Silent Running

SILENT RUNNING (1972) - June 17, 2009
A slow-paced and somewhat dated film about a space ship in the distant future, which carries a couple of bio-domes (it's implied that something terrible happened to the Earth and that these domes are all that has survived of Earth's greenery). After they're given the order to jettison and nuke the domes, the ship's somewhat off-kilter botanist snaps and murders the other crew in order to save his dome. Bruce Dern plays the character as essentially being insane right from the get-go, and I'm not sure if that was supposed to be the point or not, but it wasn't the best performance ever. The film (and Dern's performance) does improve once the other crew members have been dispatched, but certainly, this is no 2001 (despite being directed by Douglas Trumbull, the man behind many of the special effects in 2001; not surprisingly, the effects in this film are quite impressive for the time). **1/2