Silent Running

"Silent Running" (Douglas Trumbull, 1972) I'd been planning to look at this movie for a long time now, but the release of "Moon" put me in mind of it again, the two films sharing a melancholy feel for the isolated man in space, both of whom are dirt-farmers of their own kind.

"Silent Running" postulates a world so over-populated that the planet becomes overrun with cities, the flora (and some fauna) rocketed into space until such a time that the Earth can find space for them again.

Questions immediately come up: no room for vegetation? Where does the planet get its oxygen? It's phyto-plankton? It seems that if you take vegetation out of the equation that the food pyramid will pretty much collapse in on itself, and with it, the human population who are subsisting on what...space food sticks? Soylent green?

None of this matters to the four caretakers (Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint and Bruce Dern), three of whom could care less, and Astronaut Freeman Lowell (Dern)being the one for whom the Mission is a sacred trust. Needless to say, they don't get along, Lowell's sole companions being the nursery-bots tending to the plants' daily needs.

Things go to seed, when word comes up from Mission Control that Earth doesn't give a rip anymore—budget cuts or some such—so they should jettison the space-green-houses, blow 'em up, and return home. Rather than commit planticide, Lowell chooses, instead to go all-PETA and decide that his fellow agro-nauts' best function would be as fertlizer. A bit extreme, maybe, but we are talking about Bruce Dern here. And, to hide his crimes, he sends the ship into a collision course with Saturn's rings to try and convince Mission Control the ship will be destroyed. However, pesky-persistent techies that they are, NASA manages to find him, and Lowell must come up with a way of saving the plants and allaying any suspicions.

Douglas Trumbull did some of the FX work on "2001: A Space Odyssey," creating 3-D forced perspective lunar landscapes and perfecting the "slit-scan" technique—a frame-by-frame animated geometric horizon that made up the bulk of the "Star-gate" sequence near the film's end. "Silent Running" was his first feature, and he maintained a healthy career as director ("Brainstorm"), special effects guru ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Blade Runner"), pioneer with film formats (his "Showscan" became a staple at world's fairs displaying huge 70mm films at a reality-approaching 60 frames per second, and designer of thrill rides (for the Luxor and Universal Tours).

In "Silent Running," Trumbull managed to make an ecological low budget sci-fi film, with illusion work that rivalled "2001"—he even managed to make a realistic looking Saturn, something that wasn't possible years before with the Kubrick film. His robots were strange little non-humanoids forms that suggested walking amplifiers, and the story (and Dern's acting) makes them sympathetic little synth's. The ships designed for "Silent Running" were subsequently used for stock footage for years in such shows as "Battlestar Galactica" and Trumbull's considerable work served to influence the look and techniques of "Star Wars."*

Not the greatest of films, but not through lack of trying, as director, star and art team stretch their budget impressively and play it for all the drama it's worth. But the story is a little skimpy, the protagonist a bit bi-polar, and the conclusion not exactly rousing. A good study in movie-making, if not necessarily story-telling.

* Specifically, the look of R2-D2, and the flotsam scattering separations (emulating real NASA footage) that are in both movies. Trumbull's squat little helper-bots were performed with the help of double amputees in plastiform shells walking on their hands. The effect is totally convincing, and he avoids the cliche of the humanoid robots.