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It’s that final sequence of Silent Running that sticks with me.
Yes, the movie has the look and feel of a ‘70s environmental infomercial, complete with two agonizing Joan Baez interludes during which we see plants being pruned lovingly. Yes, Bruce Dern’s performance is a little stilted and stretched in parts. But until Avatar, I’ve never seen a sci-fi enterprise that has set out so doggedly to deal with issues of environmental decline.
In Silent Running, the last bastions of Earth’s ecosystem have been transferred to domes attached to a spaceship. Freeman (Dern) has taken an oath to protect and preserve these scraps of green. So when orders come out into the depths of space that these domes are to not only be jettisoned but detonated, Freeman takes it upon himself to save them, killing his crew members when they start to follow orders and piloting the ship alone, out of the reach of the self-destructive human species.
When it becomes apparent that his crimes are about to be found out, he ejects that final dome, puts a robot in charge and allows it to float out into the dark reaches. A robot tending the last garden saved from a dying world…accompanied by another irksome Joan Baez song. While the style may seem rickety today, the themes remain stark and sobering, visualizing the deep reaches of space less as a final frontier than as a final resting place.
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