Streaming
Please note: This event took place in May 2020
Special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull’s directorial debut is this environmentally conscious sci-fi, eulogised by Mark Kermode as the best science fiction film ever made. Bruce Dern plays a botanist astronaut aboard the Valley Forge, a space station containing vast greenhouses that house a wealth of plant-life, awaiting the call to return and reforest a decimated planet earth.
With its Joan Baez soundtrack, bizarre sound effects and ecological leanings, Silent Running is ultimate hippy-era sci-fi.
Mark, our Cinema Curator, says:
"Bruce Dern takes social isolation to the extreme in Silent Running as he travels through space tending to the remains of Earth’s vegetation. The 1972 film brought together the visionary skills of special effects turned director Douglas Trumbull - who had just come off working on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey - and the writing of Deric Washburn/Michael Cimino (who would collaborate on The Deerhunter) and Steve Bochco who would reinvent TV police drama with Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. Its ecological theme speaks down the years and made for an extraordinary event when we screened it at the Eden Project with introduction from film critic and Silent Running aficionado Mark Kermode. We both stood in wonder as the biomes of the spacecraft merged with the biomes of the Eden Project."