Silent Running

Plot synopsis:
Silent Running takes place in the not-so-distant future, at a time in which Earth's plant life has been decimated. Only a few specimens of flora have been preserved, and are currently in space in a fleet of orbiting greenhouses.Freeman Lowell (played by Bruce Dern) is the main character, one of four extraterrestrial forest rangers aboard the Valley Forge, one of the 2,000 metre-long green house freighters. He is passionately dedicated to preserving the orbiting forests and their natural inhabitants, and eventual returning them to Earth for reforestation of his now-barren planet more so than his crewmates, whose main priority seems to be returning to Earth after their one-year deployment to space.The main conflict comes when Lowell and his crew are ordered to destroy the orbiting greenhouses and redeploy the freighters to commercial service. Lowell decides to disobey orders and save the forests he has worked so hard to preserve.Lowell's crewmates manage to jettison and detonate four of the six greenhouse domes on the Valley Forge. Lowell kills one of his crewmates in a struggle to save the two remaining domes, during which he seriously injures his leg. He then manages to trap the other two crewmen in the other remaining dome, which he then jettisons and destroys.With help from the ship's three robots, Lowell feigns a premature dome detonation to fool his superiors, then alters the orbit of the Valley Forge , redirecting it towards Saturn in an attempt to preserve the last forest dome. Injured and alone with three robots, Lowell programs them to perform surgery on his leg.Still in communication with the rest of the fleet, Lowell is informed that the Valley Forge is on a collision course with Saturn's rings, and there is nothing he can do to stop the catastrophic event. The ship will likely be destroyed. With communications failing due to the distance now between the Valley Forge and the rest of the fleet, the ship passes through the rings of Saturn. While the three robots are outside the ship on maintenance duty, one is blown away from the ship, leaving two remaining robots. The ship, and its single greenhouse dome, emerge undamaged on the other side of the rings.Lowell and the two remaining robots chart a course into deep space, far away from the fleet. Alone except for his accompanying drones, Lowell befriends them and renames them Huey, Dewey and (posthumously) Louie. He teaches them to play poker, plant trees, and bury the killed crewmember.Lowell soon realizes that despite all his efforts, his forest is dying from unknown causes. In a desperate and rushed attempt to save the dome he badly damages Huey in an accident with one of the ship's buggies. Repairs are unsuccessful, the forest continues dying, and Lowell begins to come to realize that his mission to save the forest is bound to fail.After weeks alone in space, faint radio chatter is heard from a rescue party mounted from the Valley Forge's sister ship, the Berkshire, which has located the freighter after a long search. Finally able to communicate with Lowell, they inform him that they will be able to reach him within six hours he must jettison the dome but not detonate the nuclear charge, as it is too dark to do so safely.At this point it dawns upon Lowell that what was killing the forest was lack of sunlight. With little time to work, he activates a series of lights to simulate the sun and instructs his last active robot, Dewey, to "just maintain the forest."Realizing that his crime will be uncovered when the Berkshire finds him, Lowell jettisons the last dome to safety with the words "take good care of the forest, Dewey."With the Berkshire only two hours away from docking, Lowell and the damaged Huey sit facing each other while he arms the last of the six nuclear charges. As he prepares to destroy himself and preserve the last dome, Lowell says to Huey: "When I was a kid, I put a note into a bottle, and it had my name and address on it. And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anyone ever found it."With that, Lowell destroys the Valley Forge with the last of the onboard nuclear charges.The final scene is of a well-lit forest greenhouse drifting into space, tended by the sole remaining robot with a battered watering can. The scene is accompanied by Joan Baez's rendition of the film's theme song.

Tags: comedy, murder, cult, atmospheric, flashback, psychedelic, claustrophobic, inspiring

Review:
By far the best to come out of this program was 'Silent Running', an ecologically-minded 'message film' that stands out today as one of the truly great films of the science-fiction genre.Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, a futuristic Park Ranger minding Earth's last forests, sealed in gigantic domes aboard an equally gigantic freighter in space.
When ordered to destroy the domes and return home, Lowell is forced to choose between his crewmates and his beloved forests.The motif of a polluted, or simply, homogenized Earth, the ultimate triumph of human progress over nature and wilderness, is a standard theme of science fiction in the 20th century, and the film is not too different from many other films and episodic television programs seen since the postwar period.
