Silent Running

Saw Silent Running this evening with N and M. I had seen the second half of it two or three times before, initially many many years ago on HBO. Jim bringing it up during a conversation at Arcus last month made me want to see it again. So, we gave it a place among this week's rentals from City Video.

I had thought that the film was just about a guy who had somehow gotten marooned on a big ol' spaceship that was towing a forest under a geodesic dome, and spent a lot of time watering the plants, feeding the bunnies, and talking to his silent, goofy-looking robot companions. I loved all this imagery, when I was a little kid. It seemed the life for me.

But I had never seen the setup, before last night: the guy is named Freeman (gag), and the ship was one of several, charged with maintaining Earth's last forests in space until the planet cleaned itself up a bit. However, the ships receive an order to scuttle the trees and return to Earth, so that they can be pressed into commercial service. The guy's tree-hating shipmates (they're earlier seen whoopingly driving their dune buggies through Freeman's cantaloupe patch) think this is a wonderful idea, and gleefully start nuking the domes, until Freeman murders them all (one via shovel-assisted strangulation, the other two by trapping them on a doomed dome) and then steals the ship, with one dome left.

Hmm. Suddenly I cannot empathize with the main character very much. (Also, he clearly has a beard in the version of the film stored in my memory, and clearly does not in the real version. This is a lesser point, though.)

Things I didn't notice when I was younger: One of the plot complications involves Freeman -- who at the start of the film states that he's the best forest caretaker in the whole world -- not realizing that plants need sunlight, and so he reacts with confusion when the forest starts to turn brown after he hides for several days on the dark side of Saturn.

Which leads one to ask: what in tarnation was the fleet doing around Saturn? Why weren't they just killing time in Earth (or maybe Lunar) orbit? Holy moley.

I also didn't realize how very goofy indeed the robots are. They waddle about on little legs, plainly housing tiny human actors (as it turns out, each one had a bilateral amputee stuffed into it, according to the IMDB). This lent them slightly more emotiveness than an R2D2-like scheme, but all I could think about was how uncomfortable the actors must have been.

Lastly, the music, dear god, the music. At no fewer than three points a warble-voiced earth-mother bursts into in the soundtrack to belt out songs that go something like this:

Children running wiiiild in the fooooreeeeest
Soil beneath their tooooes and on their haaaaaaaands
In the suuuuun, in the suuuuuun

This caused M's head to explode, and she started singing likewise for the remainder of the evening, chronicling her housemates' activities:

Nooooah running wiiiild from the baaaathroooom
Heee drinks iced tea beacuase it taaaaastes gooooood
In the suuuuuuuun, in the suuuuuuun

Despite all that, I still identified the bits I liked (the silent parts alluded to by the title) and smiled. It's not a terrible movie.

Coat Dream

( Gag, another dream (and clothing) description )