SILENT RUNNING

Watched 1972's SILENT RUNNING this weekend. I think I saw it years ago - basically the Earth's last eco-systems are shepherded in domes through space first legally then not. I enjoyed the first half immensely - the humans' interaction, the order to destroy the eco-domes, the ensuing struggle. Bruce Dern is excellent as the fanatical eco-warrior and the three small droids are prescient of Star Wars 5 years later. The film raises the question of whether Widlife is more important than Human life at a time when environmentalism was in it's infancy and more confrontational than today but still very topical, probably moreso. Dern's quick despatching of his three fellow co-workers is harsh leaving him solely in charge of the last dome in existence. He suffers brief remorse for his crimes but overall the murders are glossed over. More effort is put into his relationship with the 3 droids, well acted by double-amputee actors. The second half of the film, where Dern is alone in the dome with said Droids is rather like watching grass grow literally and I imagine modern cinema audiences would find it boring. More than the obvious eco-pocalypse motif, for me the most interesting aspect of the film is it's portrayal of an astronaut's extreme solitude and insidious descent into oblivion, both mentally and spatially, a theme hinted at in its ambiguous title and touched on in other movies: 1968's 2001, Solaris in the same year, 1979's Alien, 1997's Event Horizon and last year's brilliant Moon by Duncan Jones, son of one David Bowie. Sensationalised for the cinema no doubt, the question of the effects of isolation in space is critical to long-stay astronautics and our vision to go to Mars. What does anyone else think?