Silent Running

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Silent Running is a 1972 science fiction film directed by Douglas Trumbull and starring Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint. It was made with a very limited budget but has since achieved a cult following. The science and technology depicted in Silent Running are not always plausible, but Trumbull's special effects are on par with those he created for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the melancholy message is considered by some to be very powerful. The soundtrack contains two songs — "Silent Running" and "Rejoice in the Sun" — written by Peter Schickele and Diane Lampert and performed by Joan Baez.

[edit] Taglines

• Amazing companions on an incredible adventure... that journeys beyond imagination! (theatrical release)
• Earth's last battle will be fought in space. (2003 DVD release box art)

[edit] Plot summary

The movie depicts a future in which all plant life on Earth has been made extinct. Only a few specimens have been preserved just outside the orbit of Saturn, in enormous, greenhouse-like geodesic domes attached to a fleet of American Airlines "Space Freighters". Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is one of four crewmen aboard the Valley Forge, one of the 2,000 metre-long freighters, and is the resident botanist / agronomist / ecologist dedicated to preserving the forests for their eventual return to Earth, and the reforestation of the planet. In constant disagreement with his crewmates over the objective of their mission (they being more anxious to return to Earth after a one-year tour of duty), Lowell spends his time in the forests, cultivating the plant and animal life within them.

When orders come from Earth to jettison and destroy the domes (with nuclear charges), and return the freighters to commercial service, Lowell opts instead to save the last remaining forests in existence. After four of the six domes on the Valley Forge are jettisoned and destroyed, Lowell kills one of his crewmates in a struggle, which leaves his right leg seriously injured, but which prevents the destruction of one of the remaining domes. Lowell then manages to trap the other two crewmen in the other remaing dome, which he then jettisons and destroys. Enlisting the aid of the ship's three service robots (drones), Lowell stages a fake premature dome detonation and a cargo bay explosion as a ruse, and sends the Valley Forge careening away from the space freighter fleet, towards Saturn, in an attempt to hijack the ship and flee with the last forest dome. Injured and alone with the three drones, Lowell reprograms them to perform surgery on his leg.

Still in communication with the rest of the fleet, Lowell is informed that the Valley Forge is on a collision course with Saturn's rings, and there is nothing he can do to stop the catastrophic event. The ship will likely be destroyed. With communications failing due to the distance now between the Valley Forge and the rest of the fleet, the ship passes through the rings of Saturn. The three drones are outside the ship on maintenance duty, when Drone 3 is blown away from the ship, leaving two remaining drones. The ship, and the precious dome, emerge undamaged on the other side of the rings.

Totally alone, Lowell and the drones set out into deep space, away from the fleet, on a quest to maintain the forest. During the trip, Lowell befriends the drones, renaming them Huey, Dewey and Louie (Drone 02, 01 and in absence 03 respectively), teaching them to plant trees and play poker (in a memorable scene). However, Lowell's conscience sets in, as he instructs the drones to bury the crewman he killed in the dome.

With thoughts of the human toll he has taken to save the last forest, Lowell is horrified when he realises that his forest is dying from some unknown cause. Desperate, he rushes to the dome, badly damaging Huey in an accident with one of the ship's buggies. Repairs are unsuccessful, the forest is dying, and Lowell begins to come to the unsettling conclusion that his mission to save the forest has failed.

After weeks alone in space, faint radio chatter is heard from a rescue party mounted from the Valley Forge's sister ship, the Berkshire, which has located the freighter after a long search. Finally able to communicate with Lowell, they inform him that they will be able to reach him within six hours — he must jettison the dome — but not detonate the nuclear charge, as it is too dark to do so safely. Perhaps somewhat belatedly, given his botanical background, Lowell now realises that what was killing the forest was the lack of sunlight. With little time to work, he wires up several banks of grow lights to simulate sunlight, and instructs the last healthy drone, Dewey, to "just maintain the forest." Realising that his crime will be uncovered when the Berkshire finds an undamaged ship and a buried crewman, Lowell jettisons the last dome to safety with the words "take good care of the forest, Dewey."

With the Berkshire only two hours away from docking, Lowell and the damaged Huey are sitting down, facing each other, while Lowell arms the last of the six nuclear charges. Prepared to destroy himself to atone for his crime, and ensure the preservation of the last dome, Lowell says to Huey "When I was a kid, I put a note into a bottle, and it had my name and address on it. And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anyone ever found it." With that, Lowell destroys the Valley Forge with the last of the onboard nuclear charges.

The final, poignant scene is of a well-lit forest greenhouse drifting into space, tended by the sole remaining drone with a battered watering can, with a musical accompaniment from Joan Baez.

[edit] Production

In an interview with Starlog magazine in the late 1970s, Douglas Trumbull revealed that the plot of the movie in the original version of the script was quite a bit different from what was actually filmed. In this version, the Space Freighters were on permanent duty carrying biological domes. When they're finally told to blow the domes and return to earth, it is because the freighters are going to be scrapped.

