Silent Running (1972)
April 10th 2009 09:56 pm
I love space based sci-fi films: 2001, Star Wars, Alien, Aliens, Dune, Event Horizon. These were films I grew up loving. However, the first time I had ever heard of Silent Running was when Mark Kermode kept on talking about it on his radio show.
It is in Mark’s top 5 films of all time and is a film he says was “what 2001 could have been”.
So, when I got the opportunity to see it when I saw Mark live in Leeds I thought I was going to be in for something really amazing. I should have known better…
80 minutes later I felt so disappointed. It was dull, badly explained and cringeworthy in places.
It was the directorial debut from the man who had worked on the special effects for 2001 and this was the one thing the film did do well. The external shots of the spaceships were fantastic and the little robots were excellently created.
It’s a shame that the story about bringing back wildlife to the Earth by growing plants in space was so dull. I didn’t care about the characters at all and appart from a brief moment when the robots are playing poker I found it hard to connect with.
I’m sorry Mark, we are going to have to disagree on this one; there’s a reason I’d never heard of it.
[4/10]
