cult film freak: BRUCE DERN SURVIVING DOUGLAS TRUMBULL'S 'SILENT RUNNING'

Bruce Dern in SILENT RUNNING Year: 1972 Rating: ****1/2

Science-Fiction Special Effects wizard Douglas Trumbull went from making Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY look both futuristic and prehistoric while his own directorial SILENT RUNNING starts at the same planet the first winds up, Jupiter... while back on Earth, it's learned that life sustains not only without forests, but doesn't seem to need any...

Which goes against Bruce Dern's sole mission, despite literally sharing space with three other astronauts... who eventually get orders to send vessel-carrying forest domes into nuclear annihilation so they can finally return home: until Dern's Freeman Lowell decides to kill off his human cohorts to save one last portion of tangible nature...

Bruce Dern with Ron Rifkin, Cliff Potts and Jesse Vint in SILENT RUNNING

Replete with fantastic-looking interior/exterior space-age aesthetic and a big environmental message (including horribly dated Joan Baez songs), the American spacemen aren't professionally collected like 2001 as they engage in spontaneous and playful dark humor between claustrophobic-battling dune buggy rides... yet for Dern, his only real comrades are cute drone robots that'd soon influence George Lucas's STAR WARS...

Splitting SILENT RUNNING into a double-edged sci-fi thriller: the first with Dern physically combating a glib Ron Rifkin, an aloof Jesse Vint and the charming yet disingenuous Cliff Potts... into a race-against-time for an ambiguous anti-hero, split between Bruce Dern's signature frenzied style until calmly dealing with loneliness and solitude — that engages and haunts both his character, and agenda.