No need for me to give an in-depth review of this terrible, boring, clumsily-made turkey. Just check out the multitude of one star reviews it's gotten and you'll see what I mean.Watched it last night with the family, confident that the many glowing 10 and 9 star reviews meant that Silent Running would be at least a fairly good, reasonably interesting sci-fi outing.But everyone in my sci-fi loving family started groaning about two minutes into the film. Nevertheless, we watched it, from boring beginning to boring end, mainly hoping it was going to get good at some point. But it never did. So the real and extremely valuable lesson here is simply this: be skeptical. Don't rely just on the glowing user reviews to decide what you'll watch tonight. Take the trouble to sort the reviews by negative rating first (i.e. after sorting by review rating, just reverse the order by clicking on the little arrow).Really wish I had done that last night.

this review contains spoilers! its 1972 and the summer of love has been followed by the winter of the machine. what can a poor boy do? realising he is powerless in the face of the new world order, he drops out (hard 1970s style, not soft 1960s style) kills the local supporters of the status quo, retreats to his bedroom in the shadow of saturn (astrological reference), neglects the washing up and lets the pot plants wither away. he's been on the job looking after the terrarium for 8 years but he still hasn't learned that plants need sunlight to photosynthesise, duh. he talks to machines that can't talk back and imagines a response. he goes crazy. in the end he lets his dreams go, and commits suicide, in the process taking out the people who have tried to rescue him. his problem is that he's locked into a machine system which has no avenue of escape. he tries to save the plants with artificial life, ends up using the on-board Abomb to do himself in. his whole existence is predicated on the machines and he just can't deal with it. he's a hippy ideologue. read in this way its an OK story, but really, considering kubrick's 2001 was made some years before it, silent running is pretty lame. it has much more in common with the moralistic scifi movies of the 1950s and 60s, despite its groovy environmental themes (also pretty old hat by this time; rachel Carson's silent spring was published in 1962). and joan baez's sentimental quavering on the soundtrack is frankly unbearable.

Silent Running is based on the very real possibility that there will be no more 'right' to life in the United States because its citizens would not be allowed to grow food. Forty years after the film's release, the the current advance of 'right to farm' laws champions corporate domination over all food sources.Little did the creators of Silent Running know that the majority of Americans forty years later would, indeed, reject real food, favoring processed food instead, just as in their film.Silent Running even covers why Americans would find the situation perfectly acceptable: because a thoroughly 'democratized' nation would ideally be able to provide labor opportunities to the entirety of its marginalized proletariat.The film's intelligence is subtle and carried through by an effort of pure-heartedness, hindered only by very poor pacing. If one's patience can last until the development of the lovable Drone's personalities, finishing the film won't be any problem.

I kind of liked this movie. It is always captivating that mankind has destroyed earth, and more so that they are growing trees in orbit to make earth green again. The main character is a nerdy garden freak, and the other guys at the space station make fun of him and run go carts through his flower beds. But he still beats them in poker, and he has a cool hair do. The best thing about this movie is the unconventional plot, where the gardener kill his mates to save the forest. He then kills himself because he gets lonely. Even though people are imperfect, we need each other. That is a nice theme. Even nicer is the final shot of the robots continuing to tend the trees and water the plants. In wait for an improved mankind?