Silent Running (1971) **
Some movies are such obvious products of their times that it is simply impossible to imagine them being made in any other. The technologies they employ, the attitudes the reflect, the assumptions they make about the way the world worksó these things all combine in some peculiar way that pins the film down to a certain era. And let me tell you, 1971 was the only time in all of human history that could possibly have produced Silent Running. For one thing, there were still great numbers of hippies running around in 1971, and a fair proportion of them still hadnít been completely neutralized by their years of intensive drug use. ë71 also seems to have been the year that environmentalism finally broke out into the mainstreamó that was the year when car manufacturers began re-tuning their late-60ís engines to take unleaded gasoline in the real world, while in the reel world, it brought us the first wave of ecology-conscious monster movies. And finally, it seems to have been about then that mistrust of government and authority really started to spread out from the counterculture into society at large. With all that going on in the background, the stage was set for an era of unprecedented pessimism and paranoia in popular entertainmentó for a brief interval, in other words, during which a movie about a spacefaring hippy and his pet robots turning to violence in order to protect the last 31,000 square feet of natural Earthly ecosystem in the universe from destruction could actually be taken seriously.
Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern, from The Wild Angels and The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant) is part of the four-man crew of the spaceship Valley Forge. This vessel is part of a squadron of four former interplanetary freighters in orbit around Saturn, which have been converted to carry the biological heritage of Earth. The planet itself has been completely built and paved over, and transformed into a single, homogenous, climate-controlled environment fit only for human beings. The Valley Forge and her three sister-ships each carry six geodesic domes, about 200 feet in diameter, each of which houses a different preserved ecosystem. (Among others, the Valley Forge carries a North American pine forest and a piece of the Southwestern American desert.) The original idea, apparently, was that these ships would eventually be called home, and their cargo used to refoliate the planet, and Lowell is still a true believer in that original mission. Unfortunately, the other fifteen men in the squadron have other ideas. We never meet the crews of the other three vessels, but Lowellís crewmates are eco-philistines of the first order. Our first look at Wolf (Cliff Potts), Barker (Ron Rifkin), and Keenan (Jesse Vint, from Bug and Pigs) comes when they race the all-terrain go-carts they use to get around inside the immense ship into the forest dome where Lowell is tending to the small garden he has created in a clearing near the entrance, and drive over Lowellís vegetables. These three actively resent their mission, seeing absolutely no point in preserving the last of Earthís non-human biomass, and wishing with all their hearts that leveler heads will prevail back home, and order the whole project abandoned.
They get their wish very soon. The commodore of the squadron radios the Valley Forge from his flagship, the Berkshire, and informs the crew that he has received orders to jettison and destroy the domesó with nuclear detonators, naturallyó and return to Earth to resume their places in the planetís commercial shipping fleet; no explanation has been given for the decision to abort the mission. Lowell doesnít like this, of course, but orders are orders, right? Figuring thereís no way to change anyoneís mind about the fate of the domes, Lowell sets to work digging up as many of the smaller plants as he can, and transferring them to flower pots, which he will presumably take home with him to Earth. But when the other shipsí crews actually begin blowing up their domes, the idea for a more pro-active approach begins to form in his mind. Then the destruction of the first four domes on the Valley Forge seals his resolve. When Barker comes to set the detonator in the pine forest dome, Lowell kills him with a shovel, and then hurries to the shipís bridge to jettison the desert domeó where Wolf and Keenan have already set the bombó before the other two men can escape from it. Lowell then radios the commodore that there has been a series of accidents, including the premature detonation of one of the domes and the destruction of the jettisoning machinery for the final dome. He also mentions that he thinks his shipmates were inside the fifth dome when it blew up prematurely. The commodore replies that it is urgent that Lowell find a way to ditch the last dome, because the Valley Forgeís present course will take it straight into Saturnís rings on the night side of the planet. These ships werenít designed for such a rough ride, and the commodore doesnít think the Valley Forge will survive. Naturally he doesnít realize this, but thatís exactly what Lowell wants to hear. If the folks back home think heís dead, no one will come looking for him, and heíll be able to tend his forest in peaceó for the rest of his life, if necessary.
