Monday, October 28, 2013

Silent Running

Silent Running is a film made by a Canadian director, Douglas Trumbull, who also worked on the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It's essentially about a man who finds himself on a space station greenhouse trying to keep Earths last living plants alive. He of course is a deeply emotional man however so the story takes you on a mini roller coaster ride of his journey after some difficult choices.

The movie starts out with this man, Freeman, tending to his plants and various things, as the camera pans out of a window you can see that he is on a gigantic space station greenhouse thing that has American Airlines logos painted on it.  It's sometime in the future when airlines are using space also and its learned later that there are no more living plants on Earth and everyone is happy about it.  Except Freeman because he loves plants and nature and small animals.  Freeman bunks with a few other guys who work on the space station greenhouse with him, those guys are not really like Freeman though.  They lack his passion for nature and the regret that men should have about destroying all the plants on Earth.  Freeman tries to persuade them with a cantaloupe, to no prevail.  Frustrated by his shipmates ignorance they all later find out over communications that the plan is to destroy all the greenhouses and head back to Earth because they are now only going to be operating commercially.  This is devastates Freeman and he stares off into space in a shock, all the other guys are highfive-ing and dancing around.  They start to take out orders and destroy the greenhouses, of course Freeman is not going to do this so he stands up against the others, ultimately murdering one of the guys after a little fist fight.  Anyway, he escapes into the deep dark corners of space, but he is all alone with three drones.  He has also sustained injuries during the fight he had with the shipmate, and it's so bad that Freeman cannot even stand up.  The way the actor does these scenes was hilarious, his cheeks were shaking and his hair was all over the place!  His knee is the spot that is injured but Freeman must hate the sight of blood because he cannot even look at it, he programs his drones to doctor him up, all the while he is puffing his cheeks and shaking is hair.  He starts to get better and teaches the drones how to plant and take care of the greenhouse areas.  Freeman talks to the communications folks who tell him it will be impossible to find him out in space so he should just contemplate suicide.  So he is now confident that he has escaped everybody ever and they will all just think he disappeared into space, luckily for him he as no family back on Earth so he is used to being alone.  After losing one drone to an accident he now names the remaining drones Duey and Huey and basically programs them to be his only friends.  Him and the drones just repair things that happen on the ship, maintain the plants, and play poker together until one day when Freeman sees that his plants are starting to die.  He realizes that they are not getting enough sunlight, so he tries to make up for it.  Sometime during all this he gets a message from some rescuers that have located him!  It's a miracle, he has been found and will be taken to safety, but that's not really what Freeman wants and he has only one option in his plans.  He packs up one of the drones in the greenhouse dome and instructs it to maintain the forest, that is it's sole purpose from here on, and he and the other drone will detach and blow up.  He aims the forest and drone at the sun and then has his final words with the remaining drone.  It's a kind of scene that is in the Titanic, the captain goes down with the ship, heroic in a way.  Freeman says something about when he was a kid he put a message in a bottle and threw it into the ocean and wondered if anyone had ever found it, in this situation he put a drone in a space greenhouse and sent it into space, so maybe somebody will find it and maybe not but he will never know.

The film was really quiet funny and entertaining.  The character was not like any actor we have seen in the spaceship science fiction films viewed as of yet, he was a nature man out in space where nature does not mean the same thing as it does on Earth.  He was a loner in the sense that no one really took the time to understand his perspectives, and the film gave you the idea that he had always been like that.  I am sure we could find many people just like Freeman all over the place now too, he feels alone and unappreciated, like newer things are replacing the good older things, pushing the past into extinction.  Technology is taking over, this is true to us now but we have not lost our past and I like to think we never will, there is something to learned when doing certain things in a certain method, like simply writing a letter instead of an email.        

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