Silent Running is an impossible movie with an improbable hero but imbued with a grace and charm which can steal your heart. Bruce Dern is one of the cockeyed actors who plays the bejeezus out of outlandish villains, so to see him here as a gentle soul, albeit one who commits multiple murders, is weird in its own way.
The premise of Silent Running is totally off the wall. Earth has become toxic and the few remaining bits of natural landscape, forests and deserts and such have been dug up, popped into massive terrariums, attached to immense space ships and put into space to save them until such time as Earth might be more capable of maintaining them. But that project is scuttled and the forests along with it as the weary spacemen eagerly begin the trip home. But one man has a different notion, and instead kills his three amigos who disagree with him, pretends to destroy the forests in his care and then tries to find a quiet zone of space to hide his treasures.
He has three robots to help him and one by one the project takes its toll on them. The finale is striking and depends completely on whether you have any sympathy for a man who is willing to kill human beings to save a tree. Lunatics come in all types and sweet though he might be, the futility of his plan begins to wear on him and eventually things change.
This is a lovely movie with elegant images of space and some dandy music. It's message of ecological awareness had a few more teeth back in the 70's when such notions were hardly widespread and the destruction of the Earth's resources was only beginning to kick into high gear.
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