Silent Running

Silent Running (1972) is a science-fiction drama by Douglas Trumbull you can watch online on iFILM. Earth has lost its forests long ago. The last surviving plants are kept inside huge geodesic domes mounted on cargo freighters drifting near Saturn.

Botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) tends one of those greenhouses. To him the woods are not freight, they are the whole point of being alive. When orders come from Earth to blow up the domes and return the ships to commercial duty, Lowell turns on his own crew and ends up alone in the void. His only company is three clumsy maintenance drones that he teaches to garden and even to play poker.

This was the directing debut of Trumbull, the effects wizard behind 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is a quiet ecological warning from a time when almost no one talked about the climate, with songs by Joan Baez on the soundtrack. The drones Huey, Dewey and Louie later helped inspire R2-D2. Stream Silent Running (1972) online on iFILM.