January 16, 2014A few weeks back, a friend of mine told me he watched Silent Running and couldn't believe how boring it was. I'm not sure why, but after that I really wanted to watch it. Bruce Dern stars as one of four astronauts on a space station whose mission is to save and sustain an eco-system that can no longer be produced on Earth with the current climate conditions. When the government advises them that the mission is over and they should destroy the eco-systems and head home, three of the astronauts are ecstatic, leaving a furious Dern to try to save the trees. Dern goes a little haywire and ends up killing his cohorts, lying to the folks back on Earth, and befriending some robots by re-programming them to help him keep things alive. Granted, it was a pretty slow movie, but I couldn't help but be fascinated by the whole spectacle of it. Dern's acting was superb, the model sets they built were beautiful, and the gradual degradation of everything involved was spot on. Maybe it helped to have a not-so-good review going in to it to clear my mind of any preconceived notions of what I was about to see. It isn't a modern blockbuster with gratuitous violence or explosions or whatever, so don't expect that.
No comments:
Post a Comment