Dow Chemicals logos are on some of the cargo containers.

The hippie seems to have stolen the ship. He ejected one of the biodomes with some of the crew in it and detonated it. The engines have engaged and he's accelerating. He tells central control that he's got an emergency but that appears to be a ruse to get them to delay rescue. They tell the hippie there's nothing they can do and he's gonna crash into Saturn's rings.

Having successfully stolen the ship he tries to retrain the service droids to plant trees. He starts to crack. He yells at the service droids, he starts hotrodding around in the rovers until he knocks down some cargo containers and realizes what he's doing.
He teaches the service droids to play poker. The place becomes a mess as our hero does no house keeping whatsoever.

Eventually the plants start to die. He can't quite figure out why. I'm thinking they're a long way from the sun and there's not enough light. Or there were multiple nuclear explosions about six miles from the ship. Or maybe the CO₂ levels created by a single person aren't sufficient.

Finally, a rescue ship comes thinking they're saving his worthless ass and reminds him that it's dark out beyond Saturn. So he sets up a bunch of lights, turns the last biodome over to the service droids, ejects it into space, and detonates the last of the nukes on board the ship.

A good writer and director might be able to do something with this movie. This version had neither.