Silent Running
1972
***
Director: Douglas Trumbull
Cast: Bruce Dern, Ron Rifkin, Cliff Potts, Jesse Vint, Joseph Campanella
In the future Earth can no longer sustain vegetation and the last remaining trees and plants have been preserved into floating greenhouses in space. When the order arrives to destroy the nature reserves, one of the crew members is determined to keep the samples alive, even if it means killing fellow human beings. This thinking man's science fiction film and its ecological themes and humanised robots have clearly influenced numerous subsequent works in the genre. The film is short and captivating but its age shows in places, i.e. every time Joan Baez starts singing on the soundtrack. The pacing is also a bit slow, even if it is a meditation on loneliness. Bruce Dern seems completely false at first, but utterly compelling once he's left alone with his solitude.
