Botanist Freeman Lowell has spent eight years aboard the space freighter Valley Forge preserving the only botanical specimens left from Earth under huge geodesic domes. When he receives orders to destroy the project and return home, Lowell rebels and hijacks the freighter, while plunging the craft into the gaseous rings of Saturn. From that moment on, he has only the trees, the gardens and two “Drone” robots, Huey and Dewey, to keep him company on his greatest adventure of all.
Source: Silent Running
About the Movie
In the future, Earth’s plant life is extinct. The last forests survive in geodesic domes attached to a fleet of space freighters orbiting Saturn, tended by small crews awaiting orders to return them home. Botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) has spent eight years caring for his forest — and then the order arrives: jettison the domes, destroy them with nuclear charges, and bring the ships home for commercial service.
Lowell cannot do it. He kills his crewmates rather than let them destroy the last forest, hijacks his ship with the help of the ship’s service robots, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and flees into deep space to keep the dome alive alone. When the surviving dome begins to sicken, Lowell must solve a mystery any gardener could have told him — while knowing that rescuers are coming, and that what he did to save the forest will not be forgiven.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Silent Running is one of the founding films of environmental science fiction — made in 1972, at the dawn of the modern ecology movement, and decades ahead of its time in treating nature as something whose loss is a tragedy, not a backdrop. Its director, Douglas Trumbull, had just finished the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the film’s drones — expressive, personality-filled robots played by amputee actors — are direct ancestors of R2-D2 and WALL-E. Quiet, sad, and stubbornly humane, it showed that sci-fi could carry a conservation message without losing its sense of wonder, and its influence runs under nearly every “last garden in space” story since.