His work here is still fresh and understated and certainly not of the over-the-top calibre, despite the insistances of some.The film possesses truly amazing visual images, from the spacecraft itself (the decommissioned and soon-to-be-scrapped aircraft carrier Valley Forge) to the domes (an aircraft hanger at Van Nuys Airport) to the unforgettable Drones, uncanny little robots designed around the amputee-actors that give them life.
The music, composed for the film by Peter Schickele (known internationally as P.D.Q. Bach), is by turns boldly triumphant, softly mournful, and is quite effective; some viewers may hate the vocal work of Joan Baez, but she is a logical choice for this production and time period.While many films have suffered since the release of 'Star Wars'(which is NOT, strictly speaking, science-fiction) due to dated visuals and obsolete effects technology, 'Silent Running' is still startlingly clean and visionary.
Director Douglas Trumbull and other SFX masters like John Dykstra and Richard Yuricich were chosen to work on "Star Wars" because of the state-of-the-arts special effects they did for "Silent Running".
Generally one would usually choose one of the high-tech, high-priced, superstar biggies.But I had to say "Silent Running." Oh, it has special effects all right, and I think they're good enough for the purpose; I certainly felt the cramped dimness of the station against the vast implacability of space.
Originally having seen this film years back, all I could remember were a few squatty little robots, some kind of personal crusade, and alot of tears from Bruce Dern.
Silent Running is by no means a great science fiction film; it is instead a simplistic story about one man's refusal to destroy that which is dear to his heart, against all odds.
What makes this film stand out from others, however, is a combination of great special effects (Trumbull was, of course, mentored by Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001), a good message and...
Made in the wake of both 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968; the ultimate space opera) and EASY RIDER (1969; the era's biggest 'sleeper' hit), SILENT RUNNING was given the go-ahead by the executives at Universal  in an attempt to recapture the momentum of those two films  who even allowed special-effects wizard Douglas Trumbull to make his directorial debut, and this with unprecedented artistic freedom.The film is a visual treat, featuring marvelous if unassuming special effects, though Trumbull manages to keep the technology firmly under control  it is all so simple but still very impressive (even more so in view of the budget).
The green forest and small animals also look great, and it's fun to see Lowell cultivate his private garden like a king, assisted by childlike drones who he lovingly names Huey, Dewey and Louie after the nephews of Donald Duck.Unfortunately, what the film wins in visuals, it loses in writing.
Even so, the visual style and the tragic ending are easily enough to make Silent Running a very watchable movie; it is also interesting as a product of its socially aware time..
Bruce Dern stars as an interstellar gardener (!) tasked with caring for a greenhouse full of the Earth's last plant life.The film that gradually unfolds (at a slow and stately pace) is both watchable and slightly twee.
Those quirky robots, which are nothing like robots in real life but which add humour and a touch of pathos in any case.SILENT RUNNING is considered by some to be a masterpiece, but I don't buy it; there just isn't enough substance to go along with all the effects and the heavy-handed message.
We all need to heed the message in this film and do everything we can to preserve this beautiful, amazing planet we live on.I have seen many movies throughout my life, but this one always stands out in my mind...I cannot forget it.Well done!.
At first Dern's character seemed over the top but decades later I believe that it's in fact right on.All of your other reviews are wonderful but I have one terrible confession to make:I am the only human being left alive on the Earth that still likes Joan Baez..
Okay, the plot has Freeman Lowel (Bruce Dern) taking care of a forest put in a dome in space because Earth had become inhabitable because of various ecological problems.
I suppose Joan Baez's musical score also contributes to making the viewer appreciate nature.The movie criticizes apathy about nature, and it does so in a way that reflects a time when protest cost too much but was not political suicide.
The two original Joan Baez songs are incredibly corny even for Baez, and Bruce Dern's botanist is not nearly as interesting or human as he should be, crying over his misdeeds while applauding himself for his ingenuity-- all to save one little piece of forest from Earth.
And of course I love 'Dark Star', which in retrospect almost seems like a parody of this movie at certain times - but for the life of me I cannot understand how so many people can be so fond of 'Silent Running', which to me is almost completely awful.I don't even know where to start listing its problems.
The lead character, who I suspect is supposed to come across as some sort messianic environmentalist hero, is clearly unhinged even in the earliest scenes, and coupled with Dern's excruciating over-acting, it's hard to feel any sympathy for him as he rants and raves at his crewmates who race over his garden in a scene that looks like it was heavily influenced by The Banana Splits Show.
id seen a few sci-fi films before it, but it was "running" that turned me on to deep space science fiction.
