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Silent Running, 1972
In a distant future, all flora and fauna on Earth has died out and will not re-propagate. Deep in space, Lowell (Bruce Dern) tends to several biomes in a specially designed spacecraft. He holds out hope that one day they will get the call to return home and help revive the planet. But when they do get a call, their direction is to destroy the biomes and return home. Distraught, Lowell turns against the other crew members, going to more and more extreme lengths to save his plants and animals.
Despite some vagueness in the overall premise, I found this to be an incredibly moving portrait of a kind of eco-despair and the way that wanting to take action to protect the environment sometimes comes at a cost that’s too much for someone’s conscience to bear.
It’s hard not to be very pessimistic about the way that our planet will be irrevocably changed over the next few decades. And what makes it very hard to handle is being surrounded by people who will not make the most basic, tiny changes to their lives to reduce the damage they do to the environment. You’d think that washing out a can instead of putting it in the garbage was some huge imposition. Some part of me knows that the world would be a better place without human beings, and yet the idea of all those lives being eradicated is painful. It’s a hard contradiction.
For me, this film captured the heart of that pain. Lowell can see the tragedy of losing the diversity of life on earth. He can see the beauty of the plants and the animals. For him, life is not a product, measured only by its use or its ability to be consumed. But the other men on the ship---standing in for a majority of humanity---has no appreciation or care for the plants and animals. They can have their needs met via simulated food. Why grow or raise food when it can be churned out by a machine? There is one crew-member who seems sympathetic and open to Lowell’s point of view, John (Cliff Potts), but even he seems more tolerant than in agreement. You can tell that he’s basically a nice guy, but he can’t really connect with Lowell’s point of view.
And so Lowell turns to violence. At first, it is an impulsive act to prevent one of the crew from putting a nuclear bomb into one of the biomes, but the circumstances force his hand. He must choose between the lives of his crew or the lives of the plants and the animals in the biome, and it’s ultimately not a very hard decision to make.
But just because the choice isn’t hard to make, doesn’t mean that it comes with no consequences. It can be true at the same time that Lowell made what he felt was the morally correct decision, and yet suffers in the knowledge that he has done harm, and specifically harm to people he cared about. Lowell took life to protect life, and a huge part of the film is him slowly coming to grips with the implications of that, both logistically and in terms of his own humanity.
The most pleasant surprise of the film is the squadron of artificially intelligent robot workers--nicknamed Huey, Dewey, and Luey by Lowell--that Lowell reprograms to help him maintain the biome. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how they got such amazing movement, but the answer was that they used actors with multiple amputations to work inside of the robots. There is something undeniably, for lack of a better word, human about the robots and the bond they forge with each other and with Lowell. Lowell attempts to use the robots to replace his lost crewmates, but in the end they are not sufficient substitutes.
I think that it would be easy to come into this film and feel that it isn’t really sci-fi, and I think that that’s not entirely wrong. Yes, the trappings are sci-fi, but this is really a drama set in space, using a futuristic setting to confront a specific strain of environmental anxiety. I found it incredibly effective, incredibly relatable, and incredibly sad. I thought that the ending was perfect and devastating.
If you don’t have some of those environmental anxieties, I’m sure this would be a long haul. For me, I connected very deeply with Lowel’’s emotions and his conflicting feelings. I’d often heard very middling things about this film, but I really liked it.
Silent Running, 1972
In a distant future, all flora and fauna on Earth has died out and will not re-propagate. Deep in space, Lowell (Bruce Dern) tends to several biomes in a specially designed spacecraft. He holds out hope that one day they will get the call to return home and help revive the planet. But when they do get a call, their direction is to destroy the biomes and return home. Distraught, Lowell turns against the other crew members, going to more and more extreme lengths to save his plants and animals.
Despite some vagueness in the overall premise, I found this to be an incredibly moving portrait of a kind of eco-despair and the way that wanting to take action to protect the environment sometimes comes at a cost that’s too much for someone’s conscience to bear.
It’s hard not to be very pessimistic about the way that our planet will be irrevocably changed over the next few decades. And what makes it very hard to handle is being surrounded by people who will not make the most basic, tiny changes to their lives to reduce the damage they do to the environment. You’d think that washing out a can instead of putting it in the garbage was some huge imposition. Some part of me knows that the world would be a better place without human beings, and yet the idea of all those lives being eradicated is painful. It’s a hard contradiction.
For me, this film captured the heart of that pain. Lowell can see the tragedy of losing the diversity of life on earth. He can see the beauty of the plants and the animals. For him, life is not a product, measured only by its use or its ability to be consumed. But the other men on the ship---standing in for a majority of humanity---has no appreciation or care for the plants and animals. They can have their needs met via simulated food. Why grow or raise food when it can be churned out by a machine? There is one crew-member who seems sympathetic and open to Lowell’s point of view, John (Cliff Potts), but even he seems more tolerant than in agreement. You can tell that he’s basically a nice guy, but he can’t really connect with Lowell’s point of view.
And so Lowell turns to violence. At first, it is an impulsive act to prevent one of the crew from putting a nuclear bomb into one of the biomes, but the circumstances force his hand. He must choose between the lives of his crew or the lives of the plants and the animals in the biome, and it’s ultimately not a very hard decision to make.
But just because the choice isn’t hard to make, doesn’t mean that it comes with no consequences. It can be true at the same time that Lowell made what he felt was the morally correct decision, and yet suffers in the knowledge that he has done harm, and specifically harm to people he cared about. Lowell took life to protect life, and a huge part of the film is him slowly coming to grips with the implications of that, both logistically and in terms of his own humanity.
The most pleasant surprise of the film is the squadron of artificially intelligent robot workers--nicknamed Huey, Dewey, and Luey by Lowell--that Lowell reprograms to help him maintain the biome. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how they got such amazing movement, but the answer was that they used actors with multiple amputations to work inside of the robots. There is something undeniably, for lack of a better word, human about the robots and the bond they forge with each other and with Lowell. Lowell attempts to use the robots to replace his lost crewmates, but in the end they are not sufficient substitutes.
I think that it would be easy to come into this film and feel that it isn’t really sci-fi, and I think that that’s not entirely wrong. Yes, the trappings are sci-fi, but this is really a drama set in space, using a futuristic setting to confront a specific strain of environmental anxiety. I found it incredibly effective, incredibly relatable, and incredibly sad. I thought that the ending was perfect and devastating.
If you don’t have some of those environmental anxieties, I’m sure this would be a long haul. For me, I connected very deeply with Lowel’’s emotions and his conflicting feelings. I’d often heard very middling things about this film, but I really liked it.