Silent Running

Silent Running is a science fiction movie of 1972, directed by Douglas Trumbull and starring Bruce Dern as the protagonist Freeman Lowell. It was made with a very limited budget and has since achieved something of a cult film following.

The movie depicts a grim future, in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, and only a few specimens have been preserved in greenhouse-like domes attached to a fleet of three spaceships which are traveling near Saturn, but time may also be running out for these survivors. Lowell, a crewmember aboard one of the ships, is in constant disagreement with his other, human crewmates, who are anxious to return to a bleak and deforested yet familiar Earth. Lowell does however have better companionship with humanlike drones which are also aboard the ships.

The science and technology depicted in the film is not always plausible, and Trumbull's special effects (he had a more expansive budget in Blade Runner) are low quality even by the standards of the time, but the melancholy message is powerful.

The soundtrack songs are performed by Joan Baez.

The cult show "Mystery Science Theater 3000" began as a spoof of Silent Running.

When orders come from Earth to jettison the domes that contain the plants, blow each of them up with nuclear explosions and return, Freeman Lowell decides it is his mission to save the plants on his ship. Each ship carries six domes. When one of his crewmates comes to set a bomb in Lowell's forest Lowell strangles him with the handle of his shovel. In the struggle Lowell's right leg is injured. He then traps the other two crewmates in one of the domes that is about to be jettisoned, and they are killed when Lowell releases the dome and blows it up. Lowell then overrides the programming of the service drones so they can perform surgery on his leg, and renames them Huey, Dewey and Louie.

They fly through the rings of Saturn. The three drones are outside the ship; Louie's leg gets stuck and he is ultimately blown away from the ship due to the turbulence of the rings. Huey is badly damaged in an accident when Lowell runs into it with one of the ships buggies. Lowell eventually leaves Dewey in charge of the last dome. The final, poignant scene is of the forest greenhouse tended by the sole remaining robot, with a battered watering can.

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