In short: Silent Running (1972)

The Future™. All plant life on Earth has been destroyed, or at least all forests have. The planet’s last bits of flora are dragged through space in hydroponic constructs. The mission is manned by hippie biologist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) and three jocks, for some reason. When mission control orders the astronauts to nuke the space greenhouses and return home, Lowell kills his plant-hating non-colleagues, fakes an accident, and plans on spending the rest of his life tending to plants, the fuzzy animals that came with the forest and the ship’s robot drones. Obviously things are not going to go that easily.

There are the bones of a really great, ecologically conscious, science fiction movie hidden somewhere inside this first of only two long-form directing credits of special effects master Douglas Trumbull, but they are buried under so much guff and grating nonsense. The script – credited to Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino and Steven Bochco, which is quite the mix – suffers from being so focussed on being “an ecological fable” – or something equally on the nose – it forgets to ground what it actually wants to say in any kind of recognizable reality. Thus, Silent Running is full of badly thought-through conceits and implausibilities.

Like: how is humanity still a going concern in its old-fashioned nature-destroying capitalist ways when all plant life on Earth has died? What’s the artificial food made of (is it Soylent Green?), or for that matter, how do they still breathe on Earth? How come crack biologist Lowell doesn’t know that plants need sunlight? Why nuke the greenhouses instead of just letting them drift? Why is there only a single biologist on board? Clearly, all these questions can be disregarded and answers replaced by yet another long rant of Lowell about Man’s nature-hating ways and that terrible radio-ready folk ballad that’s torturing our ears whenever Lowell feels particularly sad (so very regularly) and even a perfectly game Bruce Dern can’t express all of the bathos needed.

There’s just so little film here, anyway: the narrative never grips one with interesting questions or suspense, Lowell’s character arc simply doesn’t work, and once the ship is drifting through space, that’s what the narrative does as well. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the film had something interesting to say philosophically, spiritually, or psychologically beyond: destroying nature is bad. Which is rather too obvious to be worth a full movie, when that’s all you’ve got to say about it.