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.