Hacker Cinema
Silent Running
1972 · Film · 89 min
Directed by Douglas Trumbull
After the entire flora goes extinct, ecologist Lowell maintains a greenhouse aboard a space station for the future with his android companions. However, he rebels after being ordered to destroy the greenhouse in favor of carrying cargo, a decision that puts him at odds with everyone but his mechanical companions.
18 positive2 negative2 mixed19 neutralfrom 41 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
47 comments on Hacker News
I think of this movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
which could be read as an expression of 1970s environmentalism or something like 2001 A Space Odyssey where a crew member runs amok instead of the computer.
I am me and I approve this message. The habitats, the people, the robots, and a beautiful theme song by the great Joan Baez. Silent Running is a great film indeed.
Giant terrariums in space was the premise of one of the great science fiction films of the early 1970s: Silent Running
https://cult-scifi.com/silent-running-1972-movie/
I get your point, but I confess I have sometimes had to pause for some time to decide if I was holding a recyclable, a compostable or landfill — looking at the little pictures in fact, hoping I can find the thing I am holding.
Yeah, but otherwise, the whole MIT Media Lab thing is increasingly tasting a little bitter, not the glamorous, enviable place it seemed like in decades past.
Rather than looking for the next internet-connected wearable, for some reason, increasingly, I keep thinking about Bruce Dern's character in the film Silent Running.
Houseplants need our help. They are in need of emotional support people and you should adopt one today and just love it, try not to judge it.
Potted plants got a big rush from movies like Silent Running, that a tightly woven biosphere could engage in complete symbiosis with people, bunnies and Joan Baez.
Then as NASA gave plants the cold shoulder, the idea that plants were collectively 'the lungs of the world' took hold completely and gave them solace. House plants stood a little taller and dreamed themselves into a crucial role in keeping their critter-buddies alive, with help from their distant friends in the Amazon through open doors and windows.
Then cruel scientists popped that dream bubble, and awarded the 'lungs of the world' role to bluegreen algae in the oceans. The plants who must struggle to put out every leaf were eclipsed by little things that multiplied all day long.
So houseplants have become neurotic and anxious.
For my part, I would like for there still to be wild and quiet places to go to when I need time away from my fellow man, and I don't envision a world paved over for modern infrastructure as desirable, but rather the stuff of nightmares such as the movie _Silent Running_ envisioned.
That said, the fact that I can't find an opensource LLM front-end which will accept a folder full of images to run a prompt on sequentially, then return the results in aggregate is incredibly frustrating.
The dystopian era of SF movies started in 1972 with Silent Running.[1] That was the first "grubby future" Hollywood movie, and is an obscure but notable milestone in cinema history.
There was early dystopian SF. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine ends with a dystopia. E. M. Foester's The Machine Stops (1909) was way, way ahead of its time.
Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? — say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
Social media. 1909.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
I punched in 1972 and there were some fantastic movies that year (The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret, Solaris, Jeremiah Johnson, Aguirre - the Wrath of God, The Last House on the Left, Silent Running, The Heartbreak Kid, Fat City, etc.).
Also tried 1973 — same (The Day of the Jackal, Soylent Green, Westworld, The Wicker Man, Papillon, American Graffiti, The Sting, Serpico, Mean Streets, High Plains Drifter, Don't Look Now, Badlands, The Long Goodbye, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Three Musketeers, Fantastic Planet, etc.).
I think they simply made better movies decades ago.
He is mentioned in the article but they left off Silent Running (1972) as one of his credits. Perhaps they think it is lesser known?
Also mentioned, Brian Johnson — but they leave off that he was The Special Effects Guy behind the TV series Space 1999.
Brian's comment in the article about "blimping" the projectors to cut down the noise is an interesting throw-back to when they would wrap a camera or projector in some kind of throw-together enclosure to try to block the noise it made. I believe in addition to using padding to dampen the sound, they sometimes used thin lead sheets to build the enclosure with as well.
How you vent a blimped projector that is probably running a 1000 Watt bulb to keep it from overheating and melting the film is something of a wonder.
I discovered Silent Running almost backwards when 65daysofstatic played a live re-score of the film many years back. Looks like it’s easily searchable still, comes highly recommended.
