Silent Running (1971)

SILENT RUNNING  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Douglas Trumbull
    Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint
Bruce Dern had one of his best early-career roles in this science-fiction thriller about a botanist caring for the earth's last surviving forest in a giant terrarium in space. It's like Francis of Assisi wandering onto the set of "2001", a singular movie with a simple ecological message that only gets more timely as time goes on. Dern's character, self-righteous, anti-social and obsessed to the point of psychosis, can be difficult to like, a loner by nature who's been in space way too long and appears to be coming unglued. If he was more sympathetic, or played by anybody other than Bruce Dern, the movie wouldn't be half as interesting, and Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind "2001", "Close Encounters" and "Blade Runner", knows what a movie like this is supposed to look like. Peter Schickele and Joan Baez collaborated on the music.