Silent Running is an obnoxious portrayal of a hippie who should never have been allowed on a space ship to begin with.The premise here has a lot of promise; had the characters been more believable or the film itself less...
Bruce Dern plays astronaut Freeman Lowell, who's been working on a project for the past eight years: maintain the last of the flora and fauna scavenged from a devastated Planet Earth, inside huge geodesic domes.
True enough that a story like this would seem like a pretty hard sell to studios, even 43 years ago, since there are no female characters and the main person isn't all that noble.Special effects veteran Douglas Trumbull, renowned for his work on "2001: A Space Odyssey", obviously has a real affinity for creating interesting environments and striking visuals.
The effects are nicely done, and those robot characters - referred to here as drones - do have some personality, and are highly endearing, if not as memorable as, say, R2-D2 from "Star Wars".The songs, by Joan Baez, and score, composed and conducted by Peter Schickele, are lovely.Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, and Jesse Vint are all fun as Lowells' younger, more carefree associates, but after a while only Dern remains as the sole human presence on screen.
The 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running is highly influential, but often overlooked film from period that produced a lot of great and bleak sci-fi.In the future all plant life on Earth has died and the last remaining plants are on a greenhouses in deep space.
But when they are ordered to destroy the greenhouses domes, Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) kills the other crew members and takes the station into deep space, committed to the ideal of protecting the plants and bringing them back to Earth.
Director Douglas Turnbull was also able to give the three drones plenty of personality and makes you care for them, from their looks to each other, there body language and actions.Silent Running is a very politically minded film about its themes about environmentalism, deforestation and protecting natural landscapes.
Even now we have this debate and back in the 70s the issues of environmentalism were less pronounced.Silent Running has a constantly bleak and sombre tone, both about in its grand themes and it the personal story about Lowell, all leading to a bittersweet ending.Turnball came from a special effects background and his experience shows on screen with fantastic, having great model work, art direction and costumes of the drones.
The only real criticism is the explosions are only shown as The music by Peter Schickele added to the atmosphere, from the soft piano to a moment with more grand moments when showing the exterior.It is clear how Silent Running influenced films like Moon and WALL-E with its story, style, themes and scenes.
In a future where all flora is extinct on Earth, an astronaut (Bruce Dern) is given orders to destroy the last of Earth's plant life being kept in a greenhouse on board a spacecraft.The biggest problem with this film is the music provided by Joan Baez.
Dern is the only dedicated member of the crew who will do whatever it takes to defy his orders and save nature from man's destruction, no matter what the cost.This is a good science fiction tale with a message, and this is brought home by two Joan Baez environmental songs which she sings over the soundtrack.
Young first-time director Douglas Trumbull was also the special effects maestro who worked on Kubrick's classic 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and he referred to SILENT RUNNING as "my first student project".
Instead I found it to be a trite, poorly executed film that took important topics and packaged them into one of the most drawn out movies ever made.The acting was the worst I've seen in a long time (and keep in mind this is after I saw Justin Timberlake in another film, so that's a real insult for Silent Running).
While the director attempted to make him sympathetic I found the opposite to be true; I grew to dislike him more and more as the movie went on.I know this might be a trivial observation but Bruce Dern's hair was so frizzy and poorly cut that it drove me to distraction (all the human characters were like this but the lead was the worst).
Silent Running features wonderful spaceship effects, some of the most interesting robots ever featured in an sf movie, a heartbreaking performance by Bruce Dern, and a fine soundtrack featuring some beautiful songs by Joan Baez...
Instead he keeps the battered droid with him to share his nuclear death.All-in-all a post flower power era movie that tries to point out our folly in neglecting the planet (but never shows the planet let alone just how bad things are supposed to be) and what one dedicated man tries to do to save it.In the end, all it makes me think about now is how being alone for too long in space can drive someone nuts.
Typical environmentalist - He thinks he knows about nature but is totally ignorant about simple stuff like seasons It's also a very manipulative film where the audience's sympathy is made to lie with three robots rather than - Freeman aside - the other human characters , the idea being that machines with human qualities are somehow better than real people .
Despite being a little dated and hokey at times, SILENT RUNNING was an enjoyable sci-fi film with some incredible visual effects.