I really don't see the "prescience". Movies about an apocalyptic future are nearly a dime a dozen and considering how far silent running shot from the mark on almost anything of how our present world is, it's hardly brilliant. The earth is still here and full of life, more of us than ever live on it and despite this, all major metrics of human development are better than they have ever been. Yes, we still have many environmental problems, but solutions are at least possible for them and our planet is far from the hell so many movies and books of the 70's predicted for the early 21st century. Also, in at least some ways, we're even improving certain things in interesting ways, or at least working towards doing so.
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
It was a not-too-successful attempt by the author to create an equivalency, I think. Silent Spring was the gateway text to environmental concerns in the early 60s. Silent Running was an environmental science fiction film that had a similar theme and might have had aspirations to have a similar impact.
I don't think you can say "nothing". As the article puts it:
> "There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine."
If the idea of the importance of preservation of the natural world were much more widespread, humanity would be in a very different situation now. Dern's character's argument in the movie is just as relevant today, and the general answer today remains the same: the natural world is a secondary concern compared to humanity's unconstrained and unthinking growth.
> 2100 utopia would be about ecology
and social relationships
Silent Running https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/
That's partly why the [spoiler] of The Empire Strikes Back is effective, but that movie also has a different tone right from the start (even before that, with the title), and doesn't really tell a complete story but sets up the next sequel to provide resolution and the inevitable heroic victory.
Silent Running is a dystopian setting, so the ending is unsurprising, and American Graffiti is a of genre that often has bad outcomes for some characters as cautionary tales.
Apologies if this is too much of a spoiler, but you might be a bit surprised by how the film's immediate sequel plays out.
Edit: And considering when it was made and who made it, a happy ending was by no means guaranteed. Compare and contrast with the endings of Silent Running or American Graffiti.
I wonder if anyone recalls the little worker robots in the 1972 movie "Silent Running". [1]
I don't know what it was about those fellows but I felt emotionally attached to them. It was not that they had any visible means of conveying emotions. They just went about their tasks quietly and diligently.
For some reason they pulled at my heart strings. It was quite heart wrenching to see them destroyed in the last part of the movie.
[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
> By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers.
Crazy. You see all these wind turbines all across the U.S. If not spread across the plains or along foothills, they're being shipped along the highways one blade at a time. I look at the transformation going on and figure we could have had this tech in the 80's. What happened in the last four decades? Talk about a lost generation.
It was so weird to grow up in the 70's when they were teaching us the Metric System in public schools, when National Parks were adding meters, kilometers to signage. Reusable spacecraft, renewable energy, (and nuclear energy), computers, micro-electronics....
To be sure there were warnings of an ominous, overcrowded, polluted future ("Soylent Green", "Silent Running", just to call out a couple films of the era) but as a kid I was infused with the optimism of the time. Buckminster Fuller, NASA ... even the hippies and their communes.
I think I still live in that world in my head. I hope maybe I have expressed a part of that optimism to my kids as I raised them.
I watched this movie for an art history class and it’s considered an important movie politically due to environmentalist message. At the time environmentalism wasn’t basically movie short-hand for, “this is a black and white moral conflict obviously the environmentalists are the good guys” though obviously that’s how they are portrayed in the Silent Running. There’s was also a popular environmentalist book call Silent Spring, that was incorporated into the movie’s name.
Also shut up Joan Baez is the shit.
Too much Charlton Heston in the author's list. He's a dreadful, wooden actor.
I love Silent Running.
Does The Stepford Wives count as sci-fi?
Logan's Run was a fabulous film, full of memorable moments and lines.
The Sutherland remake of Body Snatchers is brilliant; Sutherland's alien persona is genuinely scary, and despite his versatility I can't think of anything else he's done that's quite so out-there.
Interesting that Silent Running is list as "underrated", yet I think it's way overrated. I mean, on the topic of sci-fi, the movie has been mentioned in lists and otherwise for years. The theme is good, and I like the idea of watching the movie. But then I turn it on, and man, it's sure can be cringey. My shoulders go up around my ears when Dern's character is lecturing his shipmates on "real food". IRL, they would have thrown him out an airlock after one too many sanctimonious speeches. And that part with Joan Baez screeching on the soundtrack, ugh.
And to digress into nit-picking, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Saw that in the theaters because...it got good reviews.
"I had to pay a significant amount of money for it from a dealer."
I bought them all in about 1997 or so, and paid very little, like under $10 total for all three paperbacks. I guess I bought at the right time! I haven't read them in ages now. I should go back and re-read them. I remember them being enjoyable, and the ideas were interesting, but the writing was pretty amateurish.
