Silent Running

Dir: Douglas Trumbull

1972

*****

Douglas Trumbull is the master of special effects, having worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and The Tree of Life. If Stanley Kubrick did fake the Moon landings (and I don't for one second think he did), he did it with Trumbull's assistance. Even though he is hugely talented, he only directed two films, something of a crime in my opinion but they are both cracking films. Silent Running was written by the great Michael Cimino - his co-writer on The Deer Hunter Deric Washburn and Doogie Howser M.D. creator Steven Bochco. The film is one of the first to have a heavy environmental theme, a subject that was starting to enter society’s consciousness in the early 70s and involves a futuristic story of saving the planet's ecosystem. Freeman Lowell (played by the brilliant Bruce Dern) is one of four crewmen aboard the space freighter Valley Forge, a space-ship holding enormous, greenhouse-like geodesic domes containing plants, crops and some wildlife. Lowell is the ship's only botanist and ecologist and spends his days attending to the plants as the ship orbits Saturn, waiting for conditions to be right back on earth before they go about the reforestation of the planet. When orders come from earth that the plan is to be scrapped, the domes blown up and the space freighters returned home for commercial use Lowell loses his cool and refuses to adhere and give up on his life's work. He kills a crew-mate and sends the others to their deaths in one of the bio-domes before hijacking the ship with his favourite dome intact. He then enlists the help of the ship's three service robots (who he names Huey, Louie and Dewey) to assist him in fleeing from detection through the rings of Saturn and eventually keeping him company, helping him plant seeds and also playing poker with him. However, as they drift into deep space Lowell realizes that the plant life is getting less and less natural light and is starting to die. He then realises that another ship is gaining on them to see if they survived the journey through Saturn's rings, and knowing that his crime will be soon discovered, he races to install lamps before the reach him, before setting the dome off into deepest, darkest outer space. The last scene is one of my all-time favourite scenes in cinema's history. It's a beautiful story, full of madness but touching at the same time. Huey, Louie and Dewey remain three of my favourite robots in film history too. However, I do wonder whether the original script would have been even more special. In an interview in the late 1970s, Douglas Trumbull revealed that the plot of the movie in the original version of the script the space freighters were on permanent duty, carrying biological domes. When they are finally told to blow the domes and return to Earth, it is because the freighters are going to be scrapped and Lowell was an older, a more curmudgeonly man who simply did not want to return to Earth and be forced into retirement, so he steals the Valley Forge and heads off into deep space. As in the filmed version, he reprograms the robots for some companionship. The subplot involving the plants dying due to a lack of light was involved, but his main interest in the plants was simply as a means of extending his limited food supplies. Eventually he receives a signal from an alien ship and decides to approach it, making humanity's first contact with aliens. The conclusion was a race between Lowell, who was trying to contact the aliens, and the human boarding party trying to retake the ship. Finally, in desperation, Lowell detaches one of the domes with one of the robots aboard seconds before he is killed by the boarding party. The dome drifts off into deep space, where it is found by the aliens. The film would have ended with a confused Dewey "introducing" itself to the equally baffled aliens by presenting them with a "family photo" of Lowell and the drones taken earlier in the story. A wonderful idea with a matching heartfelt ending, who knows, maybe someone will make it one day. Trumbull used a lot of the unused effects from his time working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick had wanted the Stargate sequence of that film to be about Saturn, but there were technical difficulties in getting the special effects for it finished in the limited time available. The Saturn idea was scrapped, and Kubrick substituted Jupiter instead. Trumbull developed the sequence after production, and it was recreated for Saturn in Silent Running. Bruce Dern is brilliant, it's one of his very best performances and that is really saying something, given his impressive body of work. It's one of those very special sci-fi films that ticks all the right boxes but also gives the viewer something unique that can't be seen in any film like it, indeed, there is no other film like it.