Weíre a bit less than halfway through the film at this point, so one would expect there to be a hell of a lot more plot on the wayó perhaps something about this futureís spacefaring equivalent of the Coast Guard finding out about Lowellís survival, something about the authorities getting wise to his mutiny, maybe even something about the political repercussions of his desperate action back on Earth. Thatís not what happens, though. Instead, Silent Runningís story comes to a complete halt, and doesnít get moving again until five minutes before the closing credits. How does it fill up the next 40 minutes, you ask? Well, first Lowell reprograms the shipís maintenance drones to serve as his companions and assistants in the work of tending to the forest. Then, after one of the drones is destroyed during the shipís passage through Saturnís ring, he fiddles with the programs of the remaining two drones some more, so that they will answer to the names Huey (Mark Persons) and Dewey (Cheryl Sparks). (Louie, of course, didnít survive to see his formal christening.) Then he teaches the droids how to play poker. Itís all excruciatingly dull, really. Finally, with just minutes left on the clock, Lowell receives a transmission from the Berkshire; evidently, the commodore meant what he said about sending out a search party for Lowell. Now Lowell has a problem, though. His ship isnít really damaged, his crewmates are dead, and his forest is still attached to the shipó thereís going to be a lot of explaining to do when the folks from the Berkshire come aboard, and little chance of saving the forest Lowell took such drastic action to protect. Iíll say one thing in this movieís favor: the solution Lowell ultimately adopts is of the most rigorous intellectual honesty, and would have been seriously powerful if I wasnít rooting so hard for the movie to just fucking end by the time he arrived at it.
Silent Runningís grievous structural and dramatic woes are only the beginning of the movieís problems, though. I have some serious suspension-of-disbelief issues with this film that stacked the deck against it from the very start. I simply cannot buy the notion of a humans-only Earth, especially a scant 100 years in the future! We, as a species, just arenít that powerful. We can make ourselves extinct, sure, and we can take every terrestrial vertebrate larger than a rat or a seagull with us when we go. We can rid the planet of old-growth forests, turn jungles into deserts, exterminate every species of aquatic mammal, and turn all the worldís rivers, lakes, and estuaries into open sewers. But weíre never, ever, ever going to get rid of all non-human life on Earthó not even the still-unexplained worldwide catastrophe that caused the Permian Extinction accomplished that! And even if we could, it wouldnít be possible to do so without ruining the planet for ourselves. Thatís the real message of environmentalism, after alló that we are inextricably tied to the rest of the biosphere, and as it goes, so do we. A foliage-freeó or even just critically deforestedó Earth would be incapable of recycling the oxygen that we need to breathe. Our capacity to synthesize organic compounds is nowhere near what would be necessary in order to create actual food from petrochemicals, and I donít see it improving to that degree in just 100 years. Our only hope of basic biological survival would be mass cannibalism, in which case the attendant total collapse of civilization would preclude anything like the kind of advanced, technologically dependent society sketched out in Silent Running. Furthermore, even if we assume that such a society could exist, what possible reason could its leaders have for wanting to preserve two dozen tiny pockets of the very wilderness that theyíve so gleefully destroyed all over the world?!?! I mean, if the real thing wasnít important enough to keep around, why go to the expense of creating artificial ecosystems in geodesic domes and then shooting them into space to orbit Saturn until such time as we realize how stupid it was to pave over the Earth? Besides, if history teaches anything about ìprogress,î itís that nobody ever considers whatís being given up in its name until itís already much too late. Only in the near-hysterical context of apocalyptic times (and the turn of the 70ís were certainly that) could this movieís underlying premise have seemed anything but ridiculous.
And while weíre on the subject of the ridiculous, letís have a look at the two big holdovers from the 60ís that are so prominently displayed in Silent Running. Bruce Dernís acting here is simply beyond belief. Heís really just doing the same shtick as he had in all those drugs-and-bikers movies he made for Roger Corman starting in 1966. It scarcely seems possible that anyone would hire such an obvious wacko for a year-long mission in outer space, let alone put him in charge of safeguarding the planetís biological heritage! Donít they have security clearances in the future?! As for the other 60ís holdover, the soundtrack by Joan Baez made me mad enough to eat babies. It thankfully doesnít come up all that often, but her tuneless warbling will surely have anyone who isnít on some giant 60ís nostalgia kick reaching for the volume button on their remote control.
It isnít all bad, however. Thereís the ending, for one thing. And the special effects by director Douglas Trumbull (who had been the top effects man on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Jonathan Dykstra (who went on to do the same job on the even more spectacular Star Wars) are beautiful, if also somewhat dated. The Valley Forge, for example, understandably rather resembles a cross between the Discovery 1 and the Battlestar Galacticaó the models are complex, highly detailed, and exhibit no consideration given to irrelevant aerodynamic principles. Silent Running also features, in the robots Huey and Dewey, the obvious forerunners of R2-D2. These strange little machines (which were played by double amputees walking on their hands) are amazingly expressive and fully believable as characters, and the people inside them put in by far the best performances in the movie.
Home Alphabetical Index Chronological Index Contact
