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
chance 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.