RogerBW's Blog

Silent Running (1972) 05 September 2025

1972 science fiction, dir. Douglas Trumbull, Bruce Dern: IMDb / allmovie. The last of the wilderness is preserved in space… but it isn't needed any more.

This film's genesis was some years earlier, when Trumbull planned a Saturn flyby as one of the big set pieces for 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was too expensive, so Kubrick shifted the mission target to Jupiter, but Trumbull took his idea away and a few years later set out to direct, and to re-use the idea…

Part of the problem here, though, is that Trumbull not only cares about his message, but is determined to rub it in. When a film is more message than character or plot, for me, I get fed up with it, and my contrary mind starts looking for excuses for the opposite of the message to be valid. Or just plot holes.

For example, you've got these isolated wilderness preserves, for (mumble mumble) reasons. Why put them in space? Why not on Earth, where the cost of maintaining whatever environmental inputs they need would be vastly less? Or even in Earth orbit? Clearly, off-world settlements must exist, or there wouldn't be space freighters to be borrowed for the project, but we never get any sense of anyone living anywhere except Earth. For that matter, when you decide to abandon them, why blow them up (creating an orbital débris hazard for anyone who wants to use that space) rather than abandoning them or dropping them into Saturn's atmosphere?

Of course we know why. It's so that we can have film of the cute forest animals that are about to die in a nuclear fireball, while the three jumpsuit guys laugh about it and the robed Jesus guy objects. (They have, in theory, names, but really, why bother?)

I know cubes are boring and familiar, but there is actually a reason why cargo containers tend to be cuboid. Most polyhedra don't tesselate, so packing becomes inefficient—and these truncated tetrahedra, weird and futuristic as they certainly look, are blatantly inefficient. You just have to look at the piles to see the gaps between them… (Bizarrely, the triakis truncated tetrahedron looks at least as weird and can be packed efficiently.)

And, of course, famously, even the Last Best Botanist doesn't remember that plants do actually need sunlight to grow. (Though at 9.5AU, you'd get about 1/90 of the insolation, but that's still an overcast midday relative to a bright midday; I don't think the effects on the plants would be as quick as they're shown.)

Music by Joan Baez and Peter Schickele (P D Q Bach)! How could they make it boring?

I'm being unfair, probably, but if you want your film to convey a message rather than just express one it has to entertain too. The big conversation among the crew feels scripted (which of course it is) when it should feel like people genuinely arguing from the gut. Clearly people on Earth are still alive without the forests, somehow, so maybe we could talk about that?

But the visuals, I have to say, are great. The spaceship interiors were shot aboard USS Valley Forge, an Essex-class carrier converted to an LPH and about to be scrapped. (The film crew were allowed to do anything they liked to the ship as long as they didn't remove any metal.) The exteriors are classic Trumbull model work. When a dome is jettisoned, we see flakes of débris spinning away from the connection, in a way that would have been familiar to any viewer who'd seem footage of the Apollo missions.

And the drones are the things I remembered most from seeing this when I was young. They're perhaps not desperately practical designs given that they can't reach up to things that the crew can, but they're both visually appealing and a fine piece of prop design: they were operated from inside by bilateral amputees.

Ths film was a critical success; I suspect they were startled by a science fiction film having something to day beyond "aliens good" (1960s) or "aliens bad" (1950s). But it was a box-office failure, in spite of its minimal budget; I suspect that this was in large part not due to any innate characteristics of the film, which probably hit better in the zeitgeist of the run-up to the 1973 oil crisis than now when we all know about the problem but there are very well-funded efforts to make sure nothing effective is done about it, but rather because the studio spent nothing on publicity in an "experiment" to see if word of mouth alone could bring in the viewers to first-run showings. Turned out it couldn't.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

Add A Comment

Your Name
Your Email
Your Comment

Note that I will only approve comments that relate to the blog post itself, not ones that relate only to previous comments. This is to ensure that the blog remains outside the scope of the UK's Online Safety Act (2023).

Your submission will be ignored if any field is left blank, but your email address will not be displayed. Comments will be processed through markdown.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2300ad 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech base commerce battletech bayern beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime crystal cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter disaster doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 essen 2024 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror horrorm science fiction hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2021 hugo 2022 hugo 2023 hugo 2024 hugo 2025 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow openscad opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast poetry politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant review reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 typst vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1