Silent Running joins Soylent Green in a duo of ecologically minded sci-fi films from the early 70's. Both movies are about the end of the natural habitat on Earth, and serve as a warning to us that we need to care of the environment and not take it for granted.
While few can disagree with this message, this film needs to explore it more. The picture works best at the very beginning- Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is one of a crew of four on a legion of spaceships that maintain the very last of Earth's forests. He lectures the other men on what the planet has lost- organic beauty, the pleasure of watching things grow, harmonzing with nature. The others just laugh at him.
One day, the group recieve a message that continuing the forests is no longer economically viable. They are ordered to destroy the biomes and return home. Lowell cannot stand to see the last surviving planet life from Earth destoryed, so he kills his fellow crewmembers and goes on the run from the company's other ships who are trying to track him down. He has only two robots, whom he nicknames Huey (Mark Persons) and Dewey (Cheryl Sparks) for company.
Up until the point where the rest of the crew are killed the movie is pretty interesting and effective at making its ecological points. It works on the level of a fairy tale or fable, and we identify strongly with Lowell as he desperatley tries to save the last bit of beauty left.
However, at the start of Act Two, the movie becomes a conventional thriller. The ecological content is mostly abandonded for a fairly standard thriller plotline, as Lowell and the robots try to evade their inevitable capture. It's hard to invest much in this story, because we've seen all of the plot machinations before.
The movie is directed by Douglas Trumbell, who assisted Stanley Kubrick with special effects for 2001. The effects in Silent Running is no where near as a good as that film, and look so fake that it's laughable in a bad way. Trumbell and cinematographer Charles F. Wheeler find a great way of photographing the forest, making them look both natural and artificial at the same time, and the production design of the spaceships are quite good (It looks like Gerry Anderson took notes when he did Space: 1999).
The music, which intermixes excellent original compositions by Peter Schickle with lame folk songs sung by Joan Baez demonstrate the main problem with the film- an awkward shift in tone from the sublime to the cliche. Silent Running has it's moments, but not enough for a reccamendation.