‘Silent Running’ revisited

Eco-fascists in spaaaace

Certain films capture your heart at 15, but how awkward and old-fashioned would they make you feel if you watched them with a teenager now? And what horrifying things might they reveal about the person you once were? Avoid embarrassment, and the waste of £1.49 in rental fees, by letting us take the risk on your behalf.

Silent Running (1972)

Elevator Pitch

A polluted Earth’s last forests have been preserved by sending them off into space, where only Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) seems to care about them. When the order comes to destroy them, Lowell murders his crew mates instead and sets off towards Saturn with just three robots for company: Huey, Dewey and Louie. He cannot escape justice, however, and finally commits suicide with a nuclear bomb, leaving one forest to be cared for by Dewey as it drifts through the cosmos.

Silent Running was the directorial debut of Douglas Trumbull, who worked on the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), most relevantly on a sequence involving the planet Saturn. That sequence ended up being cut, but Trumbull continued working on the effects and they became the cornerstone of this film.

I probably first saw Silent Running on BBC1 on the evening of Tuesday, 27th December, 1977 (thanks, BBC Genome!). The date is important. 1977: the year of Star Wars. I was eight years old, had had my mind blown, and was primed for anything featuring scale model spaceships cobbled together out of old Airfix kits. Silent Running lodged hard in my memory. Partly because the spaceships were fantastic; but mostly because of the unbearably cute ‘drones’, the robots Freeman Lowell nicknames Huey, Dewey and Louie after Donald Duck’s nephews. The drones were portrayed by amputee actors who used their hands as the robots’ feet and performed the wordless parts with pantomime expressiveness.

It’s interesting, then, that Silent Running — as a creative run-off from 2001 — is very much from a world before Star Wars. Its origins are obvious in its desire to be a film of ideas as much as a film of special effects. In Star Wars George Lucas was essentially adapting Flash Gordon, making a sci-fi adventure that owed more to swashbuckling romances like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) than it did to hard science depictions of space travel. Trumbull isn’t interested in laser swords and space dogfights; he wants to dramatise ‘70s ecological themes of pollution and deforestation.

Star Wars was the beginning of the popularising of science fiction. Fifty years later sci-fi is arguably the most successful genre in mainstream culture, something that can be dated to the release of the Star Wars prequels in 1999. But Silent Running is from a time when science-fiction was predominantly a low-budget, outsider-art genre, beloved of freaks and nerds. It is an odd little film stuffed with precisely the sort of peculiar imagery that lodges in an eight-year-old’s head.

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Delights

There is a term of art in visual effects that particularly delights me: ‘greebling’. It means the addition of meaningless surface elements to models, usually models of spaceships: cables, boxes, random bits of pipework. (It is not necessarily a reference to Peter Cook, who had a character called Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling; but it captures how Cook would monologue by piling absurd detail upon absurd detail.) This was traditionally done by buying up model kits of armoured transports, battleships and steam engines, and raiding them for extra little knobbly bits that could be glued onto the outside of the Millennium Falcon or Battlestar Galactica or, in the case of Silent Running, the American Airlines spaceship ‘The Valley Forge’. The ultimate effect was so delightful that the real American Airlines wanted to take the model on tour to show it off (sadly, all that greebling was too fragile to be moved). But the real delight lies in the fact that the spaceship was identified as belonging to American Airlines at all.

In this it again follows 2001, in which scientist Heywood Floyd travels in an Pan-Am shuttle to a space station that has a Howard Johnson hotel onboard. This integration of real world brands into the science fiction milieu is an attempt to add veracity, to place us in a lived future. Silent Running goes further than 2001, in fact, because where the latter’s interiors were vacuum packed and gleaming white, Silent Running was filmed on board a decommissioned aircraft carrier, all exposed pipework and taped up repairs.

This gives the spaceship an interior as well as an exterior greebling, the feel of a real, practical environment. I can’t think of an earlier film that takes this approach, but it was quickly picked up. It can be seen in Star Wars itself and then in Ridley Scott’s pair of sci-fi masterpieces, the truckers-in-space aesthetic of Alien (1979) and the dystopian cityscapes of Blade Runner (1982). It is now the convention for sci-fi interiors. Only the sinister intergalactic empires have cleaners.

Discomforts

The key way in which Silent Running differs from 2001 is in not being very good. This was Douglas Trumbull’s directorial debut, and it shows. It is very much a movie made by a visual effects director, with lots of long shots of beautiful models followed by incoherent visual storytelling when it comes to the actual characters.

It’s not helped by a questionable script, despite the presence of TV legend Steve ‘Hill Street Blues’ Bochco and director Michael Cimino on the writing roster. The big twist of the movie is that Freeman Lowell — who reads about plants, cares for plants, is so obsessed with plants that he murders his fellow humans to save them — has forgotten that they need sunlight to grow. This is not a good twist. Bruce Dern is required to do an awful lot of wild-eyed monologuing to various pot plants and robots, especially after he has put a spade through all other potential interlocutors. And the less said about Joan Baez’s singing, the better.

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So, can we show it to the kids?

If you think they can stand listening to Joan Baez warbling over footage of Bruce Dern in a homespun kaftan watching bunnies frolic in a geodesic dome in orbit round Saturn: why not? But this doesn’t seem likely, does it? There’s nothing essentially offensive in the film (murder apart). But in my experience, children of the twenty-first century are slightly impatient with the indulgences and longueurs of twentieth century cinema.

To be fair: while the twist is laughable and the dialogue whiffy, the core theme — the balance between human and ecological interests — is as relevant as it’s ever been. The forests have only been preserved through a kind of corporate greenwashing. They are scheduled to be destroyed solely because public interest has waned. The film is emphatic that Lowell’s murders are unforgivable, that he has tainted his outer space Eden. His ranting about how people need to stop eating ultra-processed foods becomes somewhat redundant when he starts killing people to preserve his allotment. 

For once there might be an argument for remaking a ‘70s sci-fi movie in the 21st century. Just as long as we keep the robots.

Is it as good as you remember?

Well, no, but what did I remember? The sweet little drones; the big greebly ships; the strange, doomed hippyish atmosphere. I saw it first through a Christmas haze of Turkish Delight and new Action Man accessories, and probably not again until it was shown on TV in the early ‘90s. And until that point all I had was a synopsis in Halliwell's Film Guide and some photos of the special effects production in Starlog magazine.

Of course, this happens a lot in childhood, when you are less in charge of what you’re watching; and it happened even more in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when we were all at the mercy of three channel schedulers who could shove on any old film on the telly on a Christmas afternoon, just as long as it contained no swearing, little nudity and not too much violence. With no opportunity to rewatch films, discover more about them, or, in many cases, find out what they were actually called, you were left with fragmentary but indelible images: the horrible pig-hybrid from O Lucky Man! (1973), the crash scene from The Appointment (1981), the ancient Martians hopping about in Quatermass and The Pit (1967).

You had the impression that you were only glimpsing things through a screen darkly; that there was, beyond your vision, a whole unseen world. Unlike the twenty-first century experience of being deluged with undifferentiated ‘content’ (itself quickly being drowned in AI slop), there was the sense of things being hidden, cultural objects yet to be discovered. That somewhere out there, there were undiscovered wonders and overlooked oddities and, perhaps, a forest in orbit around Saturn, tended only by a lonely robot with a dented child’s watering can.

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For further televisual glimpses of strange movies, there’s always Hammer Horror: