Silent Running

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Silent Running is a 1971 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 , and the melancholy message is powerful. Unusual for a science fiction film, the soundtrack contains two songs — "Silent Running" and "Rejoice in the Sun" — written by Peter Schickele and Diane Lampert and performed by Joan Baez.

Story

The movie depicts a future in which all plant life on Earth has been made extinct, and only a few specimens have been preserved in large, greenhouse-like geodesic domes attached to a fleet of American Airlines "Space Freighters" positioned just outside the orbit of Saturn. Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is part of the four person crew aboard the Valley Forge, one of the 2,000 foot-long freighters, and is the resident botanist / 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.

The planet Saturn and the Valley Forge

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 him seriously injured), and manages to trap the other two crew members in a dome that he 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 (an old submarine trick called "silent running"), and sends the Valley Forge careening away from the space freighter fleet, towards Saturn, in an attempt to 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.

Detail close-up shot of the forest domes on the 26 foot-long "Valley Forge" model. Note the support apparatus underneath the model, holding the ship in position.

Still in communication with the rest of the fleet, Lowell is informed that the Valley Forge is on a collision course with Saturn's gaseous 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 (Louie) 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 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 crewmate he killed in the dome. With thoughts of the human toll he has taken to save the last forest, Lowell is horrified when he realizes 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, who have located the freighter after a long search. Finally able to communicate with Lowell, they tell 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 realizes 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." Realizing that his crime will be uncovered when the Berkshire finds an undamaged ship, and a buried crew member, Lowell jettisons the last dome to safety with the words "take good care of the forest, Dewey." With the Berkshire two hours away from docking, Lowell and the damaged Huey are sitting down, facing each other, while Lowell arms the last six nuclear charges. Prepared to destroy himself to atone for his crime, and ensure the escape 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.

Trivia

• Trumbull had been involved with creating effects for . 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.
• 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, Arcadia, Blue Ridge, Glacier and Mojave. Each is named for a National Park in the United States.
• The Valley Forge space freighter was meant to appear 2,000 feet (600 m) long.
• Each ship features a designation on the hull, which notes the area from which areas 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 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 (explaining the differences from drone to drone). The suits weighed 20 pounds (9 kg) each.
• 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 the words of someone involved with the film, the ship "now rests under several tons of dirt underneath the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California."
• As in 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 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 "Agro Ship" in the fleet, which is of a different, but clearly derivative design.
• Featured in Episode 306 of Six Feet Under ("Making Love Work")
• Joel Hodgson has admitted the film was a key influence in the premise of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

See also

• Space colonization in popular culture
• List of counterculture films
• The article "Special Effects In The Movies" in the 1974 Encyclopedia Brittannica "Yearbook of Science and the Future" features detailed information about the production of this film.

External links

• [IMDB entry for Silent Running]
• [Sci-Fi Movie website analysis]
• [Silent Running - Classic Movie Reviews at booksmusicfilmstv.com (partial spoiler warning)]

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