RogerBW's Blog

Logan's Run (1976) 10 September 2025

1976 science fiction, dir. Michael Anderson, Michael York, Jenny Agutter: IMDb / allmovie. In the city, everyone accepts that they will die at age 30; or they run, and are hunted down and killed. But the central computer is determined to find and destroy the Sanctuary that they're running to.

This is loosely based on the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, which is straightforward generation panic: if we don't control These Kids Today, who knows what they may get up to? As with so many of these things, it's purest projection: we'd screw Them over if we could get away with it, so obviously They would do the same to us.

The film manages to be rather more fun, starting with some lovely if very obvious models of the "outside" of the city. (Rainbow tape had just been invented, and was used with enthusiasm, like bubble wrap in the previous year's Doctor Who story "The Ark in Space".) And it's clear that most of the inhabitants of the city are quite happy to eat, drink and be merry until it's time to die—or, in theory, have a small change of "renewal" in a kind of public auto-da-fé. It's never made clear, at least to me, whether the audience at these things realises that most people are dying but thinks there might be a tiny chance that someone would survive, or whether there's some metaphysical angle that suggests that former inhabitants of the exploding bodies are being "renewed" in some way into new individuals.

And you only have to scratch the whole setup a little to see that it makes no sense (because its original made no sense, it was just These Kids). If the reason for the age limit is, as given, preservation of the city's limited resources, why not simply allow people to leave as long as they never come back? Why is the central computer so obsessed with finding and destroying the rumoured "Sanctuary"?

Anyway, Logan is a Sandman, one of the cop-alikes (ASAB, and he certainly is) who chase down old people who don't turn themselves in. His visible age indicator is shifted to 30 so that the underground railway will take him in… and here's where I think Michael York's acting gets too subtle for his character's good. At the beginning, Logan's happy to go on this undercover mission, with only a slight reservation that the palm crystal will be turned back to his real age afterwards, won't it? By the end, of course, he's happily on Team Live As Long As You Can. So there really ought to be a moment when he's visibly changed his mind… but there never quite is. Even quite late in the narrative, he might still be a loyal undercover cop.

Most of the body of the film is effectively a picareseque, wandering through the outskirts of the City (and finding out what happened to most if not all of the other runners who tried to get to Sanctuary), and ultimately learning that this is indeed an Earth after a catastrophic war, though it's recovering nicely in the absence of humans.

And then it's back to the city to report in and/or sneak more people out, and conveniently the computer blows up in traditional style when confronted with evidence that Sanctuary does not in fact exist. At which point it all strikes me as a bit like the end of Snowpiercer: yeah, your dystopia is gone, but now you have neither a technological infrastructure nor wilderness survival skills. A lot of you are going to die. Soon.

Hey ho, I think that of the three 1970s dystopian SF films we watched as a block, this is the one that's best at being entertaining; it completely drops the generation-war rhetoric of the book and simply sets out to let decent actors have fun on some truly beautiful sets.

There was briefly a television spinoff, in which Logan becomes a wanderer, searching for Sanctuary while solving the local problem of the week. I have very vague memories of this being on television. But of course Star Wars came along and destroyed the stodgy old concept of having ideas in visual SF; and as a reader, I think ideas work better in books than in films where the thinky bits can too readily harm the entertainment side of things.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.

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