A Look Back at 1989: 'Silent Running' - A College Student's Review

-
I originally wrote this movie review for the Diversions section of the Miami-Dade Community College - South Campus student newspaper in March of 1989. Silent Running was being screened by the Campus Student Activities Department as part of a science fiction film series. It was published on March 9, 1989. 

 'Silent Running' is science fiction with a message

 Alex Diaz-Granados
Staff Writer
It is the 21st Century. After centuries of ecological mismanagement, Earth has been defoliated, the average temperature of the planet is 75 degrees and many species of plants and animals are quickly becoming extinct.  

 Out in deep space, a fleet of American Airlines space arks contains the few surviving specimens of Earth fauna and flora, carefully preserved in perfectly reconstructed ecosystems.

Silent Running, director Douglas Trumbull's vision of the future, is a fascinating film which deals with the deterioration of the environment and the ultimate sacrifice a human can make - voluntary solitude.

In Trumbull's "answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey,"  Bruce Dern plays Lowell, a botanist aboard the USS Valley Forge, a man who is devoted to his ecosystems.

Lowell spends much of his time "as one" with the animals and plants under his care, seemingly detached from his shipmates Wolf (Cliff Potts), Barker (Ron Rifkin) and Keenan (Jesse Vint). 

All goes well until "the brass" orders the ark fleet to return to Earth and jettison the ecosystems into deep space.

Lowell, a sort of space-going Green Peace environmental activist who eats fruits and vegetables instead of the synthetic food concentrates preferred by his shipmates, goes crazy when he hears the orders and jettisons sections of the Valley Forge, killing his mates.

Alone except for the denizens of his ecosystem and three robots (which he names Huey, Dewey, and Louie), Lowell and the Valley Forge set off toward the edge of the solar system and interstellar space.

Silent Running is, on the whole, an above-average science fiction film, with beautifully photographed special effects. Particularly stunning is Trumbull's depiction of Saturn's rings, based on unused material for 2001 (Trumbull was assistant director for that film). 

However, the film is not without its weaknesses. The pro-ecology "message" is not delivered as subtly as it could have been, and the "Space 60s" songs by folk singer Joan Baez are a bit grating. 

Nevertheless, the screenplay by Deric Washburn, Michael (The Deer Hunter) Cimino and Steven (L.A. Law) Bochco is for the most part interesting and contains occasional gems like the scene where Lowell teaches the robots how to play poker.

Silent Running is being shown in Room 2114 at 7:30 p.m, as part of the science fiction film series. Admission is free. 

Rating: Worth Seeing

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more