I've got an original movie poster framed and hanging at home next to my "Silent Running" poster.
> That and bladerunner are probably the two slowest sci fi movies in the canon
Silent Running: hold my beer.
(I say this with love for Silent Running and Blade Runner. I find 2001 to be the hardest one to watch.)
Silent Running (1972) is another one in the "man against nature" theme, and has no supernatural element. This movie is kind of a classic but tends to be forgotten, maybe because it's quite old.
Hard to imagine that this film was shocking in 1972.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had been out for 10 years (note the name), the Deep Ecology Movement's creed coincided with Silent Running when Arne Naess formulated what became "Environmentalism". People were exhausted and horrified at the end of the Vietnam War after the whole shitshow descended into chemical warfare of mass defoliation using Agent Orange. In the UK, the "self-sufficiency" movement was in full swing and where I lived we grew more than half of our food.
In the film Freeman Lowell murders his crewmates rather than destroy trees and flowers, hence the label as a "counter-culture" movie and surrounding controversy.
I was too young to be allowed to watch it on TV when it screened around 1976, but I sneaked a look through the door. A year later I was watching the mass murder of evil imperial stoomtroopers at the cinema. No problem with that.
The idea that some humans might choose to put the lives of other humans second to plants and animals remains problematic to this day. "Eco-terrorists" are always "crazies". Yet a young person said to me just this week that the next war the USA fights should not be with Russia, but with Brazil, because "more is at stake". Not sure what to make of that.
Youtube hosts a lengthy Trumbull talk that took place at the Toronto International Film Festival where he discusses his work in a number of movies (2001, Silent Running, Star Trek, CE3K and others). [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaZQojd1_s&ab_channel=TIFFOriginals
The 1972 film Silent Running had three gardening robots called Huey, Louie and Dewey.
Or Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running) As a kid I loved that film, as an adult, not so much.
Silent Running: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Between the almost annoying seriousness of 2001 and the irresistible madness of Dark Star, Silent Running is in an very difficult spot where it's almost impossible to win anything beyond honorable mention for trying.
But once you've sat through Tarkovsky's Tokio driving sequence in a cinema those three all seem kind of superficial (my opinion, and probably mine alone. And I'm not sure that it would survive a re-watch of Solaris, it's been a while)
Reminder that there's a fantastic analysis of the film over at Centauri Dreams : https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/02/01/in-wildness-is-the-preservation-of-the-world-silent-running-and-our-choice-of-futures/
I loved silent running. (Except I always thought Bruce Dern wasn't the best casting choice. He always seemed to have too bold of a personality for a lower-key scifi movie)
They're right about 2001 stealing the spotlight for that time period though.
So the author turned into an adult.
No, that's not it. We don't have a vision of the future any more.
Here's a well-known vision of the future: Futurama.[1] No, not the cartoon. The 1939 World's Fair exhibit. Yes, it's General Motors' view. Note the expectation of unlimited progress. Most of what you see there as the future was achieved.
GM tried again at the 1964 World's Fair.[2] There was still optimism, but what we see there - huge moon bases and undersea cities - didn't happen.
The big moment of disillusionment was the end of the US moon program in 1972. Going into space was just too expensive. That was about the time when science fiction turned dystopian. "Silent Running", the first "dirty future" movie, came out in 1972, and set the pattern for most later SF films. Crystal spires out, grunge in.
For about a century and a half, manufacturing and transportation changed the world and led to the future. Then what?
Well, we got computers, and that carried us for another half century.
What's next? There's nothing obvious in the near term. Eventually biology may be figured out to the level that organisms can be designed and engineered. But that's not close. Fusion power? Not going well.
We have enough technology and resources to provide a good standard of living for everyone on the planet. Nobody seems to have a scalable political system able to make that happen. This isn't a technology problem.
[1] https://vimeo.com/329901114
[2] https://youtu.be/2-5aK0H05jk
The entire Alien movie is basically an extended (and, ahem, perhaps slightly darker?) remake of the Pinback vs the beach ball creature scene. My favorite piece of movie trivia. I wonder if anyone stumbled into the theatrical release of Alien knowing about that connection?
Regarding "used space", I'd say that the trend was already present in Silent Running (1972) which happens to link both the clinically clean 2001 and dirty Star Wars in terms of FX crew.
