Silent Running (1972)

Three years after creating the groundbreaking special effects for Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", Douglas Trumbull made his directorial debut with the modern science fiction classic, SILENT RUNNING..

All of the forests and plant life on Earth are extinct and the last wilderness exists only in huge domes being carried through space by a small crew.

Bruce Dern (Black Sunday, Coming Home) is Lowell Freeman, the only crew member who sees guarding the last forests as a serious mission, versus just another job. The rest of the crew taunts him and his devotion to the cause.

The design of the ship is exceptional and some of the interiors were filmed in massive cargo holds of the decommissioned aircraft carrier Valley Forge. I love all the branding on the cargo, with American Airlines taking front and center as the future leader in global travel!

When orders come in from the government to jettison all the domes and return home, Freeman is faced with a choice on listening or taking more drastic avenues to save his beloved greenery.

Fascinating in its early seventies outlook on the environment and very well executed with great special effects by Trumbull (who would wow us again with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"'s groundbreaking effects 5 years later) this is a solid sci-fi flick.

The model work is exceptional, long before CGI was an option. The largest model of the Valley Forge used was over 26 feet long!

Nobody does borderline crazy better than Dern and he is in nearly every shot of the film. Dern specialized in driven, unhinged men in the 70's, with this role following his lethal work against John Wayne in "The Cowboys".

Trumbull does really well on a smaller budget and delivers the goods in a very soft, eco-friendly seventies, hippy kind of style. This was one of five films commissioned by Universal in the wake of "Easy Rider", giving emerging film makers a million dollar budget and no oversight to create films for younger (20's) audiences.

The songs by Joan Baez are pretty awful, but they're a minor flaw in a decent film.

To keep his budget down, Trumbull hired college students to work on his model making. One of them, John Dykstra, went on to become an Academy Award winner for Star Wars & Close Encounters.

Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Stephen Bochco (LA Law/NYPD Blue) share screen writing credit with Deric Washburn (Deer Hunter, Extreme Prejudice).

Excellent micro photography shows up in the opening credits too. It's sci-fi with an eco-friendly message and an admittedly slow but stylish journey.

Trumbull would go on to make one of my favorite, vastly underrated sci-fi films of all time, 1983's "Brainstorm" with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood, but he never became a prolific Director, choosing to focus on groundbreaking & Oscar winning work in Special Effects for films like "Blade Runner" and 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture".

I have very fond memories of seeing this with my brother in theaters when it was released by Universal as part of a double feature with Robert Wise's "The Andromeda Strain". While nowhere near as good as that film, we'll give Freeman, Huey and Dewey a B-.