escape to insanity

I recently re-activated my Netflix account after suspending it for several months while I moved around and got re-situated in my current living quarters and settled into my job. The last time I had an active Netflix subscription, I kept running into the problem of not having enough movies picked out to keep my queue continually full. I'd add two or three movies at a time and then not be able to find anything more that I was interested in watching, so I'd be basically paying for time that I wasn't cycling through movies. So I let the account sit dormant for a few months while I slowly added movies to it. When I got up to 70+ movies, I figured that would be sufficient for keeping the movies flowing for a few months, during which time I could add more without running the risk of an empty queue.

That's the background. Today I got home from work and cracked open my mailbox, to discover much to my delight a new movie had arrived. I wasn't really all that surprised — I knew it was coming, thanks to Netflix's thoughtful provision of an RSS feed for my rental activity and a notification e-mail. This particular movie was none other than Silent Running. Here's the plot summary from Netflix:

In a ruined future, huge orbiting spaceships preserve the last remaining trees from pollution and overcrowding on Earth. Botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) receives an order to destroy the trees. He refuses, setting himself against his superiors and fellow crew members. Directed by special-effects titan Douglas Trumbull, Silent Running's innovative effects and powerful themes ensured its cult status.

Hmm, alright. Sounds doable for a sci-fi movie, and if you know anything about me you know I love sci-fi movies. Run-time, 90 minutes even. Standard length.

Within the first ten minutes, I'm dubious at best. The characters are extremely cliched and lack any sort of depth. Within the first fifteen minutes, I'm extremely skeptical that there's any redeemable qualities. The plot is beyond thin, and suspension of disbelief can only go so far. The idea is that Earth has somehow lost all of its forests, and the only surviving nature preserves are in the form of a handful of spaceships meandering around the solar system (all built by American Airlines, as indicated by the ever-present logo), each with a half-dozen or so domed enclosures.

The characters are wusses. One guy falls and cuts his hand, and acts as though he's about to die… he goes running to another character to get patched up as easily as a five-year-old who just skinned his knee will go running to mommy. Yet those same characters have no trouble with nuking the world's last forests for no apparent reason (except for our hero, Freeman Lowell — certainly not a symbolic name at all).

By the end of the first half hour, there's just the one character left to concentrate on, and he's the worst kind of stereotypical tree-hugger hippie you will ever meet. Ever. I understand that's sort of the plot, that he's trying to save the trees, but this guy is beyond special. He of course begins to go crazy, being all by himself with the exception of a couple of stumpy robotic drones strongly resembling upside-down mop buckets. It continues for another hour.

He's also apparently the universe's most incompetent botanist. For all his professed love of nature and trees and his beloved forests, all his effort was completely wasted. Of the half-dozen or so domed forest enclosures on his ship, he manages to take action in time to save one. Yep. The others he just sat in his garden and cried about, one after another. Then he gets angry, and you don't want to see him angry. Oh, and he starts to wonder why his trees are dying when he's on the dark side of Saturn… apparently the fact that plants need sunlight to survive slipped his mind.

…I can't go on. This movie was beyond awful. If you ever get the urge to see this movie, or are ever forced for some reason to see it, take a fork and stab yourself in the head. Twice to be safe. Trust me, it's preferable to the alternative of watching this. I wouldn't go so far as to say this is the worst movie ever made (I know I haven't seen enough movies to make that kind of judgment), but it's definitely in the running.

The silent running, that is. (sorry… after 90 minutes of that garbage I can barely think.)

Photo by ellievanhoutte. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)