SILENT RUNNING (1972) ** When the hardest core and most valiant tree huggers perch on high, protecting against the otherwise inexorable encroachment...I wonder if they ever run this film through their heads? It has that same elevated sense of self in service of ideals, that militant environmentalism whose face may become twisted beyond recognition for any but the most initiated and faithful. Bruce Dern is the pseudo-hippie space scientist, lost out there with some other people that are so grounded and immersed that they're totally lost, serving a system that lost its guiding light in the distant past ('70s, anyone?). I'm not going to say that he's a great actor, or even that his technique is better than average, but he is a very interesting actor and, given that he's in just about every single shot, and very few of them have any other human in them...the film would have utterly collapsed without him. I'm not saying it's a great performance (someone else probably has), but he offers a lot of credibility in a wide range of....situational emotions. He expresses fairly serious "vibe weird" as effortlessly as anyone. He offers way more than enough for any Ethics class to ponder the justification-utility?-of his actions. So the spaceship is cool and the pacing at least reminds you a little bit of 2001 , and Dern's performance has to have been some of the inspiration for Jack Nicholson in The Shining , there are some cool breaks for nice Joan Baez songs and Peter Schickele's incidental music is always interesting and nearly as often appropriate...it raises real issues, it gets you thinking...what's not to like? Well, it can run very dry, there is nothing profound or original in the treatment of the big ideas, and although there is virtually no plot to it there's a bigger hole in it than you'd like to see in a second grader's first short story.
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