In space, no one can hear you jog, trot and, most especially, run.
That’s actually pretty good, because crazed environmental astronaut Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) goes on the lam — the space-lam, that is — into the farthest reaches of the universe, all to protect his beloved plants, including flowers, shrubs and all the cute little insects and animals living in and around them. He’s silently running, see?
With Earth’s precious resources pretty much dead, most of humanity is encased in domes and that can’t be too fun to hang out in. On a massive spaceship carrying one of the few living gardens, Lowell — and a trio of irresponsible living bodies, natch — are in outer space, testing various theories about plant growth or something to that effect.
However, mission control eventually turns tail and decides to blow up the whole project for the sake of capitalism. Lowell goes suitably nuts and kills off his trio of shipmates — thank you, by the way — and heads out into deep space with his newly reprogrammed robot pals in order to save the lives of the remaining plants.
As simplistic as ’70s sci-fi can be, Silent Running is a strange amalgam of subgenres, from, of course, the environmental fear film to a wacky robots flick, but it mostly works thanks to a delightfully off-kilter Dern; in every scene, he looks close to strangling someone, but hopefully not director Douglas Trumbull, who gives the sci-fi film his special-effects all.
Like the spaceship in the film, in the end, Silent Running just explodes under the weight of its own self-importance, something that is, by me, sorely missed in many prophetic science-fiction films, the Joan Baez soundtrack definitely included. —Louis Fowler