Reviews and notes
FESTIVALS:
1972 Trieste (science fiction)
2020 Thesaloniki
This authentic 1970s cult sci-fi classic stars a key figure of the period, patrician hippie Bruce Dern, as an idealistic crew member of a 21st-century space station refusing to destroy the only forest vegetation saved from a defoliated Earth. The screenplay by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (later to collaborate on The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (of subsequent Hill Street Blues fame) delivers its ecological message with humour and imagination, and Joan Baez sings the appropriate songs. But this deeply moving, immaculately staged film is essentially the work of Douglas Trumbull, only 28 at the time, a special effects expert who got the assignment after making a major contribution to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unless you count Brainstorm, Natalie Wood’s disastrous final film, he didn’t direct anything of significance again, though his work on Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner brought him Oscar nominations, and his technological innovations have made him a legendary figure in the film industry.
– Phillip French, The Observer.
In the not very distant future, man has at last finished with Earth. The mountains are leveled and the valleys filled in, and there are no growing plants left to mess things up. Everything is nice and sterile, and man’s global housekeeping has achieved total defoliation. Out around the rings of Saturn, a few lonely spaceships keep their vigil. They’re interplanetary greenhouses, pointed always toward the sun. Inside their acres and acres of forests, protected by geodesic domes that gather the sunlight, the surviving plants and small animals of Earth grow. There are squirrels and rabbits and moonlit nights when the wind does actually seem to breathe in the trees: a ghostly reminder of the dead forests of Earth.
The keeper of one of these greenhouses, Freeman Lowell, loves the plants and animals with a not terribly acute intelligence. Silent Running his story. In an earlier day, he might have been a forest ranger and happily spent the winter all alone in a tower, spotting forest fires. Now he is millions of miles from Earth, but his thoughts are filled with weedings and prunings, fertilizer and the artificial rainfall.
One day the word comes from Earth: Destroy the greenhouses and return. Lowell cannot bring himself to do this, and so he destroys his fellow crew members instead. Then he hijacks his spaceship and directs it out into the deep galactic night. All of this is told with simplicity and a quiet ecological concern, and it makes Silent Running a movie out of the ordinary – especially if you like science fiction.
The director is Douglas Trumbull, a Canadian who designed many of the special effects for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull also did the computers and the underground laboratory for The Andromeda Strain, and is one of the best science-fiction special-effects men. Silent Running, which has deep space effects every bit the equal of those in 2001, also introduces him as an intelligent, if not sensational, director.
The weight of the movie falls on the shoulders of Bruce Dern, who plays the only man in sight during most of the picture. His only companions are Huey, Louie, and Dewey, who are small and uncannily human robots who help with the gardening. They’re OK with a trowel but no good at playing poker, as their human boss discovers during a period of boredom.
Dern is a very good, subtle actor, who was about the best thing in Jack Nicholson’s directing debut, Drive, He Said. Dern played a basketball coach as a man obsessed with the notion of winning – and the deep-space ecologist this time is a quieter variation on the theme.
Silent Running isn’t, in the last analysis, a very profound movie, nor does it try to be. (If it had, it could have been a pretentious disaster.) It is about a basically uncomplicated man faced with an awesome, but uncomplicated, situation. Given a choice between the lives of his companions and the lives of Earth’s last surviving firs and pines, oaks and elms, and creepers and cantaloupes, he decides for the growing things. After all, there are plenty of men. His problem is that, after a while, he begins to miss them.
– Roger Ebert, 1 January 1971.
Restoration
This new restoration is nothing short of stunning. Colors now have a more natural glow, without losing any warmth. Reds and oranges are now much more distinguishable, along with a heightened amount of detail, and enviable grain. There is ever-so-slightly more in the upper, lower, and right side of the frame, thanks to this new restoration from the original negative.
– adapted from Colin Zavitz, DVD Beaver, 17 November 2020.