Douglas Trumbull, who had worked
on Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey and Robert Wise's
The Andromeda Strain (1971),
debuted with the dystopian, apocalyptic sci-fi movie
Silent Running (1972).
The special effects are trivial but work. It is unfortunate that three tedious
songs destroy the momentum of the action in three vital moments.
The action takes place sometime in the distant future, when forests have
disappeared on Earth and only a few artificial ones survive on dome-shaped
greenhouses that float around spaceships.
The botanist who tends lovingly to the forests is a young man, Freeman Lowell.
The other members of the crew are indifferent to their mission and only want
to return home. Freeman is the only one who eats natural food, coming from his
domes, whereas the others are happy to eat chemical food.
One day they receive the surprise order to nuke the forests because the
spaceships are needed for commercial purposes.
The other members of the crew are happy because it means the end of the mission.
Only Freeman is gloomy, but tries in vain to explain to his three companions
how precious these last forests are. The others remind him that progress has
eliminated both poverty and disease. Freeman retorts that all the people are
identical, which makes their lives meaningless.
When the three begin the operation to nuke the domes, Freeman gets into action.
He sends two of them in the wrong place and they get blown up, and personally
kills the third one with a shovel.
He is wounded in the process and asks the maintenance robots to perform surgery
on him.
After naming them Dewey and Huey, he
then directs them to dig a grave for the dead one and to bury him.
Meanwhile he radioed his captain that he lost control of the spaceship due to
a malfunction.
In reality, he is deliberately steering the space station towards the rings
of Saturn. Eventually, his captain tells him that he has reached the point of
no return and recommends suicide. However, Freeman's spaceship survives the
impact with the rings.
Having lost all contact with the rest of the fleet, Freeman lets the spaceship
drift through space, with no destination, and only the mission to keep the
forest alive.
Freeman teaches Huey and Dewey to care for the forest and plays poker with them,
treating them like his children.
One day he realizes that the forest is dying and can't explain why.
While he is driving around, he accidentally hits and damages Huey, and then
tries in vain to repair the damage.
While he is still investigating the mystery of the dying forest, Freeman
receives a radio message from his captain: they searched for him, found him
and they are about to "rescue" him. He doesn't want to be rescued because he
knows that they would blow up the forest. At the same time, the captain
indirectly helps solve the mystery: there is not enough sunlight where he is.
He sets up strong lights in the forest and leaves Dewey in charge of the forest.
He takes the damaged Huey with him and separates the spaceship from the dome-shaped nursery. He then blows up the spaceship, committing the suicide that the
captain had prescribed but for a completely different reason.
Meanwhile, Dewey cares for the forest, watering the trees with an old-fashioned
watering can.
Trumbull later worked on the special effects for famous films such as
Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1981).
He only directed one more film, the ridiculous sci-fi melodrama Brainstorm (1983),
adapting a story by Bruce Joel Rubin,
that feels like a tribute to Corman's B-movies of the 1950s:
montage, dialogues and acting are amateurish is not childish, and the plot
is so implausible to feel like a parody of some other movie.
The action is also very slow, and, because of the inept montage, it is often
difficult to understand what is going on.
It was Natalie Wood's last movie and the movie was not released for two years,
and apparently never properly completed.
Michael and Lilian invent a device that can record the feelings of a person
and play them into the mind of another person (all of this employing an array
of robots and computers)
Michael is separating from Karen (Natalie Wood) and Lilian seems to live all
her life in the laboratory, smoking cigarettes and staring at a computer screen.
Their boss Alex is ecstatic when they demonstrate the product. Hal shows it
to his investors, which are mainly the military and who get excited at the possible military applications.
This does not go down well with Lilian who has strong anti-military feelings.
Michael uses the device to record his sweet memories of his marriage with
Karen, and then plays back to Karen, so that she can be moved and their love
reignited.
The military force Alex to assign the project to a shady scientist, Landon.
A scientist, Hal, plays a pornographic tape over and over again to feel endless
orgasms and almost goes crazy. He is forced to retire.
While alone in the lab, Lilian has a heart attack. She dies suffering greatly
but manages to plug her brain into the computer so that a recording is made
of her last feelings. When Michael plays her tape, he almost dies of a heart
attack himself.
Landon is monitoring everything that goes on in the lab.
Michael knows that Lilian's tape can be deadly and so asks Hal for help to
modify the chip so that the tape will not affect his breathing. Michael can then
re-live Lilian's last moments: memories and an ascent to the stars.
Landon, wanting to spy on Michael, forces a man to play back Lilian's tape at the same time but this man is not protected from the breathing effect and
dies in terrible spasms.
The lab is turned by Landon into a top-secret manufacturing site, and
Michael is now deemed an enemy and deprived of access to the lab.
Michael is determined to get hold of the tape and watch it to the end.
Hal reveals the existence of a secret military program called "Project Brainstorm". Michael is now determined to destroy the lab so that the military cannot
use his invention for evil purposes.
Karen and Hal help Michael break into the computer. Karen hacks the computer
causing the robots to destroy the lab and shutting down the
the security system so that nobody can enter the lab to stop the robots.
Michael manages to download Lillian's tape.
Karen finds him inside a phone booth where he is playing the tape and
experiencing the feeling of death and the afterlife.
He collapses but (of course) Karen revives him with her love.
(Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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