Silent Running 4K

Arrow has been on a two-year roll, upgrading their elaborate Blu-ray special editions to the newer 4K Ultra HD format. Their re-dos of Universal titles are the ones that stand out, especially their dazzling upgrade of David Lynch’s Dune. Most of this essay is an re-written repeat of an older review.

Universal’s Silent Running is a modestly budgeted sci-fi thriller that quite brilliantly overcomes a tall stack of technical challenges. Its talented special effects experts came from 2001 and were central to the visual effects bonanza brought on five years later by Star Wars and Close Encounters. The writing credits include two names soon to become industry notables, but not with anything like this environmental space opera.

“They paved Paradise, put up an orbiting greenhouse, La la la.”
In the near future Earth’s plant life has died out due to human mismanagement. A preservation workaround is a fleet of spaceships in a distant orbit, with caretakers that tend to living flora specimens in domed greenhouse pods. The forest ranger on the ship Valley Forge is Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), an earnest, dedicated and uncomplicated soul who believes in the spirit of the Smokey the Bear song. Lowell’s fellow astronauts don’t share his sense of duty. They shun him as an oddball and ignore his pleas to stop racing their electric work cars through his gardens.

When orders come through that the entire reforestation program is to be abandoned, Lowell flips out. When his colleagues begin jettisoning and destroying the precious domes, he strikes back, murderously. Only one dome is saved. Lowell steers his ship into a different orbit to hide his crime and lies to Mission Control. Now alone and with ‘rescue’ months away, Lowell passes the time in isolation by developing an eccentric relationship with his three robot gardeners, which he dubs Huey, Dewey and Louie. Mission Control tells him that his new orbit will take what’s left of the Valley Forge through the rings of Saturn — and he’s not expected to survive.

The early ’70s saw a surge in ecologically- themed sci-fi. No Blade of Grass, Soylent Green and Z.P.G. predicted apocalyptic chaos via viral plagues, pollution-related devastation or simple over-population. Silent Running opts for a less drastic, if bittersweet, approach, a sci-fi extrapolation of a popular Joni Mitchell song.

Having just completed the truly impressive visuals for Universal’s The Andromeda Strain, Douglas Trumbull leveraged his good name as a gee-whiz genius effects wizard to direct, getting a piece of the same Universal ‘let the kids do their thing’ program that would produce American Grafitti. His technically resourceful production conjures impressive outer space scenes for relative pennies on the dollar. John Dykstra and Richard Yuricich worked out electronic / mechanical effects that would later be refined into ‘motion control,’ a buzzword heard endlessly after Star Wars. A decommissioned aircraft carrier stands in for the interior of the spaceship Valley Forge. Ingenious front projection enhances the illusion of the garden dome interiors, avoiding gigantic set construction.

Trumbull & Co. worked out a unique alternative to the traditional science fiction robot. Little Huey, Dewey and Louie are played by young bi-lateral amputees skilled in walking on their hands. The lightweight ‘robot’ shells built around their bodies were designed to hide hints of human physiognomy. A big success, the robots have been noted as the precursors to Star Wars’ R2-D2 robot, which frankly is less impressive.

The best thing about Silent Running is still Bruce Dern, whose characteristically fearless performance keeps the episodic story in motion. Dern isn’t afraid to tap some of the out-there mannerisms of the psychos he often played. Freeman Lowell is essentially a one-man Greenpeace movement, an activist pushed to violence to defend his principles. As Freeman is the only thing preventing the total extinction of plant life, we are naturally on his side. But he’s also a terrorist outlaw, like the misguided anti-nuke boffin Professor Willingdon.

The story’s emotional idealism is just fine, as are the Schickele & Lampert songs voiced by Joan Baez. But we wonder why the preservation domes need to be parked somewhere out in space, instead of on Earth somewhere. The only Earthbound scenes are dream visions of a redwood forest, so we have no idea what’s going on back home. Society doesn’t seem to have entirely broken down, but we don’t know the full extent of the environmental collapse. Has all the vegetation died? Without plants, how can life on Earth survive at all? What do all the herbivores eat? Is humanity living on mushrooms?  The only previous Sci-fi movie I know of to depict an orbiting greenhouse is the Soviet Nebo Zoyvot from 1959.

The little ‘innocent’ robots tending the shrubbery and shuttling along the exterior of the spaceship make for some unique visuals. But the attempt to sentimentalize them is a little thin, especially when one of them uses a watering can, like a robotic Johnny Appleseed. Silent Running can’t avoid the fact that most ecological stories are defeatist downers. We can easily imagine George Lucas looking at Silent Running and deciding that audiences want space opera, not an ecological fable. We’re all for the motto ‘Save the asparagus,’ but it’s difficult to translate into the disaster format of filmed science fiction.

Silent Running’s message-laden fantasy doesn’t totally connect with the audience. We know that Freeman Lowell can’t win — he has ‘Noble Loser’ tattooed on his forehead. But our patience is strained when he can’t figure out why his plants aren’t flourishing, even though he’s taken them millions of miles further away from the life-giving sun. Simple logic makes Lowell’s quest come off as a fool’s errand. If the plants are doomed anyway, why kill the other astronauts? Sorry, tree-huggers, but Freeman Lowell’s actions are indefensible.

These discordant elements put a damper on the film’s glorious ‘save the Earth’ finale, despite the inspiring music and the vision of the jewel-like surviving dome. But realistic space hardware and fairy-tale magic are not particularly compatible. Huey will eventually run out of batteries, the plant food got left behind in the hangar, and those sun lamps won’t last forever. If HAL-9000 were on board the Valley Forge he’d ask for a duty transfer.

The story of another cute robot cleaning up after humanity’s neglectful mismanagement eventually became an animated hit by Pixar: WALL•E.

Almost half a century later, Silent Running now reminds us of our deplorable state of ecological progress. Despots and opportunists persist in calling climate change a hoax. A scary 60 Minutes report shows the efforts of an arctic seed bank to store varieties of grain seed that might become extinct. (More alarming seed bank news. . . )

None of this is meant to give Douglas Trumbull’s movie a bad rap . . . Silent Running’s ‘save the plants’ message is a perfectly good one to spread around in any form.