University of Virginia Library

'Running': Soapy Space Opera

By BARRY LEVINE

As a member of Stanley
Kubrick's technical crew for
"2001," Douglas Trumbull
helped in making the spaceship
mockups and final light show
into stunning visual effects.
Now Trumbull has directed
and produced a film of his
own, a space melodrama called
"Silent Running," and he
shows that science fiction can
still be entertaining even if it
doesn't have Kubrick's majestic
vision.

In "Running," Bruce Dern,
who was the gung-ho
ass-slapping basketball coach in
"Drive, He Said," plays a
Johnny Appleseed type
astronaut, named Lowell
Freeman, who wears a Smokey
the Bear patch on his uniform,
has a conservation pledge on
his wall, and has an abiding
loyalty to Mother Nature. He is
part of a crew that mans the
remnants of forests and
wildlife in domed spaceships
while a barren planet decides
what to do with its greenery.
For some unknown reason the
earth command decides to
destroy the natural preserves
and return the crew to earth,
but Freeman refuses and kills
his comrades rather than kill
the trees.

Both "2001" and
"Running" are concerned with
men attempting to return to
the primal mystery of life, and
both show the need for men to
take final command of their
overwhelming technology.

Yet, while Kubrick's film
shows men who make an
intrusion into space to come to
their source, Trumbull's deals
with an extrusion from Earth:
the one journeys to its origin,
the other journeys away from
it; one is an odyssey, the other
is a flight.

Kubrick's astronauts must
take on the hardened
characteristics of their
technology if they are to
survive the journey. One
reviewer of "2001" noted that
Hal the computer had a good
deal more personality and
emotion that either of the
astronauts, and it is the
computer that decides to make
his own moral judgment to
defy orders.

In "Silent Running,"
however. Freeman is
apparently the only one who
remains with any degree of
emotion, and he is the one who
must make a moral decision on
the mission.

After killing the obnoxious
comrades, his only companions
are small mechanical
men-Fridays called Drones,
who, as shown in a very
interesting article of Esquire,
are actually double amputee
stuntmen. Of course he and the
Drones develop an affection
that the rest of the human
world — wherever it is — seem
incapable of doing.

Although this space opera
has a martyr's complex and an
infatuation with ecology, it is
nevertheless something more
than just another leftover from
the Muskie campaign.
Particularly in the zooms, the
camera work is a little hesitant,
so that one has a least a sense
of human presence rather than
Kubrick's omnipotent,
motor-driven eye. Joan Baez,
who used to be a simple,
guitar-strumming lass, sings the
score in the company of
electric orchestration. Despite
its moralizing and slow
movement, "Silent Running" is
an interesting first effort, one
in which the real theme is the
impending suicide of life being
overwhelmed by its own
creations. And that is
something that "2001," with
its sight fixed on the stars,
didn't have.

(Now at the Cinema)