Silent Running: The Ecological Sci-Fi That Broke Hearts

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a shot early in Silent Running (1972) where Bruce Dern kneels in a forest, and the forest is inside a geodesic dome, and the dome is bolted to the side of a freighter drifting somewhere past Saturn. Everything about that image should feel like a stunt. Instead it feels like a held breath. Douglas Trumbull, who had just spent years bending light for 2001, made his directorial debut about the smallest possible thing — one man who cannot bear to let a garden die — and shot it as though the fate of the species hung on a stand of Douglas fir. Which, in the film’s arithmetic, it does.

Ecological Sci-Fi - vo.rs

Silent Running: The Ecological Sci-Fi That Broke Hearts