For this week’s selection I decided to do seventies science fiction. Specifically seventies science fiction that as a lover of science fiction I knew all about, read reviews and analysis of in dozens of textbooks on the subject, but for whatever reason never actually got around to seeing.
The first one on my list was George Lucas’s first film, THX 1138. Robert Duvall stars as the titular character, who’s a drone in a future dystopia where all people are shaved drugged and individuality and emotion are illegal. THX 1138 is content because the meds tell him so… That is until his roommate messes with his prescription. They fall in love. He’s found out and arrested, put in a prison that consists of a featureless while room, which he eventually escapes. The rest of the film consists of an ongoing chase scene.
This is an interesting film. It’s a good example of show don’t tell. In fact for the first half hour or show it does nothing but show and expects you to keep up. The filming does a lot good things with it’s shoestring budget making the settings dystopia creepily convincing for the first half. What makes it work is just how casual everyone is about this police state especially when the comically polite robot police thugs take people away as if it was nothing.
My next film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull, is an environmental parable about a lone man trying to save the last of earth’s forests. It’s a distant future and what’s left of earth’s environment is stored in a fleet of ships orbiting Saturn. Then without any explanation the project is canceled and the crews of the ships are ordered to destroy the forests. (Oh, and when I say no explanation I don’t just mean sloppy writing, the orders that the crew gets literally says there is no explanation) Our hero, Freeman Lowell played by Bruce Dern mutinies killing the rest of the crew and tries to fly the ship away from the rest of the fleet.
I had mixed feelings about this thing. Not that I have any problem with the films message,but it was so heavy handed it was hard to swallow. The film does everything to put Lowell in the right even to the point of having the rest of the crew being unrepentant jerks who almost gleefully cary out their orders to destroy the trees (though this is subverted slightly in that the main reason the other ships are hunting Lowell is because they are trying to rescue him from what they believe was a disaster.)
Beyond that the film is pretty enjoyable with fairly good effects for it’s time (the three robot drones, Huey, Dewey and Louie, being played by double amputees) and Dern’s performance of a man slowly going mad from guilt and isolation are especially good. Along with that it has some enjoyable moments. My favorite being where he plays poker with the drones.
