'' is a 1972 ,'' and the melancholy message is considered by some to be very powerful. Unusual for a science fiction film, the soundtrack contains two songs — "Silent Running" and "Rejoice in the Sun" — written by
Peter Schickele and Diane Lampert and performed by
Joan Baez .
The movie depicts a future in which all
Plant life on Earth has been made extinct. Only a few specimens have been preserved just outside the orbit of Saturn, in enormous, greenhouse-like
Geodesic Dome s attached to a fleet of
American Airlines "Space
Freighter s". Freeman Lowell (
Bruce Dern ) is one of four crewmen aboard the ''Valley Forge,'' one of the 2,000 metre-long freighters, and is the resident botanist / agronomist / ecologist dedicated to preserving the forests for their eventual return to Earth, and the
Reforestation of the planet. In constant disagreement with his crewmates over the objective of their mission (they being more anxious to return to Earth after a one-year tour of duty), Lowell spends his time in the forests, cultivating the plant and animal life within them.
and the ''Valley Forge'']]
When orders come from Earth to jettison and destroy the domes (with the ship and flee with the last forest dome.
Injured and alone with the three drones, Lowell reprograms them to perform surgery on his leg.
Still in communication with the rest of the fleet, Lowell is informed that the ''Valley Forge'' is on a collision course with Saturn's rings, and there is nothing he can do to stop the catastrophic event. The ship will likely be destroyed. With communications failing due to the distance now between the ''Valley Forge'' and the rest of the fleet, the ship passes through the rings of Saturn. The three drones are outside the ship on maintenance duty, when Drone 3 (Louie) is blown away from the ship, leaving two remaining drones. The ship, and the precious dome, emerge undamaged on the other side of the rings. Totally alone, Lowell and the drones set out into deep space, away from the fleet, on a quest to maintain the forest. During the trip, Lowell befriends the drones, renaming them
Huey, Dewey And Louie (Drone 02, 01 and 03 respectively), teaching them to plant trees and play poker (in a memorable scene). However, Lowell's conscience sets in, as he instructs the drones to bury the crewman he killed in the dome. With thoughts of the human toll he has taken to save the last forest, Lowell is horrified when he realises that his forest is dying from some unknown cause. Desperate, he rushes to the dome, badly damaging Huey in an accident with one of the ship's buggies. Repairs are unsuccessful, the forest is dying, and Lowell begins to come to the unsettling conclusion that his mission to save the forest has failed.
After weeks alone in space, faint radio chatter is heard from a rescue party mounted from the ''Valley Forge'''s sister ship, the ''Berkshire,'' who have located the freighter after a long search. Finally able to communicate with Lowell, they inform him that they will be able to reach him within six hours — he must jettison the dome — but not detonate the nuclear charge, as it is too dark to do so safely. Perhaps somewhat belatedly, given his botanical background, Lowell now realises that what was killing the forest was the lack of sunlight. With little time to work, he wires up several banks of grow lights to simulate sunlight, and instructs the last healthy drone, Dewey, to "just maintain the forest." Realising that his crime will be uncovered when the ''Berkshire'' finds an undamaged ship and a buried crewman, Lowell jettisons the last dome to safety with the words "take good care of the forest, Dewey." With the ''Berkshire'' only two hours away from docking, Lowell and the damaged Huey are sitting down, facing each other, while Lowell arms the last of the six nuclear charges. Prepared to destroy himself to atone for his crime, and ensure the preservation of the last dome, Lowell says to Huey "When I was a kid, I put a note into a bottle, and it had my name and address on it. And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anyone ever found it." With that, Lowell destroys the ''Valley Forge'' with the last of the onboard nuclear charges.
The final, poignant scene is of a well-lit forest greenhouse drifting into space, tended by the sole remaining drone with a battered watering can, with a musical accompaniment from Joan Baez.
In an interview with
Starlog magazine in the late 1970s,
Douglas Trumbull revealed that the plot of the movie in the original version of the script was quite a bit different from what was actually filmed. In this version, the Space Freighters were on permanent duty carrying biological domes. When they're finally told to blow the domes and return to earth, it is because the freighters are going to be scrapped.
The Freeman Lowell character in this version was an older, more curmudgeonly man who simply doesn't want to return to earth and forced into retirement, so he steals the ''Valley Forge'', "Shoots the rapids" through Saturn's Rings to make it look like his ship is destroyed, and heads off into deep space. As in the filmed version, he reprograms the robots for some companionship, and the subplot involving the plants dying due to a lack of light were involved, but his main interest in the plants was simply as a means of extending his limited food supplies on the ship. In the second half of the film, he receives a signal which he realizes is from an alien ship passing through the solar system, and decides to approach it—humanity's first contact with aliens around the same time, his superiors on earth have realized what he did, and are trying to re-capture the ship.
