Silent Running. Douglas Trumball, 1972.
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Edition screened: Eureka! Masters of Cinema Blu-ray #23, released 2011. English language. Runtime approximately 90 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.
Silent Running is a reminder that high-budget space films of quality were made between 2001 and Star Wars. A trio of androids in the film resemble color-coded recycling bins, but emote and interact with humans as service animals. The good man at the space station (Bruce Dern) tends a vegetable garden and treats the androids kindly, while his three galoot coworkers run go-karts around and act like the Steelers just made it to the play-offs wah-hoo.
Trumball’s Silent Running and von Trier’s Melancholia both have happy but bittersweet ‘endings’: the destruction of an Earth whose time has come. The end comes swiftly in Melancholia and is caused by impact with another planet. Silent Running concludes with confirmation that the spiritual and physical deaths of our world at the hands of capitalism will be torturous and not swift enough. ‘The Dreary Dane’ von Trier, then, has optimistically chosen intervention by a merciful God. In both films a token sampling of humanity dies with at least an affectionate understanding of what has been lost. The rest of us get exactly what we have earned and deserve.
The included 50-minute documentary The Making of Silent Running (Charles L. Barbee, 1972) is enjoyable and explains the workings of the androids.