Movies from 1972 vs 1996? I'll take the ecological classic that is a bit more in line with the OC's post.
Silent Running was very much an ecological and social statement about humanity and the Earth. I cried when Lewie was gone, and felt bad for Dewey.
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
I think the ending of Silent Running was the first part of a movie to make me cry (I was 15 or so).
We had the same thing being reported in the late 70's.
There was a travelling exhibit that visited my high school which was an analog computer - you could set your energy sources (coal, hydro, nuclear, solar) and see how long society could run before we re-entered the Dark Ages (literally - no more electric lights!). Thinking about it - the consumption side was likely a rising wave function which predicted steadily-increasing use of electricity.
This was around the time when the EPA's Energy Star program got started, and I suspect it did a lot to counter the increase in demand.
You can also look at the films of the 70's to get some of the zeitgeist of the era - "Soylent Green", "Silent Running", "No Blade of Grass", "Damnation Alley", and so on, all with the theme that the Earth no longer nourishes life.
As a big fan of Jodorowsky (L'Incal is one my favourite graphic novels ever), I think we could also unequivocally say that whatever he had made would not have been very faithful to the book. It's quite possible that Dune fans would have been even less happy with Jodorowsky's film than Lynch's.
We also have to remember that this was before Star Wars and Alien. Most scifi at the time was, with some honourable exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, Solaris), pretty silly, childish, often campy stuff: The Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Moonraker. Pulp origins aside, Star Wars introduces a level of violence, maturity and realism to the genre that stood out at the time, and closer to that of contemporary adult 1970s productions like Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and so on.
For all the considerable talent involved in the Dune adaptation, it's quite possible — and this eases the pain over the loss of the project a bit — that it would have been closer in tone to something like Zardoz or Flash Gordon, i.e. a big, colourful, but ultimately also a bit silly extravaganza. Even O'Bannon's Alien script was also pretty pulpy and silly until Ridley Scott, David Giler and Walter Hill hammered it into shape.
I got a Silent Running vibe from the first picture, just an odd connection to a film from my childhood. I am always fascinated how the brain does that
In the underrated 1972 scifi film "Silent Running" there was a circular pool table complete with computer arm player, which became a source of interest into the math of chaos theory: http://fadesingh.tumblr.com/post/49428198268/the-billiards-of-chaos and even inspired other variations like a hexagonal table: http://switchgaming.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/accessible-pool.html
This project immediately reminded me of the 1972 movie "Silent Running," which featured a couple of robots that tended plants on a greenhouse in space. Kind of a sad movie, now that I think of it. Hopefully this project achieves a happier ending... ;-)
Maybe Naomi Klein can clear her mind with some old classic films:
How about Soylent Green (overpopulation, 1973), or Silent Running (climate collapse, 1972)?
Maybe something more upbeat like Logan's Run (overpopulation AND climate collapse, 1976)?
Yep. It's all been way overdone. Brazil and 12 Monkeys were different because it was all more or less new then. Both also had great arc and reveals, but It's Been Done Now.
I say "new then"; dystopian SciFi was a staple of drive-ins in the '70s - from Silent Running to Planet of the Apes to Logan's Run...
It's not like there isn't a huge backlog of great sci-fi to draw on that isn't dystopian. I'd like to see The Foundation Trilogy as a multi-year "Breaking Bad" style series.
It's basically a massive essay, but Scorcese's "Personal Journey" manages to explain why movies are in terrible shape without being hopeless about it. The reasons are profound.
Very interesting! My follow-up post to Moon is actually Alien, and I've come to a similar realization. I reckon the main reason that 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn't aged half as much as Alien, or Silent Running, or other 70s/80s sci-fi, is that in 2001, all of the monitors are flat-screen displays, not curved CRTs. Ironically, this is only because they didn't have the computing power to generate the HAL graphics on an actual computer, and so it was all hand-animated on film and then back-projected onto a flat display. This combination of flatness and high-resolution animation means that it looks just like the retina displays of today.
This incident also sheds a different light on another tidbit on talk show history. In one of the earlier episodes of the 5by5 version Dan and John were talking about how Dan's recommendation of "Silent Running" to John basically ended the first run of the talk show. At the time I thought that was just a joke. But after this I'm really wondering if that supposed friendship between the two wasn't all that strong after all.
I think Silent Running is the more apt film choice here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running