Forgotten Film Friday (on a Saturday): Silent Running

A retrospective by Brooks Rich

I love '70s science fiction. It's a style of the genre that still shows up occasionally in films like Blade Runner 2049 and Under the Skin but science fiction is now usually more in line with Stars Wars. Though Star Wars really is slow compared to modern science fiction. Dune this year was more in line with '70s science fiction but still not the pacing of today's film, one of my favorite science fiction films of all time.

Bruce Dern is Freeman Lowell, a botanist in charge of a variety of planet life on a space ship. Plant life on Earth is becoming extinct and so ships are sent off with plant specimens to repopulate the earth with our leafy friends. And well I don't want to say anything else. This film is a wonderful mystery revealed slowly to us. We have Bruce Dern and his robot friends. That's it.

This film is glacially paced sometime. The '70s was all about that. Films took their time. Science fiction went from cheesy over the top movies in the fifties, stuff like It Conquered the World and Earth vs. the Saucers, to more quiet and thoughtful films like 2001 and the original Solaris. Sure we had some masterpieces in the genre during that early time, The Day The Earth Stood Still is one of the greatest films ever made.

This is not a big epic space epic. Bruce Dern isn't fighting off an alien, or saving a princess from a big scary villain voiced by James Earl Jones or even reaching the next step of human evolution in the cosmos. He's tending to his plants and hanging out with his robot friends. No they also don't riff on bad movies. Dern is the star of this movie, obviously he's really the only human character, giving what might still be the best performance of his career. He makes me feel for him and sympathize with Freeman. We understand where he's coming from and why he's in the situation he finds himself in. Also depending on your environmental views, you might even agree with him.

This one is pretty readily available to rent and the price won't break the bank. Check it out.

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