The Freeman Lowell character in this version was an older, more curmudgeonly man who simply doesn't want to return to earth and forced into retirement, so he steals the Valley Forge, "Shoots the rapids" through Saturn's rings to make it look like his ship is destroyed, and heads off into deep space. As in the filmed version, he reprograms the robots for some companionship, and the subplot involving the plants dying due to a lack of light were involved, but his main interest in the plants was simply as a means of extending his limited food supplies on the ship. In the second half of the film, he receives a signal which he realizes is from an alien ship passing through the solar system, and decides to approach it—humanity's first contact with aliens around the same time, his superiors on earth have realized what he did, and are trying to re-capture the ship.

The last act of the movie was to have been a race against time, with Lowell trying to contact the aliens, and the recovery force trying to re-take the ship. Finally, in desperation, Lowell detaches one of the domes with one of the robots aboard only seconds before he's killed by the forces that have boarded the Valley Forge. The dome drifts off into deep space, where it's spotted by the as-yet-unseen aliens, who board it and find the robot. The robot, unsure what to do, pulls out a snapshot of itself, the other two robots, and Freeman Lowell taken earlier in the film, a "Family Portrait" after a fashion, and shows it to the aliens, who look at it and the robot confusedly, and there the film ends.

Trumbull had been involved with creating effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Director Stanley Kubrick wanted the "Stargate" sequence of that film to be centered around Saturn, but there were technical difficulties in getting the special effects for this sequence finished in the limited time frame. The Saturn idea was scrapped, and Kubrick substituted Jupiter instead. Trumbull perfected the sequence after production, and it was recreated for Saturn in Silent Running.

The interiors were filmed aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge (CV-45), which was docked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in Long Beach, California. Shortly after filming was completed, the carrier was scrapped. The forest environments were originally intended to be filmed in the Mitchell Park Domes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but the production budget forced the sequences to be shot in a newly-completed aircraft hangar in Van Nuys, California. Film Director Douglas Trumbull stated on the commentary accompanying the DVD release of the science fiction classic, that the geodesic domes containing the last forests of Earth's future on the spaceship Valley Forge were also based on the Missouri Botanical Garden Climatron dome.

There are three freighters seen in the film: they are the Valley Forge, the Berkshire and the Sequoia. Five other ships that carried domes are also named, but do not appear on screen — they are the Yellowstone, Acadia, Blue Ridge, Glacier and Mojave.

Each ship features a designation on the hull, which notes the area from which some of the flora and fauna samples were taken. The Valley Forge is listed as "Bahia Honda Subtropical," indicating at least some specimens were taken from this area of the Florida Keys. The model of the Valley Forge Space Freighter was 26 feet (8 m) long, and took six months to build from a combination of custom castings and the contents of approximately 800 prefabricated model aircraft or tank kits. After filming was completed, American Airlines expressed an interest in sending the model on the tour circuit, but this was not feasible due to the fragile nature of the model (in fact, during filming, pieces of the model kept falling away). The ship was subsequently disassembled. Several pieces, including the domes, wound up in the hands of collectors, but the entire ship was destroyed after several years sitting in a storage bin.

In an interesting parallel to the events of the film, only one dome is known to have survived, and now rests in the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington. The model of the Valley Forge space freighter was put into Douglas Trumbull's personal storage facility, where it sat for several years before being demolished (by chain saw), and discarded. According to Trumbull, the model pieces now rest in a public landfill near the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California.

The three "drones" were played by four double-amputees, an idea inspired by Johnny Eck. The "drone suits" were all prototypes, and each suit was custom tailored to the amputee operator inside^{[citation needed]} (explaining the differences from drone to drone). The suits weighed 20 pounds (9 kg) each.

[edit] Influences in other works

The original Battlestar Galactica series used stock footage of the space freighters in several episodes. On that show, they were called "Agro Ships," and were the source of all the food in the rag-tag fleet. Initially there were three of them, but two were destroyed by the Cylons. In the current incarnation of Galactica, there is one "Botanical Cruiser" in the fleet, which is of a different, but clearly derivative design.

Joel Hodgson has admitted the film was a key influence in the premise of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Referred to heavily in John Hodgman's compendium of fictional trivia, The Areas of My Expertise, the film is cited satirically as the source of numerous slang terms used by submariners (such as "Dern", to describe someone who embodies actor Bruce Dern's emotional performance in the film).

Doug Naylor, Rob Grant and Ed Bye cite Silent Running as an inspiration for the British science fiction television series of the 1980s and 1990s, Red Dwarf.

The "oxygen garden" in the 2007 film Sunshine was directly inspired by the forest domes in Silent Running.^[1]

[edit] DVD release

The UK DVD of Silent Running is designated as a U certificate, ie, for universal viewing, even though there is one physical on-screen murder and the mild expletive 'crap' is used on several occasions.

[edit] See also

• The article "Special Effects In The Movies" in the 1974 Encyclopedia Britannica "Yearbook of Science and the Future" features detailed information about the production of this film.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Silent Running at the Internet Movie Database
• Sci-Fi Movie website analysisda:Silent Running

de:Lautlos im Weltraum es:Naves misteriosas fr:Silent Running ja:サイレント・ランニング ru:Молчаливый бег (фильм)