Done on a fairly modest budget of just slightly over $1 million, SILENT RUNNING inevitably will seem dated to some after four decades; its message, however, remains all too timely.Set in a far distant future, where Earth's ecology has become a permanent train wreck, SILENT RUNNING generally takes place in the deepest and most isolated part of the Solar System onboard the American Airlines-sponsored deep-space freighter "Valley Forge", which houses three different types of what is left of Earth's greenery in geodesic domes, all of which are tended to by a very dedicated scientist (Bruce Dern).
But more importantly, the message being told in SILENT RUNNING remains timely to this day, and it is an important one: We humans need to preserve our planet, or else there will come a day when there won't be anything left here..
However, in this rare opportunity, Bruce Dern plays Freeman Lowell, the hero of the movie "Silent Running." The story takes place far off in the future, when Earth's remaining forests, wildlife and vegetation have been preserved in gigantic domed enclosures with the intent on one day 'reforesting' the planet.
One interesting message I think that is lost on many people is that technology is our ultimate hope of preserving the beauty of nature in all its forms; the final image of a robot tending to the forest is a metaphor for the entire film.To top it off, the acting and production design are extremely convincing considering the premise that the story asks the viewer to accept; it requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief, and the film pulls it off completely.
"Silent Running" a movie directed by special effects photographer Douglas Trumbull, produced in the season of 1970/1971 at some remote airfield hangar in Van Nuys, California and starring heart-out-acting Bruce Dern as an space traveling environmentalist, who suffers a nervous breakdown by killing off his entire crew in order to ignite robots to do their jobs and eventually sending his long-time cared for botanic forest under a dome into deep space before ending the mission with complete annihilation of the spaceship, which had been designed to escape Earth in such a desolated state that visuals from "Mad Max" (1979) to "The Road" (2009) pop into my mind, where it supposed to be believed that not even one leaf grows on a tree anymore.Director Douglas Trumbull puts his entire anger, disappointment and sorrow into a picture about the state of the America's union since 1865 with another war raging in Vietnam a hundred years later, while scrupulous industrialized capitalists earning for their retirement in the 1990s despite all warning signs of a polluted world in constant decay; a picture, which runs along within a brotherhood of dystopian Science-Fiction-Films of the early 1970s as "THX 1138" (1971), "The Omega Man" (1971) or "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) directed by Robert Wise, which is arguably the most accomplished one with an nerve-wrecking split-second key-to-key-hole finale.
All pictures utilized the elements of research, science and fictional story-telling to give their emotions of contemporary environmental as well as governmental issues a visual playground.If "Silent Running" can be watched closely enough, preferably in an auditorium with 70mm film print, it is possible to find ingredients of the later much more audience-attracting contents as "Star Wars" (1977) or "Close Encounters of The Third Kind" (1977), which serve to this day as role models of workday escaping motion pictures, where no controversy has been allowed, which may go beyond the choice between a soda drink and a cup of coffee toward the way back from the movie house to home to hit a midnight grocery store to indulge further into a synthetic food-chain and forget about the picture the next morning, yet wishing to watch it again a year later in hope of feeling the same escapology emotions to block out the core of a universal contradiction between nature versus industry.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC).
Secondly,the character of Freeman Lowell, played by Bruce Dern was very believable to me; I sometimes think I would do the same thing as he did to save the nature he so loved.
Silent Running, had I seen it in 1972, probably would have been totally engrossing and astounding as a piece of science fiction film-making that pushed the special effects limits just a nudge further from 2001, and gave a positive (if rather, ultimately, bittersweet) message about taking care of the planet.
Taking aside the pro-environment message of the film, it's a really excellent story about a man going over that certain edge, and being possessive of the very thing that should be shared with the world.It's a complex character that the writers, Cimino, Bochco and Washburn have created here with Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), so much so that he's both very complex and too simple-minded to figure on.
All he has, apparently, are three strange, almost kinda cute robots he names Huey, Dewey and (after the fact of losing him around Saturn's rings) Louie, who do tasks all over the ship.What the film lacks in directorial polish, therefore, is made-up in spades by the wonderful story and this character who, for 2/3 of the movie, is the only human we see on screen.
Douglas Trumbull, who was the special effects wizard on 2001 - A Space Odyssey, (and also directed the film) fails miserably in Silent Running.
Watched this after getting onto a scifi kick this past week and reading many recommendations for Silent Running, with a some reviewers stating its as good or even better than 2001.Bad move, this movie is cringy AF right from the opening credits.
Silent running is a movie set in 2008 or at least what people thought 2008 would be like.