The last act of the movie was to have been a race against time, with Lowell trying to contact the aliens, and the recovery force trying to re-take the ship. Finally, in desperation, Lowell detaches one of the domes with one of the robots aboard only seconds before he's killed by the forces that have boarded the ''Valley Forge''. The dome drifts off into deep space, where it's spotted by the as-yet-unseen aliens, who board it and find the robot. The robot, unsure what to do, pulls out a snapshot of itself, the other two robots, and Freeman Lowell taken earlier in the film, a "Family Portrait" after a fashion, and shows it to the aliens, who look at it and the robot confusedly, and there the film ends.
Trumbull had been involved with creating effects for ''.'' Director
Stanley Kubrick wanted the "Stargate" sequence of that film to be centered around
Saturn , but there were technical difficulties in getting the special effects for this sequence finished in the limited time frame. The Saturn idea was scrapped, and Kubrick substituted
Jupiter instead. Trumbull perfected the sequence after production, and it was recreated for
Saturn in ''Silent Running''.
The interiors were filmed aboard the decommissioned
Aircraft Carrier USS ''Valley Forge'' (CV-45) , which was docked at the
Long Beach Naval Shipyard in
Long Beach, California . Shortly after filming was completed, the carrier was scrapped. The forest environments were originally intended to be filmed in the
Mitchell Park Domes in
Milwaukee ,
Wisconsin , but the production budget forced the sequences to be shot in a newly-completed aircraft hangar in
Van Nuys , California.
There are three freighters seen in the film: they are the ''Valley Forge,'' the ''
Berkshire '' and the ''
Sequoia ''. Five other ships that carried domes are also named, but do not appear on screen — they are the ''
Yellowstone ,
Acadia ,
Blue Ridge ,
Glacier '' and ''
Mojave .'' Each is named for a
National Park in the United States.
Each ship features a designation on the hull, which notes the area from which some of the
Flora and
Fauna samples were taken. The ''Valley Forge'' is listed as "
Bahia Honda Subtropical," indicating at least some specimens were taken from this area of the
Florida Keys . The model of the ''Valley Forge'' Space Freighter was 26 feet (8 m) long, and took six months to build from a combination of custom castings and the contents of approximately 800 prefabricated model aircraft or tank kits. After filming was completed,
American Airlines expressed an interest in sending the model on the tour circuit, but this was not feasible due to the fragile nature of the model (in fact, during filming, pieces of the model kept falling away). The ship was subsequently disassembled. Several pieces, including the domes, wound up in the hands of collectors, but the entire ship was destroyed after several years sitting in a storage bin. In the words of someone involved with the film, the ship "now rests under several tons of dirt underneath the
Getty Museum in
Los Angeles, California ."
The three "drones" were played by four double-
Amputee s, an idea inspired by
Johnny Eck . The "drone suits" were all prototypes, and each suit was custom tailored to the amputee operator inside (explaining the differences from drone to drone). The suits weighed 20 pounds (9 kg) each.
As in the film, only one dome is known to have survived, and now rests in the
Science Fiction Museum And Hall Of Fame in
Seattle, Washington .
The original ''
Battlestar Galactica '' series used stock footage of the space freighters in several episodes. On that show, they were called "Agro Ships," and were the source of all the food in the rag-tag fleet. Initially there were three of them, but two were destroyed by the Cylons. In the current incarnation of ''Galactica'', there is one "
Botanical Cruiser " in the fleet, which is of a different, but clearly derivative design.
Joel Hodgson has admitted the film was a key influence in the premise of ''
Mystery Science Theater 3000 .'' Referred to heavily in
John Hodgman 's compendium of fictional trivia, ''
The Areas Of My Expertise '', the film is cited satirically as the source of numerous slang terms used by submariners (such as "Dern", to describe someone who embodies actor Bruce Dern's emotional performance in the film).
Doug Naylor ,
Rob Grant and
Ed Bye cite ''Silent Running'' as an inspiration for the British science fiction television series of the 1980s and 1990s, ''
Red Dwarf ''.
The "oxygen garden" in the 2007 film "
Sunshine " was directly inspired by the forest domes in "Silent Running."
1
The UK DVD of Silent Running is designated as a U certificate, ie, for universal viewing, even though there is one physical on-screen murder and the mild expletive 'crap' is used on several occasions.
- The article "Special Effects In The Movies" in the 1974 Encyclopedia Britannica "Yearbook of Science and the Future" features detailed information about the production of this film.
