Silent Running

While an eco-friendly sci-fi film starring a handful of robots trying to preserve the remnants of the Earth’s plant population may sound familiar to viewers of 2008’s WALL-E, this particular plotline comes from a film 36 years its senior, 1972’s Silent Running. With all plant life on Earth now extinct, it’s left to the crew of orbiting spaceships to tend to the few examples of vegetation being saved for future generations. Ordered to destroy the specimens, botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) enlists the help of three robots, Huey, Dewey and Louie, to help him go on the run with the remaining greenery. A breathless performance from Dern, not to mention some impressive FX are supported by a fine script, dark themes of ecological disaster and murder shot through with moments of humour. Constantly highlighting the absurdity of both Lowell’s and humanity’s predicament, the question of whether Lowell is on the edge of madness or the sanest man in the universe remains. [Jonathan Melville]